Paper by Rob Kitchin in the Journal “Big Data and Society”: This article examines how the availability of Big Data, coupled with new data analytics, challenges established epistemologies across the sciences, social sciences and humanities, and assesses the extent to which they are engendering paradigm shifts across multiple disciplines. In particular, it critically explores new forms of empiricism that declare ‘the end of theory’, the creation of data-driven rather than knowledge-driven science, and the development of digital humanities and computational social sciences that propose radically different ways to make sense of culture, history, economy and society. It is argued that: (1) Big Data and new data analytics are disruptive innovations which are reconfiguring in many instances how research is conducted; and (2) there is an urgent need for wider critical reflection within the academy on the epistemological implications of the unfolding data revolution, a task that has barely begun to be tackled despite the rapid changes in research practices presently taking place. After critically reviewing emerging epistemological positions, it is contended that a potentially fruitful approach would be the development of a situated, reflexive and contextually nuanced epistemology”
Technological Innovations and Future Shifts in International Politics
Paper by Askar Akaev and Vladimir Pantin in International Studies Quaterly: “How are large technological changes and important shifts in international politics interconnected? It is shown in the article that primary technological innovations, which take place in each Kondratieff cycle, change the balance of power between the leading states and cause shifts in international politics. In the beginning of the twenty-first century, the genesis and initial development of the cluster of new technologies takes place in periods of crisis and depression. Therefore, the authors forecast that the period 2013–2020 will be marked by the advancement of important technological innovations and massive geopolitical shifts in many regions of the world.”
Who Influences Whom? Reflections on U.S. Government Outreach to Think Tanks
Jeremy Shapiro at Brookings: “The U.S. government makes a big effort to reach out to important think tanks, often through the little noticed or understood mechanism of small, private and confidential roundtables. Indeed, for the ambitious Washington think-tanker nothing quite gets the pulse racing like the idea of attending one of these roundtables with the most important government officials. The very occasion is full of intrigue and ritual.
When the Government Calls for Advice
First, an understated e-mail arrives from some polite underling inviting you in to a “confidential, off-the-record” briefing with some official with an impressive title—a deputy secretary or a special assistant to the president, maybe even (heaven forfend) the secretary of state or the national security advisor. The thinker’s heart leaps, “they read my article; they finally see the light of my wisdom, I will probably be the next national security advisor.”
He clears his schedule of any conflicting brown bags on separatism in South Ossetia and, after a suitable interval to keep the government guessing as to his availability, replies that he might be able to squeeze it in to his schedule. Citizenship data and social security numbers are provided for security purposes, times are confirmed and ground rules are established in a multitude of emails with a seemingly never-ending array of staffers, all of whose titles include the word “special.” The thinker says nothing directly to his colleagues, but searches desperately for opportunities to obliquely allude to the meeting: “I’d love to come to your roundtable on uncovered interest rate parity, but I unfortunately have a meeting with the secretary of defense.”
On the appointed day, the thinker arrives early as instructed at an impressively massive and well-guarded government building, clears his ways through multiple layers of redundant security, and is ushered into a wood-paneled room that reeks of power and pine-sol. (Sometimes it is a futuristic conference room filled with television monitors and clocks that give the time wherever the President happens to be.) Nameless peons in sensible suits clutch government-issue notepads around the outer rim of the room as the thinker takes his seat at the center table, only somewhat disappointed to see so many other familiar thinkers in the room—including some to whom he had been obliquely hinting about the meeting the day before.
At the appointed hour, an officious staffer arrives to announce that “He” (the lead government official goes only by personal pronoun—names are unnecessary at this level) is unfortunately delayed at another meeting on the urgent international crisis of the day, but will arrive just as soon as he can get break away from the president in the Situation Room. He is, in fact, just reading email, but his long career has taught him the advantage of making people wait.
