Anne Alexander (Digital Humanities Network, Cambridge)
This workshop will analyse the contemporary political economy of big data production and analysis through a series of provocation papers examining the implications of existence of data monopolies for ethical agency. It will ask where does a ‘monopoly’ lie in data? Is it in the aggregation of data, or in the processing, or in the analysis? Does it matter that a handful of giant corporations dominate markets in social media, search, online mapping and a wide range of the digital services which play a central role in the production of big data? What is the relationship between states and corporations in the production and analysis of big data? Whose ethical decision-making matters the most in this complex landscape: consumers, elected and non-elected government officials, judges, corporate executives or software developers?