Werkstatt Medienpraxistheorie – Vortrag mit Jill Walker Rettberg: Situated Data Analysis (Pre-recorded)
Situated Data Analysis: A New Method for Analysing Encoded Power Relationships in Social Media Platforms and Apps
Building upon Haraway’s concept of situated knowledge and recent research on algorithmic bias, situated data analysis allows researchers to analyse how data is constructed, framed and processed for different audiences and purposes. Situated data analysis examines representations of data, like data visualisations, which are meant for humans, and operations with data, which occur when personal or aggregate data is processed algorithmically by machines, for instance to predict behaviour patterns, adjust services or recommend content. The continuum between representational and operational uses of data is connected to different power relationships between platforms, users and society, ranging from normative disciplinary power and technologies of the self to environmental power, a concept that has begun to be developed in analyses of digital media as a power that is embedded in the environment, making certain actions easier or more difficult, and thus remaining external to the subject, in contrast to disciplinary power which is internalised.
In this lecture, Jill Walker Rettberg will outline the theoretical framework for situated data analysis, and give examples of how it could be applied to different kinds of platform.
Jill Walker Rettberg is a professor of digital culture at the University of Bergen, and PI of the Machine Vision project. Her research focus is on self-representation online and on the cultural effects of machine vision. She is the author of Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves (Palsgrave 2014; print and open access) and Blogging (Polity Press 2014).