After 15 minutes of stilted chit-chat with colleagues that the thinker has the misfortune to see at virtually every event he attends in Washington, the senior government official strides calmly into the room, plops down at the head of the table and declares solemnly what a honor it is to have such distinguished experts to help with this critical area of policy. He very briefly details how very hard the U.S. government is working on this highest priority issue and declares that “we are in listening mode and are anxious to hear your sage advice.” A brave thinker raises his hand and speaks truth to power by reciting the thesis of his latest article. From there, the group is off to races as the thinkers each struggle to get in the conversation and rehearse their well-worn positions.
Forty-three minutes later, the thinkers’ “hour” is up because, the officious staffer interjects, “He” must attend a Principals Committee meeting. The senior government official thanks the experts for coming, compliments them on their fruitful ideas and their full and frank debate, instructs a nameless peon at random to assemble “what was learned here” for distribution in “the building” and strides purposefully out of the room.
The pantomime then ends and the thinker retreats back to his office to continue his thoughts. But what precisely has happened behind the rituals? Have we witnessed the vaunted academic-government exchange that Washington is so famous for? Is this how fresh ideas re-invigorate stale government groupthink?..”
Cataloging the World
New book on “Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age”: “The dream of capturing and organizing knowledge is as old as history. From the archives of ancient Sumeria and the Library of Alexandria to the Library of Congress and Wikipedia, humanity has wrestled with the problem of harnessing its intellectual output. The timeless quest for wisdom has been as much about information storage and retrieval as creative genius.
In Cataloging the World, Alex Wright introduces us to a figure who stands out in the long line of thinkers and idealists who devoted themselves to the task. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Paul Otlet, a librarian by training, worked at expanding the potential of the catalog card, the world’s first information chip. From there followed universal libraries and museums, connecting his native Belgium to the world by means of a vast intellectual enterprise that attempted to organize and code everything ever published. Forty years before the first personal computer and fifty years before the first browser, Otlet envisioned a network of “electric telescopes” that would allow people everywhere to search through books, newspapers, photographs, and recordings, all linked together in what he termed, in 1934, a réseau mondial–essentially, a worldwide web.
Otlet’s life achievement was the construction of the Mundaneum–a mechanical collective brain that would house and disseminate everything ever committed to paper. Filled with analog machines such as telegraphs and sorters, the Mundaneum–what some have called a “Steampunk version of hypertext”–was the embodiment of Otlet’s ambitions. It was also short-lived. By the time the Nazis, who were pilfering libraries across Europe to collect information they thought useful, carted away Otlet’s collection in 1940, the dream had ended. Broken, Otlet died in 1944.
Wright’s engaging intellectual history gives Otlet his due, restoring him to his proper place in the long continuum of visionaries and pioneers who have struggled to classify knowledge, from H.G. Wells and Melvil Dewey to Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee, and Steve Jobs. Wright shows that in the years since Otlet’s death the world has witnessed the emergence of a global network that has proved him right about the possibilities–and the perils–of networked information, and his legacy persists in our digital world today, captured for all time…”
How open data can help shape the way we analyse electoral behaviour
Harvey Lewis (Deloitte), Ulrich Atz, Gianfranco Cecconi, Tom Heath (ODI) in The Guardian: “Even after the local council elections in England and Northern Ireland on 22 May, which coincided with polling for the European Parliament, the next 12 months remain a busy time for the democratic process in the UK.
In September, the people of Scotland make their choice in a referendum on the future of the Union. Finally, the first fixed-term parliament in Westminster comes to an end with a general election in all areas of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in May 2015.
To ensure that as many people as possible are eligible and able to vote, the government is launching an ambitious programme of Individual Electoral Registration (IER) this summer. This will mean that the traditional, paper-based approach to household registration will shift to a tailored and largely digital process more in-keeping with the data-driven demands of the twenty-first century.
Under IER, citizens will need to provide ‘identifying information’, such as date of birth or national insurance number, when applying to register.
Ballots: stuck in the past?
However, despite the government’s attempts through IER to improve the veracity of information captured prior to ballots being posted, little has changed in terms of the vision for capturing, distributing and analysing digital data from election day itself.
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Indeed, paper is still the chosen medium for data collection.
