Democratic governance in an age of datafication: Lessons from mapping government discourses and practices
TLDR
In this article, the authors make the case for greater government transparency and accountability about uses of big data through a Government of Canada qualitative research case study and employ counter-mapping to map government big data practices and internal discussions of risk and challenge.Abstract:
There is an abundance of enthusiasm and optimism about how governments at all levels can make use of big data, algorithms and artificial intelligence. There is also growing concern about the risks that come with these new systems. This article makes the case for greater government transparency and accountability about uses of big data through a Government of Canada qualitative research case study. Adapting a method from critical cartographers, I employ counter-mapping to map government big data practices and internal discussions of risk and challenge. I do so by drawing on interviews and freedom of information requests. The analysis reveals that there are more concerns and risks than often publicly discussed and that there are significant areas of silence that need greater attention. The article underlines the need for our democratic systems to respond to our new datafied contexts by ensuring that our institutions make changes to better protect citizen rights, uphold democratic principles and ensure means for citizen interventionread more
Citations
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The Data Revolution
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Digitalization, accounting and accountability: A literature review and reflections on future research in public services
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the current state of the art and future directions of research on digitalization, accountability and accounting in public services and identify the following emerging critical digital accountability issues and related future research avenues: the potential for dialogic and horizontal, multi-centric accountability; the blurring of accountability roles and boundaries; the increasing relevance of translation processes and translators' roles; the need to ensure accountability in such translations; the importance of social equity and inclusivity implications of digitalization.
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Datafied child welfare services: unpacking politics, economics and power
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Civic Organizations and Digital Technologies in an Age of Distrust
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References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Document Analysis as a Qualitative Research Method
TL;DR: The nature and forms of documents are described, the advantages and limitations of document analysis are outlined, and specific examples of the use of documents in the research process are offered.
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Critical questions for big data
danah boyd,Kate Crawford +1 more
TL;DR: The era of Big Data has begun as discussed by the authors, where diverse groups argue about the potential benefits and costs of analyzing genetic sequences, social media interactions, health records, phone logs, government records, and other digital traces left by people.
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Big Data's Disparate Impact
Solon Barocas,Andrew D. Selbst +1 more
TL;DR: In the absence of a demonstrable intent to discriminate, the best doctrinal hope for data mining's victims would seem to lie in disparate impact doctrine as discussed by the authors, which holds that a practice can be justified as a business necessity when its outcomes are predictive of future employment outcomes, and data mining is specifically designed to find such statistical correlations.
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Big Data, new epistemologies and paradigm shifts:
TL;DR: The authors 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.
Book
The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information
TL;DR: The Black Box Society argues that we all need to be able to do so and to set limits on how big data affects our lives as mentioned in this paper. But who connects the dots about what firms are doing with this information?