Wilshire Blvd is one of the few major roads in Los Angeles where more people travel by bus then by car. We walked the length of Wilshire Blvd, 16 miles, from downtown to the ocean. Along the way we talked with hundreds of people about mobility, transportation, and daily life in LA. 

Walking Wilshire Blvd

I met "Adam" at his fish booth in Leimert Park. He made my daughter and I some fried shrimp. I was taken by his character, and the food was delicious, so I met up with him the next day to see his newly leased store front on Manchester Ave. We talked about his 40+ years cooking fish, and his plans for a new shop. 

Serious Seafood

Child | Data | Citizen
Datafication, Algorithmic Inaccuracies, and the Profiling of Future Citizens.

Dr. Veronica Barassi
Department of Media and Communications 
Goldsmiths, University of London

On May 3rd 2018 the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies hosted the fifth annual Research & Inquiry Conference. In a time of growing skepticism concerning knowledge claims and institutions, the 2018 conference theme is Reclaiming Expertise: Facing Challenges to Knowledge, Practice, Authenticity, & Trust.

In the last decade we have witnessed a radical transformation in knowledge practices, as governments, businesses, educational institutions, healthcare providers and multiple other agents have started to turn all aspects of everyday life into data (Cukier & Mayor-Schoenberger, 2013). This process of ‘datafication of everything’ is leading to the creation of large datasets of very intimate, private and sensitive information about citizens’ lives. This latter point is particularly evident if we consider the ways in which children’s data is gathered, stored and integrated in ways that were not possible before. Today, from the moment in which a child is conceived, important biometric information is uploaded on social media or pregnancy apps. As children grow up most of their health and educational data is digitised, archived and sold by privately owned corporations. All these different forms of data monitoring and processing are just the tip of the iceberg, and the picture becomes much more complex if we consider the role played by home hubs, artificial intelligence systems, facial recognition technologies and genetic mapping.

This talk will draw on the findings of the Child | Data | Citizen Project, an ethnographically informed research project that investigates the relationship between children’s data traces and new understandings of digital citizenship. The talk explores the multiple variety of data traces that are produced daily about children and critically considers how these data traces can be used to profile them as citizen subjects. In contrast to theories of panopticon surveillance (Lyon, 2014) or quantified selves (Lupton and Williamson, 2017) the aim of the talk is to shed light on the messiness and inaccuracy of the process of datafication in family life. It will show that there is a clear human disconnect between technological structures and everyday practices, as families most of the times do not use the technologies as they are supposed to or use these technologies in tactical ways to avoid dataveillance. The highly diverse forms of data collection technologies combined with the unpredictability of human practices is leading to the creation of large amounts of personal information that is often fragmented, imprecise and mistaken. In this context, the talk will conclude we need to start tackling serious questions about data traces, algorithmic inaccuracies and profiling.

Dr Barassi is Faculty Member in the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths University of London, and the convenor of the BA Anthropology and Media Degree. She is one of the founders of the Goldsmiths Media Ethnography Group and the Chair of the E-Seminars of the Media Anthropology Network of the European Association of Social Anthropology. She is the principal Investigator on the Child | Data | Citizen Project (Funded by the British Academy) and was the principal investigator on the ‘Social Movements and Media Technologies: Present Challenges and Future Developments’ Seminar series’ (funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, UK 2015-2017). She is the author of Activism on the Web: Everyday Struggles against Digital Capitalism (Routledge, 2015), and her work on digital participation, datafication and citizenship has been published by top ranked academic journals

UCLA R&I Conference Podcast Conversation with Dr. Veronica Barassi

The “digital convergence” of the last few decades has coerced a number of industries into the business of computers and networks.  The institutions of film, television, video, photography, printing, publishing have succumbed to a “rewriting” in digital format.  This rewriting is only possible because of the new, uncanny form that language has taken, the language of computer programming, the language of software.  The uncanny language form makes images, numbers, and languages “equivalents.”  Consequently, to write today is a hybrid affair of code and commentary, programs and prose, in which one must tangle with this entanglement of images, numbers, and languages.

Warren Sack is a software designer, media theorist and artist whose work explores theories and designs for online public space and public discussion. His projects include work in Open Source software development, locative media, computer-supported translation, and systems for visualizing and facilitating online discussions.  Sack’s work has been exhibited at the ZKM, Karlsruhe,; the New Museum, New York; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. He has a Ph.D. from the MIT Media Laboratory and a BA in Computer Science and Psychology from Yale College. He is a Professor of Film & Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz and, for the 2012-2013 academic year, an American Council of Learned Societies Digital Innovation Fellow and a Visiting Professor at the École nationale supérieure des télécommunications (Paris).

This lecture is co-hosted by the Centre for Innovation and Social Process and the Digital Culture Unit, Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London

Dustin O'Hara