Conference of Irish Geographies 2018
The Earth as Our Home
Automating Homelessness May 12, 2018
The research for these studies is funded by a European Research Council Advanced Investigator award ERC-2012-AdG-323636-SOFTCITY.
Cottbus Brandenburg University of Technology Lecture series on Smart RegionsCritically Assembling Data, Processes & Things: Toward and Open Smart CityJune 5, 2018
This lecture will critically focus on smart cities from a data based socio-technological assemblage approach. It is a theoretical and methodological framework that allows for an empirical examination of how smart cities are socially and technically constructed, and to study them as discursive regimes and as a large technological infrastructural systems.
The lecture will refer to the research outcomes of the ERC funded Programmable City Project led by Rob Kitchin at Maynooth University and will feature examples of empirical research conducted in Dublin and other Irish cities.
In addition, the lecture will discuss the research outcomes of the Canadian Open Smart Cities project funded by the Government of Canada GeoConnections Program. Examples will be drawn from five case studies namely about the cities of Edmonton, Guelph, Ottawa and Montreal, and the Ontario Smart Grid as well as number of international best practices. The recent Infrastructure Canada Canadian Smart City Challenge and the controversial Sidewalk Lab Waterfront Toronto project will also be discussed.
It will be argued that no two smart cities are alike although the technological solutionist and networked urbanist approaches dominate and it is suggested that these kind of smart cities may not live up to the promise of being better places to live.
In this lecture, the ideals of an Open Smart City are offered instead and in this kind of city residents, civil society, academics, and the private sector collaborate with public officials to mobilize data and technologies when warranted in an ethical, accountable and transparent way in order to govern the city as a fair, viable and livable commons that balances economic development, social progress and environmental responsibility. Although an Open Smart City does not yet exist, it will be argued that it is possible.
Presentation #2:Open/Big Urban DataLessons Learned from the Programmable City ProjectMansion House, Dublin, May 9th, 201810am-2pmhttp://progcity.maynoothuniversity.ie/2018/03/lessons-for-smart-cities-from-the-programmable-city-project/
Note:
Interactivity and animation are lost when the slides are converted to PDF.
Abstract:
In a technological society such as Canada, it is suggested that a specialized kind of expert citizenship is needed (Andrew Feenberg). In the era of big data, others suggest that there is a need to learn how to read algorithms and to study its high priests and alchemists (Genevieve Bell). While, doing citizenship requires a political ethics of technology to thwart technological and quantitative fundamentalism (Darin Barney). Finally, in the midst of a data revolution we need to critically re-conceptualize data (Rob Kitchin). Quite simply, in today's Canada doing citizenship requires data literacy, technical, philosophical and political. Access to print media - books, government documents, academic journals - in libraries and archives enabled a literate society, the prerequisite of a democratic system. I argue that good governance in knowledge producing institutions, is to have technological experts, both data creators and preservers, working to store, manage, disseminate and preserve data so that we have the requisite artifacts to increase our literacy and build upon collected knowledge. Data literacy I suggest, is indispensable in the current democratic system, and that requires having access to data, data infrastructures - knowledge and technology - and dedicated skilled people and resources to sustainably care for them. I consider research data management to be our duty.
OSi Geographic Information Research & Development Initiatives Launch
Ordnance Survey Ireland GI R&D Initiatives
Tuesday, 22 March 2016, 13:00 to 20:30 (GMT) , Maynooth University
Cottbus Brandenburg University of Technology Lecture series on Smart RegionsCritically Assembling Data, Processes & Things: Toward and Open Smart CityJune 5, 2018
This lecture will critically focus on smart cities from a data based socio-technological assemblage approach. It is a theoretical and methodological framework that allows for an empirical examination of how smart cities are socially and technically constructed, and to study them as discursive regimes and as a large technological infrastructural systems.
The lecture will refer to the research outcomes of the ERC funded Programmable City Project led by Rob Kitchin at Maynooth University and will feature examples of empirical research conducted in Dublin and other Irish cities.
In addition, the lecture will discuss the research outcomes of the Canadian Open Smart Cities project funded by the Government of Canada GeoConnections Program. Examples will be drawn from five case studies namely about the cities of Edmonton, Guelph, Ottawa and Montreal, and the Ontario Smart Grid as well as number of international best practices. The recent Infrastructure Canada Canadian Smart City Challenge and the controversial Sidewalk Lab Waterfront Toronto project will also be discussed.
