Taking it to the People People

Looks like I get a chance to run my mouth off again :) Upcoming HDI research seminar, organised by Cambridge Big Data/Digital Humanities. In short, details are: 20th April 2015, 14:00–16:00 in S1, Alison Richard Building, West Road, Cambridge. If you’d like to attend, please do register at http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/human-data-interaction-cambridge-big-datadigital-humanities-seminar-tickets-16337148852.

And just because pixels are, in some loose sense, nearly free, here’s the abstract from the seminar link above:

The increasing generation and collection of personal data has created a complex ecosystem, often collaborative but sometimes combative, around companies and individuals engaging in the use of these data. We propose that the interactions between these agents warrant a new topic of study: Human-Data Interaction (HDI), that sits at the intersection of various disciplines, including computer science, statistics, sociology, psychology and behavioural economics._

In this brief presentation I will pose some of the challenges that HDI raises, organised into three core themes of legibility, agency and negotiability. I will also outline some of the technical work we are currently undertaking that attempts to address some of the underlying platform problems. My hope is to elicit discussion of both the HDI framework and the technical solutions we are pursuing, as well as to engage in a broader conversation about the ways we should approach the personal data ecosystem with other interested parties._