ECREA16-Abstract_book

224 / 658

222
Friday, November 110 9 : 0 0 – 1 0 : 3 0
DCC09 Feelings andNumbers in the Era of Big Data
PP 346 Feeling and Desiring Numbers: Emotions in Engagements with Data
H. Kennedy1
1 University of Sheffield, Sociological Studies, Sheffield, United Kingdom
Datafication – the quantification of aspects of social life previously experienced in qualitative, non-numeric form, which are then tabulated, visualised and
analysed – is increasingly ubiquitous (Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier 2013). The main way that people get access to the data that increasingly circulate in
this context is through their visualisation – that is, their visual representations in charts, graphs and other less common forms. As Gitelman and Jackson
(2013) put it, ‘data are mobilized graphically’(p. 12, emphasis in original). This paper focuses on the role that emotions play in engagements with data and
their visualisations, drawing on two studies. The first is an empirical study of how people relate to data visualisations circulating in the everyday, which
revealed a wide range of emotional engagements with diverse aspects of data and their visualisation. Emotions were evoked by visualisations themselves
and their aesthetic form; data presented within them; their subject matter; and the source or original location of the visualisation. The second example is
a study of what happens when social media data mining becomes ordinary, which traversed a range of sites (Author 2016). These included social media
analytics companies, museums, councils, universities and media organisations, The study found that as datafication expands, as data and visualisations
circulate and become more and more ubiquitous, a pervasive desire for numbers takes hold. I characterise this desire for numbers as a convergence of Por‑
ter’s ideas about the trust that numbers inspire because of their apparent objectivity and facticity (Porter 1995), and Grosser’s more recent argument that
the metrification of social life on social media platforms produces a‘desire for more’(more likes, more followers, more retweets, more shares (Grosser 2014)).
Bringing ideas about datafication together with the emotional dimensions of engaging with data and their visualisation suggests that it’s not only data
and numbers themselves, but also the feeling that numbers provoke that matter in these new visual-digital arrangements. The paper provides examples
of the phenomenon it describes from the two empirical research projects. It then proceeds to reflect on how we might theorise the ways in which people
relate to data/visualisation emotionally, not just cognitively and rationally, how to think about the inextricable entanglement of data and visualisation and
about the possibilities opened up and problems ushered forth by feeling and desiring numbers. REFERENCES Author (2016). Gitelman, L. and Jackson, V.
(2013)‘Introduction’, in L. Gitleman (ed) Raw Data is an Oxymoron, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Grosser, B. (2014)‘What do metrics want? How quantification
prescribes social interaction on Facebook’, Computational Culture: a journal of software studies, 4. Available at:
what-do-metrics-want. Mayer-Schoenberger, V. and Cukier, K. (2013) Big Data: a revolution that will transform how we live, work and think, London: John
Murray Publishing. Porter, T.M. (1995) Trust in Numbers: the pursuit of objectivity in science and public life, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
PP 347 Inhabiting Governed Communicative Spaces: Examining Urban Participation Using Geolocative Data and Ethnography
J.R. Rodriguez-Amat1, K. McSeveny1
1 Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, United Kingdom
Previous research on governance of communicative spaces (authors 2014, 2016) has shown that the relational space of interaction composed by the mesh
of digital and physical communication flows during urban cultural events is unevenly established. The systematic analysis of the communication geogra‑
phies of protests reveals the presence of significant and contested plurality of representations of place, numerous structures that define and steer the infor‑
mation flows, contextual architectural features that nuance the symbolic values of the urban activities, and a virtual network of connections that provide
a view of the spatial possibilities of communicative interaction. These four modes of configurations of space and place identify critical forms of spatial
inequality, and thus underpin the analytical framework that empirically examines the notion of communicative space. Moving away from the conflictual
context of urban protest, this paper applies the same framework to the exploration of the configuration of communicative spaces during the Tramlines
Festival, a commercial city music festival set up around public and private city venues held in July 2016 in Sheffield (UK). The festival, planned, with entry
fees and spread across the wide urban space, assumes the intentional setting of the available communicative spaces. In our analysis we introduce the find‑
ings obtained from the combination of ethnographic reports and geolocative data produced via tracking applications in the mobile phones of volunteer
participants. The four mode model of analysis will be applied to the data as an empirical test of the possibilities and limitations of recording and analysing
the communicative space from within. Previous research has built on the analysis of information such as the space and place represented on social media
(authors 2014, 2016), or the identification of the structures of space. In contrast, this study intends to contribute to the methodological and theoretical dis‑
cussion on governance of the communicative space, by considering the position of those inhabiting it. Amongst the extensive cultural and digital production
emerging from social interactions (including media accessed frommobile devices, staged music and fenced zones), the live action of the participants might
pass unnoticed. This project examines and integrates the digital, cultural and social meanings of space and of circulation, the network capital underlining
inequalities and power relations, and the conditions defining the (absence of) freedom to move and to interact across and within the fenced urban space.
The complex virtual and physical spaces of interactions are embedded in the city geography, and this work aims to identify the complex apparatus that
governs the features of this communicative space intervening in the four modes: in the multiple representations of place, in the structures that frame the in‑
formation flows, in the textures that symbolically add to the social activity and in the overarching conditions of interaction of the connections. A thorough
critical analysis from within should contribute to the understanding of the mechanisms involved in the governance of the communicative space, helping to
identify the complex machinery that renders these interventions powerfully invisible.