It will be argued that no two smart cities are alike although the technological solutionist and networked urbanist approaches dominate and it is suggested that these kind of smart cities may not live up to the promise of being better places to live.
In this lecture, the ideals of an Open Smart City are offered instead and in this kind of city residents, civil society, academics, and the private sector collaborate with public officials to mobilize data and technologies when warranted in an ethical, accountable and transparent way in order to govern the city as a fair, viable and livable commons that balances economic development, social progress and environmental responsibility. Although an Open Smart City does not yet exist, it will be argued that it is possible.
Presentation #2:Open/Big Urban DataLessons Learned from the Programmable City ProjectMansion House, Dublin, May 9th, 201810am-2pmhttp://progcity.maynoothuniversity.ie/2018/03/lessons-for-smart-cities-from-the-programmable-city-project/
Note:
Interactivity and animation are lost when the slides are converted to PDF.
Abstract:
In a technological society such as Canada, it is suggested that a specialized kind of expert citizenship is needed (Andrew Feenberg). In the era of big data, others suggest that there is a need to learn how to read algorithms and to study its high priests and alchemists (Genevieve Bell). While, doing citizenship requires a political ethics of technology to thwart technological and quantitative fundamentalism (Darin Barney). Finally, in the midst of a data revolution we need to critically re-conceptualize data (Rob Kitchin). Quite simply, in today's Canada doing citizenship requires data literacy, technical, philosophical and political. Access to print media - books, government documents, academic journals - in libraries and archives enabled a literate society, the prerequisite of a democratic system. I argue that good governance in knowledge producing institutions, is to have technological experts, both data creators and preservers, working to store, manage, disseminate and preserve data so that we have the requisite artifacts to increase our literacy and build upon collected knowledge. Data literacy I suggest, is indispensable in the current democratic system, and that requires having access to data, data infrastructures - knowledge and technology - and dedicated skilled people and resources to sustainably care for them. I consider research data management to be our duty.
OSi Geographic Information Research & Development Initiatives Launch
Ordnance Survey Ireland GI R&D Initiatives
Tuesday, 22 March 2016, 13:00 to 20:30 (GMT) , Maynooth University
First Annual Canadian Homelessness Data Sharing Initiative
Calgary Homeless Foundation and The School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary
May 4, 2016, Officer’s Mess – Fort Calgary, Calgary, Alberta
Presented by: Jean-Noe Landry (Open North) & Dr Tracey P. Lauriault (Carleton University) & Rachel Bloom (Open North)
Content Contributors: David Fewer CIPPIC, Mark Fox U. of Toronto, Stephen Letts (RA Carleton U.)
Partner Cities: City of Edmonton, City of Guelph, Ville de Montréal & City of Ottawa
Project Name: Open Smart Cities in Canada
Date: August 30, 2017
ABSTRACT:
The central argument of this dissertation is that Canadian reality is conditioned by government data and their related infrastructures. Specifically, that Canadian geographical imaginations are strongly influenced by the Atlas of Canada and the Census of Canada. Both are long standing government institutions that inform government decision-making, and are normally considered to be objective and politically neutral. It is argued that they may also not be entirely politically neutral even though they may not be influenced by partisan politics, because social, technical and scientific institutions nuance objectivity. These institutions or infrastructures recede into the background of government operations, and although invisible, they shape how Canadian geography and society are imagined. Such geographical imaginations, it is argued, are important because they have real material and social effects. In particular, this dissertation empirically examines how the Atlas of Canada and the Census of Canada, as knowledge formation objects and as government representations, affect social and material reality and also normalize subjects. It is also demonstrated that the Ian Hacking dynamic Looping Effect framework of ‘Making Up People’ is not only useful to the human sciences, but is also an effective methodology that geographers can adapt and apply to the study of ‘Making Up Spaces’ and geographical imaginations. His framework was adapted to the study of the six editions of the Atlas of Canada and the Census of Canada between 1871 and 2011. Furthermore, it is shown that the framework also helps structure the critical examination of discourse, in this case, Foucauldian gouvernementalité and the biopower of socio-techno-political systems such as a national atlas and census, which are inextricably embedded in a social, technical and scientific milieu. As objects they both reflect the dominant value system of their society and through daily actions, support the dominance of this value system. While it is people who produce these objects, the infrastructures that operate in the background have technological momentum that also influence actions. Based on the work of Bruno Latour, the Atlas and the Canadian census are proven to be inscriptions that are immutable and mobile, and as such, become actors in other settings. Therefore, the Atlas of Canada and the Census of Canada shape and are shaped by geographical imaginations.
