Latest data cultures project:
Patterns in Practice is an AHRC funded project that is exploring how practitioners’ beliefs, values and feelings interact to shape how they engage with and in data mining – a form of ‘narrow AI’. Visit project website
My interest in Data Cultures came about through my PhD research that examined the politics of the UK’s Open Government Data initiative, and my later research of the Secret Life of a Weather Datum (AHRC) project which examined how the socio-cultural and material factors interrelate at different sites of practice to shape data flows.
I wrote up my ideas about Data Cultures in the following chapter:
- Bates J (2017) Data cultures, power and the city, Data and the City (pp. 189-200). View this article in WRRO
I also led a small empirical project funded by the Information School that identified the important role of affective dynamics in cultures of data science practice. We wrote up this work in the following papers, and this is something I plan to explore in more depth in my new project Patterns in Practice.
- Bates J & Cameron D (2019) Affect Dynamics in Data Science Practice. Human-Centred Study of Data Science Work Practices Workshop, CHI 2019, 4 May 2019 – 4 May 2019. View this article in WRRO
- Souare M & Bates J (2018) Perceptions of Data Science outputs in a local authority context: the importance of emotion and context, Data for Policy 11-12 June 2018.
- Bates J & Elmore J (2018) Identifying the Affective Dimension of Data Mining Practice: An Exploratory Study (pp 243-252)
This is the presentation I gave at the Programmable City workshop that led to the edited volume the chapter above was published in.
In 2021, I did this guest interview for Natalia Grincheva at the University of Melbourne on the topic of Data Cultures in which we reflect on a variety of topics including how the pandemic might impact data cultures.