Digitising elections is fraught with difficulty, though. In the US, for example, the introduction of new voting machines created much controversy even though they are capable of providing ‘near-perfect’ ballot data.
The UK’s democratic process is not completely blind, though. Numerous opinion surveys are conducted both before and after polling, including the long-running British Election Study, to understand the shifting attitudes of a representative cross-section of the electorate.
But if the government does not retain in sufficient geographic detail digital information on the number of people who vote, then how can it learn what is necessary to reverse the long-running decline in turnout?
The effects of lack of data
To add to the debate around democratic engagement, a joint research team, with data scientists from Deloitte and the Open Data Institute (ODI), have been attempting to understand what makes voters tick.
Our research has been hampered by a significant lack of relevant data describing voter behaviour at electoral ward level, as well as difficulties in matching what little data is available to other open data sources, such as demographic data from the 2011 Census.
Even though individual ballot papers are collected and verified for counting the number of votes per candidate – the primary aim of elections, after all – the only recent elections for which aggregate turnout statistics have been published at ward level are the 2012 local council elections in England and Wales. In these elections, approximately 3,000 wards from a total of over 8,000 voted.
Data published by the Electoral Commission for the 2013 local council elections in England and Wales purports to be at ward level but is, in fact, for ‘county electoral divisions’, as explained by the Office for National Statistics.
Moreover, important factors related to the accessibility of polling stations – such as the distance from main population centres – could not be assessed because the location of polling stations remains the responsibility of individual local authorities – and only eight of these have so far published their data as open data.
Given these fundamental limitations, drawing any robust conclusions is difficult. Nevertheless, our research shows the potential for forecasting electoral turnout with relatively few census variables, the most significant of which are age and the size of the electorate in each ward.
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What role can open data play?
The limited results described above provide a tantalising glimpse into a possible future scenario: where open data provides a deeper and more granular understanding of electoral behaviour.
On the back of more sophisticated analyses, policies for improving democratic engagement – particularly among young people – have the potential to become focused and evidence-driven.
And, although the data captured on election day will always remain primarily for the use of electing the public’s preferred candidate, an important secondary consideration is aggregating and publishing data that can be used more widely.
This may have been prohibitively expensive or too complex in the past but as storage and processing costs continue to fall, and the appetite for such knowledge grows, there is a compelling business case.
The benefits of this future scenario potentially include:
- tailoring awareness and marketing campaigns to wards and other segments of the electorate most likely to respond positively and subsequently turn out to vote
- increasing the efficiency with which European, general and local elections are held in the UK
- improving transparency around the electoral process and stimulating increased democratic engagement
- enhancing links to the Government’s other significant data collection activities, including the Census.
Achieving these benefits requires commitment to electoral data being collected and published in a systematic fashion at least at ward level. This would link work currently undertaken by the Electoral Commission, the ONS, Plymouth University’s Election Centre, the British Election Study and the more than 400 local authorities across the UK.”
Crowdsourcing for public safety
Paper presented by A Goncalves, C Silva, P Morreale, J Bonafide at Systems Conference (SysCon), 2014: “With advances in mobile technology, the ability to get real-time geographically accurate data, including photos and videos, becomes integrated into daily activities. Businesses use this technology edge to stay ahead of their competitors. Social media has made photo and video sharing a widely accepted and adopted behavior. This real-time data and information exchange, crowdsourcing, can be used to help first responders and personnel in emergency situations caused by extreme weather such as earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and snow storms. Using smartphones, civilians can contribute data and images to the recovery process and make it more efficient, which can ultimately save lives and decrease the economic impact caused by extreme weather conditions.”
Linking Social, Open, and Enterprise Data
Paper by T Omitola, J Davies, A Duke, H Glaser, N Shadbolt for Proceeding WIMS ’14 (Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics): “The new world of big data, of the LOD cloud, of the app economy, and of social media means that organisations no longer own, much less control, all the data they need to make the best informed business decisions. In this paper, we describe how we built a system using Linked Data principles to bring in data from Web 2.0 sites (LinkedIn, Salesforce), and other external business sites such as OpenCorporates, linking these together with pertinent internal British Telecommunications enterprise data into that enterprise data space. We describe the challenges faced during the implementation, which include sourcing the datasets, finding the appropriate “join points” from the individual datasets, as well as developing the client application used for data publication. We describe our solutions to these challenges and discuss the design decisions made. We conclude by drawing some general principles from this work.”
