If you’re someone with data analysis skills and a yearning to solve poverty/malaria/the mystery of bee mortality, now’s your time. There are numerous ‘big data’ initiatives emerging to connect development initiatives with people who can code, including programs based around GIS, mobile phone data, crowdsourced crisis reporting and microfinance, to name but a few. But […]
This is a group post from a session held at the Big Data: Rewards and Risks for the Social Sciences conference in March (http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/events/?id=557). Participants in the group were Chris Birchall, Michael Khoo, Cornelius Puschmann, Kalpana Shankar, Jillian Wallis, Janet Smart, Melissa Terras and Linnet Taylor. This is an account of the session we held […]
At the end of March OII held a workshop on the potential of big data for social scientific research. The workshop brought together researchers from various continents and a wide variety of disciplines, with research interests including immigration and xenophobia, the genesis of innovation, labour markets and financial risk. The aim of the event was […]
Starting to think about the discussion we are going to organise in 2014 at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Centre on big data and social change in the developing world. Initially this seems very broad: big data could be almost anything; the developing world similarly. Our emerging project definition of ‘big data’ is data that is […]
OII recently held a workshop – ‘Towards a Sociology of Data’ – which brought together sociologists, philosophers, political scientists and computer scientists to discuss whether there exists – or needs to be – ‘a sociology of data’. The workshop was based around three main discussions: our relationship to data as private individuals, as citizens, and […]
Here’s a very last-minute call for anyone interested in attending a workshop on the sociology of data. It’s half a day at OII, January 11th. Check out the invitation and send us 300-500 words if you’re interested.
To a smart lecture on cyber-security at the Dutch national policy council (WRR), by Ron Deibert of Citizen Lab. Deibert spends his time thinking about the ways that organisations and governments may be using our data for surveillance and control, and transfixed an audience of Dutch-speaking policymakers for nearly two hours with his account of […]