Brown Bag: New Models of Scholarly Communication for Digital Scholarship, by ...Micah Altman
In his talk for the MIT Libraries Program on Information Science, Steve Griffin discusses how how research libraries can play a key and expanded role in enabling digital scholarship and creating the supporting activities that sustain it.
Tracey P. Lauriault (Programmable City team)
A genealogy of open data assemblages
Abstract: Evidence informed decision making, participatory public policy, government transparency and accountability, sustainable development, and data driven journalism were the initial drivers of making public data accessible. The access work of geomaticians, researchers, librarians, community developers and journalists has recently been recast as open data that includes a different set of actors. As open data matures as a practice, its principles, definitions and guidelines have been transformed into national performance indicators such as indexes, barometers, ratings and score cards; the private sector such as Gartner, McKinsey, and Deloitte are touting open data's innovation and business opportunities; while smart city initiatives offer tools and expertise to help government sense, monitor, measure and evaluate their cities. Open data today seems to have evolved far from its original ideals, even with civil society players such as Markets for Good, Sunlight Foundation, Open Knowledge Foundation, Code for America, and many others advocating for more social approaches. This talk proposes an assemblage approach to understanding open data and provides a genealogy of its development in different contexts and places.
Bio: Tracey P. Lauriault is a Programmable City Project Postdoctoral Researcher focussing on How are digital data generated and processed about cities and their citizens? She arrives from Canada where she was a researcher with the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre, at Carleton University, where she investigated Data, Infrastructures and Geographical Imaginations, spatial data infrastructures, open data and the preservation of and access to research and geomatics data; legal and policy issues associated with geospatial, administrative and civil society data; and cybercartography. She is a a member of the international Research Data Alliance Legal (RDA) Interoperability Working Group, the Natural Resources Canada Roundtable on Geomatics Legal and Policy Interest Group. She is also actively engaged in public policy research as it pertains to open data and their related infrastructures.
ICTs for development: from e-Readiness to e-AwarenessIsmael Peña-López
Seminar given in Barcelona, November 20th, 2007 at the Executive Master in e-Governance, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
http://ictlogy.net/bibciter/reports/projects.php?idp=801
Ontology Building vs Data Harvesting and Cleaning for Smart-city ServicesPaolo Nesi
Presently, a very large number of public and private data sets are available around the local governments. In most cases, they are not semantically interoperable and a huge human effort is needed to create integrated ontologies and knowledge base for smart city. Smart City ontology is not yet standardized, and a lot of research work is needed to identify models that can easily support the data reconciliation, the management of the complexity and reasoning. In this paper, a system for data ingestion and reconciliation of smart cities related aspects as road graph, services available on the roads, traffic sensors etc., is proposed. The system allows managing a big volume of data coming from a variety of sources considering both static and dynamic data. These data are mapped to smart-city ontology and stored into an RDF-Store where they are available for applications via SPARQL queries to provide new services to the users. The paper presents the process adopted to produce the ontology and the knowledge base and the mechanisms adopted for the verification, reconciliation and validation. Some examples about the possible usage of the coherent knowledge base produced are also offered and are accessible from the RDF-Store and related services. The article also presented the work performed about reconciliation algorithms and their comparative assessment and selection. Keywords Smart city, knowledge base construction, reconciliation, validation and verification of knowledge base, smart city ontology, linked open graph.
A 25 minute talk from a panel on big data curricula at JSM 2013
http://www.amstat.org/meetings/jsm/2013/onlineprogram/ActivityDetails.cfm?SessionID=208664
Civic Technologies: Research, Practice, and Open ChallengesPablo Aragón
Workshop – CSCW 2020 – October 17, 2020
Over the last years, civic technology projects have emerged around the world to advance open government and community action. Although Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) communities have shown a growing interest in researching issues around civic technologies, yet most research still focuses on projects from the Global North. The goal of this workshop is, therefore, to advance CSCW research by raising awareness for the ongoing challenges and open questions around civic technology by bridging the gap between researchers and practitioners from different regions.
