Our Data Ourselves

Collectively, we now create more data in two days than we did in all of 2002. Whether it is the 4 B pieces of content shared daily on Facebook, the 200 M tweets, more than 5 B of us intensively produce unprecedented and unfathomable amounts of social data whenever we text, browse, post or generate content on our phones. We call this Big Social Data (BSD), and it entails the symbolic content we generate as will as the metadata our phones emit, tracking our bodies through time and space. Recent revelations about the NSA and GCHQ reveal just how data centric our society has become. Yet you could say we suffer from a data democracy deficit. As such, it is more important than ever that public understanding of our information-rich environment and our quantified selves improves.

Our research project 'Our Data, Ourselves' seeks to democratise BSD. Big data has already been widely identified as a key economic driver. We seek to turn it into a community asset and develop tools, applications, formats and practices which will enable important new research on and using BSD by arts and humanities researchers. We see community as being articulated though social and communicative practices, the very wellspring of BSD. These mediated practices impact traditional communities, those based on place and identity, and create new communities, especially with young people, those 'born digital.'

We will partner with youth coders in the Young Rewired State network as co-researchers, and gain privileged insight into how the mediated connectedness manifested by BSD is transforming communities. We will work with our young co-researchers to develop tools and applications for the capture, storage, and analysis of BSD. We will create an open environment for BSD research and develop an ethical framework for data sharing available for widespread community use. We envision a BSD research commons, respectful of privacy concerns, and engaging young tech-savvy communities to gain a greater understanding of the data-intensive digital culture of mobile environments.

Our research aims to enquire into the elements comprising one's personal archive of BSD. This entails examining the symbolic content we generate and the metadata of our devices, which map our bodies in time and space, as well as the infrastructure, in which data is stored, searched, shared, analysed and mined. This will facilitate a better understanding of the kinds of social connections, information sharing, and normative relations we are developing to and through BSD.

A major challenge is in the development and transfer of the technical skills and knowledge necessary for the capture and analysis of the different forms of BSD, and its transformation into community research data, available to researchers, those who generate it, and their communities. The basic issue raised is whether BSD can be transformed into a public asset and become a creative resource for cultural and economic community development. The basic problem addressed is that we do not own the BSD that we generate. From the moment we tap 'send' it moves and is processed in a highly proprietary environment where it remains inaccessible to us, typically returning only in the form of targeted ads. In short, we seek to transform proprietary and inaccessible BSD into open research data that becomes an accessible community resource.

We develop a freely accessible, open source online market place for tools and applications enabling the extraction of BSD from smart phones. We engage in hackathons to develop these tools, and engage privacy concerns, developing anonymisation technologies and produce policy white papers on ethical data sharing. We seek to turn BSD, which is currently primarily fodder for targeted ads and surveillance into a community resource available for creative use. If it is 'our data ourselves', our BSD commons will empower us to use it in new ways, both in community and by arts and humanities researchers.

All components of our work deliver direct impact, as detailed in the Pathways to Impact and the Case for Support. The main impact, however, will come from working with Young Rewired State, a network of young coders who have participated in Hack Days for Refugees United, UK Aid, and the Department of Education. Young Rewired State is a leading community organisation in teaching youth coding skills through practical projects in situ, most prominently in their annual Festival of Code. We envision this project as the first step in a longer-term partnership with Young Rewired State, which has coder networks across the UK. Further, Young Rewired State is the philanthropic arm of Rewired State, which is a network of more than 1,000 software developers and designers with whom we intend to actively collaborate in the future.
Through Young Rewired State and other collaborations in the project, namely with the Open Data Institute and the Open Knowledge Foundation, we will engage a range of other stakeholders in digital culture research in mobile environments from social media researchers to mobile phone companies. This will enable us to capture the requirements of different groups within this broad field while forging networks for future research on digital culture, especially in regards to big data.
Our collaboration with Young Rewired Space will create a new interdisciplinary community for arts and humanities research, given its deployment of humanities and arts skills in the analysis of technological space. Further, our focus on hackathons, a co-research practice borrowed from our partner Young Rewired State, affords both innovative and effective means for community engagement.
Our partners will be co-researchers throughout the entire project cycle. They will generate big social data in-community, and work with us to develop the tools and applications for both its capture and analysis. The end result will be an open environment for big social data research that engages young tech-savvy communities in researching the digital culture of mobile environments.
Discussions with our partners identified a range of needs and questions that they considered would benefit from knowledge exchange with arts and humanities research. These can be clustered around the following:
i) The impact and potential of digital technologies, digital culture and digital practices and the forms of communication that surround and inform us
ii) The changing nature of engagement with the mobile environment where young tech-savvy users contribute more and more directly to the development of tools and services
iii) Cultural transformations where academic, cultural and creative organisations are challenged to connect with new forms of knowledge in new environments. These organisations need to consider the new power structures in these environment as well as new audiences, which include spectators but also a range of diverse communities that actively transform these environments.
The primary impact of the project will be providing practical experience and critical thinking about the process and importance of digital culture research in exploring the big data components of digital personalities. We would expect all participants to end the project with:
i) A wider understanding of what constitutes digital personality, both explicit and tacit, in a mobile environment
ii) Applied experience of extracting and representing knowledge in a mobile environment, in particular in relation to personal information
iii) A method and digital assets for involving a wide range young coders to participate and contribute their knowledge and insights in future digital arts and humanities research
vii) A culture, in which arts and humanities research assumes an integral role in the analysis of mobile environments
viii) An understanding of the nature and form of the interactions that best support this culture.