Crowdsourcing platform for museums
Thesis by Kræn Vesterberg Hansen: “This thesis addresses a strategic challenge at National Museum of Denmark to engage with external people, interested in contributing information about their collection of more than half a million coins and medals. This approach of getting outsiders to help with the completion of many small tasks are popularly known as crowdsourcing. This entails a need for the transcription of handwritten protocols, establishment of references between of entries in protocols and photographs of coins. These coins also references both structured and non-structured metadata.
Does a digital platformfor crowd engagement, in the museum’s context, exist? And how is such a platform integrated with the existing infrastructure of the museum? The report considers the MediaWiki, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Zooniverse’s Scribe transcription interface, and finds that the MediaWiki fits approximately 70% of the requirements.
Existing cases of successful crowdsourcing projects, national as well international is mentioned and the solution builds upon APIs of existing infrastructure components (such as the existing collection management system GenReg Mønt and the Canto Cumulus digital asset management system) in a modular and reusable architecture.
The report approaches the challenge in a three part process, greatly inspired by the software process model of “Reuse-oriented software engineering” proposed by Professor of Software engineering at the University of St Andrews, Ian Summerville.”
Collaborative approaches to public sector innovation: A scoping study
Paper by K Szkuta, R Pizzicannella, D Osimo in Telecommunications Policy: “In the last 15 years, European countries have invested considerable resources to provide e-government services. Despite of its increasing availability, its level of adoption has not been satisfying. On the other hand, over the last years, coinciding with the web 2.0 trend, the e-government services co-produced by citizens start to appear, often without the support, acknowledgement and even awareness of the government. This trend stems from a well-established tradition of offline co- production of public services, i.e. services provided by the voluntary sector, but brought to an unprecedented scale thanks to the advent of web 2.0. Still, the concept remains not well-defined and its impact is not yet well studied. The paper explores on a limited sets of cases what does it mean to collaboratively deliver online public services; what are the success factors based on the cases under study and what are the incentives for service providers (other than public administration), citizens as users and public administration. The authors propose an ostensive definition of the collaborative delivery of public services: collaborative public services are created and run by government, civil society or by private sector building on the re-use of government data or citizens data. Those services are focused on public goods delivery (e.g. health, education, public transport) and are meant to change the traditional government services by engaging in an open dialogue with public administration about the best way to deliver those services. The analysis of six case studies of innovative collaborative online public services suggests that the online collaborative public service delivery increases its quality with the users׳ growth contrary to the traditional offline service delivery. The study results indicate that the current developers interest lies in delivering complementary services to the government run services rather than substitutive services. The authors propose also the initial list of success factors, enabling conditions, and benefits for all main stakeholders (users, innovators and public administration).”
Global democracy and the democratic minimum: Why a procedural account alone is insufficient
Paper by Klaus Dingwerth in the European Journal of International Relations: “In this critical comment on the global democracy debate, I take stock of contemporary proposals for democratizing global governance. In the first part of the article, I show that, empirically, many international institutions are now evaluated in terms of their democratic credentials. At the same time, the notions of democracy that underpin such evaluations are often very formalistic. They focus on granting access to civil society organizations, making policy-relevant documents available online or establishing global parliamentary assemblies to give citizens a voice in the decision-making of international organizations. In the second part, I challenge this focus on formal procedures and argue that a normatively persuasive conception of global democracy would shift our focus to areas such as health, education and subsistence. Contrary to much contemporary thinking about global democracy, I thus defend the view that the institutions we have are sufficiently democratic. What is needed are not better procedures, but investments that help the weaker members of global society to make effective use of the democracy-relevant institutions that exist in contemporary international politics”