Data journeys and data friction

Published 31/1/2021

Building on my PhD research on the politics of open government data and The Secret Life of a Weather Datum (AHRC – PI) project, I developed a number of conceptual and methodological contributions to research in the field of Critical Data Studies, including data journeys and data friction.

Data Journeys

My work on Data Journeys came about through reflection on the ways in which data produced in very local contexts, e.g. a local weather station, end up flowing through global data infrastructures not only in the field of meteorology and climate science, but also financial markets and other sectors. I was interested in examining how the different socio-cultural and material dynamics at different sites along these journeys interact to shape how and why data flow from one place to the next, and how these journeys bring people working in very different contexts into complex forms of relation with one another.

As well as a concept related to the dynamics described above, my collaborators and I also developed Data Journeys as a methodological approach that aimed to illuminate these dynamics empirically. Our idea was that a researcher could investigate how socio-material dynamics shape data flows by conducting a mobile ethnography, following the data as it flowed through different sites of practice.

We wrote up our work on Data Journeys in the following papers:

We also developed a website highlighting some of our empirical findings:

I also presented our work on Data Journeys at the 2018 ESRC Methods Festival – http://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/4203/

and at various workshops, including

  • A workshop hosted by Juliane Jarke and her research group (University of Bremen) on our experiences of applying Data Journeys on research projects (summer 2021).
  • A workshop on Studying Public Data hosted by Gijs van Maanen (Utrecht & Tilburg) and Jonathan Gray (Kings) (November 2021)

Some of our empirical work based on the Data Journeys approach is published in these papers:

This Data Journeys approach has been adopted and/or adapted on a number of research projects, including two that I have been involved in:

  • One of my PhD students Itzelle Medina Perea has adapted the approach to explore patient data journeys in the UK health sector.
  • Our research on the Living with Data project adapted the Data Journeys approach to investigate data practices in the BBC and Department for Work and Pensions.

Data Friction

This work built upon my earlier work on Data Journeys, and aimed to extend Paul Edwards’ concept of data friction. Building on empirical studies in the fields of research data sharing and online communications data, I aimed to draw attention to key aspects of the politics of data friction, including:

  • the ways in which new data flows and the frictions that shape them bring social actors into new forms of relation with one another
  • the platformisation of infrastructures for data circulation
  • state action to influence the dynamics of data movement

I examined the ways in which moments and sites of data friction are often deeply political in nature, and are shaped by human actors with very different levels of power in shaping outcomes of struggles.

My key paper on Data Friction was awarded Highly Commended paper in the 2017 Journal of Documentation Literati Awards.

The following paper brings together the Data Journeys approach with the concept of Data Friction to examine efforts to recover historic climate data:

More recently I also wrote this blog post about some of the struggles over data frictions I saw playing out a few weeks into the Covid lockdown in 2020.