The workshop will be organized around three central topics: (1) discuss how the local context and infrastructure affect the design, implementation, adoption, and maintenance of civic technology; (2) identify key elements of the configuration of trust among government, citizenry, and local organizations and how these elements change depending on the sociopolitical context where community engagement takes place; (3) discover what methods and strategies are best suited for conducting research on civic technologies in different contexts. These core topics will be covered across sessions that will initiate in-depth discussions and, thereby, stimulate collaboration between the CSCW research community and practitioners of civic technologies from both Global North and South.
Characterizing Online Participation in Civic Technologies - PhDPablo Aragón
This thesis constitutes one of the first investigations focused on characterizing online participation in civic technologies, a type of platform increasingly popular on the Internet that allows citizens new forms, on a larger scale, of political participation. Given the opportunities of civic technologies in democratic governance, it should be noted that their design, like that of any online platform, is not neutral. The ways in which information is presented or interaction between users is allowed can greatly alter the results of participation. For this reason, we analyze the impact of different interventions in civic technologies in relation to online conversation views, ordering criteria for ranking petitions, and deliberative interfaces. Since these interventions were carried out by the corresponding development teams, the analyses have required to develop novel computational and statistical methods, while also extending generative models of discussion threads to better characterise the dynamics of online conversations. Results of the different case studies highlight the social and political impact of these interventions, suggesting new directions for future research and the need to develop a paradigm of citizen experimentation for democracy.
From Aspiration to Reality: Open Smart Cities
Open smart cities might become a reality for Canada. Globally there are a number of initiatives, programs, and practices that are open smart city like which means that it is possible to have an open, responsive and engaged city that is both socio-technologically enabled, but also one where there is receptivity to and a willingness to grow a critically informed type of technological citizenship (Feenberg). For an open smart city to exist, public officials, the private sector, scholars, civil society and residents and citizens require a definition and a guide to start the exercise of imagining what an open smart city might look like. There is much critical scholarship about the smart city and there are many counter smart city narratives, but there are few depictions of what engagement, participatory design and technological leadership might be. The few examples that do exist are project based and few are systemic. An open smart city definition and guide was therefore created by a group of stakeholders in such a way that it can be used as the basis for the design of an open smart city from the ground up, or to help actors shape or steer the course of emerging or ongoing data and networked urbanist forms (Kitchin) of smart cities to lead them towards being open, engaged and receptive to technological citizenship.
This talk will discuss some of the successes resulting from this Open Smart Cities work, which might also be called a form or engaged scholarship. For example the language for the call for tender of the Infrastructure Canada Smart City Challenge was modified to include as a requisite that engagement and openness be part of the submissions from communities. Also, those involved with the guide have been writing policy articles that critique either AI or the smart city while also offering examples of what is possible. These articles are being read by proponents of Sidewalk Labs in Toronto. Also, the global Open Data Conference held in Argentina in September of 2018 hosted a full workshop on Open Smart Cities and finally Open North is working toward developing key performance indicators to assess those shortlisted by Infrastructure Canada and to help those communities develop an Open Smart Cities submission. The objective of the talk is to demonstrate that it is actually possible to shift public policy on large infrastructure projects, at least, in the short term.
First Annual Canadian Homelessness Data Sharing Initiative
Calgary Homeless Foundation and The School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary
May 4, 2016, Officer’s Mess – Fort Calgary, Calgary, Alberta
Presented by: Jean-Noe Landry (Open North) & Dr Tracey P. Lauriault (Carleton University) & Rachel Bloom (Open North)
Content Contributors: David Fewer CIPPIC, Mark Fox U. of Toronto, Stephen Letts (RA Carleton U.)
