Critical Data, Critical Technology in Theory and Practice (original) (raw)

2017, The Professional Geographer

Tacoma D ata, its sources, analytics, and potential effects are at the center of recent popular, industry, and scholarly debates about knowledge, policy, identity, and everyday urban life. These debates have taken place across the academy, from geography to digital humanities, data science, media studies, and beyond. Researchers in these and other social science fields are increasingly engaging with new data infrastructures (Batty 2013; Marvin, Luque-Ayala, and McFarlane 2016; Pickren 2016), representational technologies (Hochman 2014), and analytic practices (Poorthuis et al. 2016) as they emerge in private industry (Thatcher 2014), academic research (Crawford and Finn 2014), and government agencies (Taylor and Schroeder 2015). In politics and industry, these related phenomena go by a variety of buzzwords, such as big data and smart cities (Kitchin 2014c, 2016; Datta 2016), that offer tantalizing promises of future social and economic growth and stability (Lohr 2012). In more recent critical investigations, early hubristic claims of the power of these new systems of data extraction, visualization, and analysis, such as Anderson's (2008) now nearly decade-old, infamous claim of the "end of theory," serve as shibboleths by which scholars situate themselves to evaluate actual data practices and effects (Thatcher 2016). Both promises and critiques of this new paradigm of data involve algorithmic analysis of heterogeneous data sets within currently underexamined contexts and social relations (Kitchin 2014a). This focus issue engages with this new paradigm from a variety of geographical perspectives emphasizing radical politics and broadly critical approaches to data analytics. Engaging data in these ways opens new, promising avenues for thought about and practices that incorporate such data. In this way, the section speaks not only to work in critical data studies but also to larger conversations around the ways in which technology mediates, saturates, and sustains late capitalist modernity (Graham 2005).