Partner Cities: City of Edmonton, City of Guelph, Ville de Montréal & City of Ottawa
Project Name: Open Smart Cities in Canada
Date: August 30, 2017
ABSTRACT:
The central argument of this dissertation is that Canadian reality is conditioned by government data and their related infrastructures. Specifically, that Canadian geographical imaginations are strongly influenced by the Atlas of Canada and the Census of Canada. Both are long standing government institutions that inform government decision-making, and are normally considered to be objective and politically neutral. It is argued that they may also not be entirely politically neutral even though they may not be influenced by partisan politics, because social, technical and scientific institutions nuance objectivity. These institutions or infrastructures recede into the background of government operations, and although invisible, they shape how Canadian geography and society are imagined. Such geographical imaginations, it is argued, are important because they have real material and social effects. In particular, this dissertation empirically examines how the Atlas of Canada and the Census of Canada, as knowledge formation objects and as government representations, affect social and material reality and also normalize subjects. It is also demonstrated that the Ian Hacking dynamic Looping Effect framework of ‘Making Up People’ is not only useful to the human sciences, but is also an effective methodology that geographers can adapt and apply to the study of ‘Making Up Spaces’ and geographical imaginations. His framework was adapted to the study of the six editions of the Atlas of Canada and the Census of Canada between 1871 and 2011. Furthermore, it is shown that the framework also helps structure the critical examination of discourse, in this case, Foucauldian gouvernementalité and the biopower of socio-techno-political systems such as a national atlas and census, which are inextricably embedded in a social, technical and scientific milieu. As objects they both reflect the dominant value system of their society and through daily actions, support the dominance of this value system. While it is people who produce these objects, the infrastructures that operate in the background have technological momentum that also influence actions. Based on the work of Bruno Latour, the Atlas and the Canadian census are proven to be inscriptions that are immutable and mobile, and as such, become actors in other settings. Therefore, the Atlas of Canada and the Census of Canada shape and are shaped by geographical imaginations.
Brown Bag: New Models of Scholarly Communication for Digital Scholarship, by ...Micah Altman
In his talk for the MIT Libraries Program on Information Science, Steve Griffin discusses how how research libraries can play a key and expanded role in enabling digital scholarship and creating the supporting activities that sustain it.
Tracey P. Lauriault (Programmable City team)
A genealogy of open data assemblages
Abstract: Evidence informed decision making, participatory public policy, government transparency and accountability, sustainable development, and data driven journalism were the initial drivers of making public data accessible. The access work of geomaticians, researchers, librarians, community developers and journalists has recently been recast as open data that includes a different set of actors. As open data matures as a practice, its principles, definitions and guidelines have been transformed into national performance indicators such as indexes, barometers, ratings and score cards; the private sector such as Gartner, McKinsey, and Deloitte are touting open data's innovation and business opportunities; while smart city initiatives offer tools and expertise to help government sense, monitor, measure and evaluate their cities. Open data today seems to have evolved far from its original ideals, even with civil society players such as Markets for Good, Sunlight Foundation, Open Knowledge Foundation, Code for America, and many others advocating for more social approaches. This talk proposes an assemblage approach to understanding open data and provides a genealogy of its development in different contexts and places.
Bio: Tracey P. Lauriault is a Programmable City Project Postdoctoral Researcher focussing on How are digital data generated and processed about cities and their citizens? She arrives from Canada where she was a researcher with the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre, at Carleton University, where she investigated Data, Infrastructures and Geographical Imaginations, spatial data infrastructures, open data and the preservation of and access to research and geomatics data; legal and policy issues associated with geospatial, administrative and civil society data; and cybercartography. She is a a member of the international Research Data Alliance Legal (RDA) Interoperability Working Group, the Natural Resources Canada Roundtable on Geomatics Legal and Policy Interest Group. She is also actively engaged in public policy research as it pertains to open data and their related infrastructures.
ICTs for development: from e-Readiness to e-AwarenessIsmael Peña-López
Seminar given in Barcelona, November 20th, 2007 at the Executive Master in e-Governance, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
http://ictlogy.net/bibciter/reports/projects.php?idp=801
Ontology Building vs Data Harvesting and Cleaning for Smart-city ServicesPaolo Nesi
Presently, a very large number of public and private data sets are available around the local governments. In most cases, they are not semantically interoperable and a huge human effort is needed to create integrated ontologies and knowledge base for smart city. Smart City ontology is not yet standardized, and a lot of research work is needed to identify models that can easily support the data reconciliation, the management of the complexity and reasoning. In this paper, a system for data ingestion and reconciliation of smart cities related aspects as road graph, services available on the roads, traffic sensors etc., is proposed. The system allows managing a big volume of data coming from a variety of sources considering both static and dynamic data. These data are mapped to smart-city ontology and stored into an RDF-Store where they are available for applications via SPARQL queries to provide new services to the users. The paper presents the process adopted to produce the ontology and the knowledge base and the mechanisms adopted for the verification, reconciliation and validation. Some examples about the possible usage of the coherent knowledge base produced are also offered and are accessible from the RDF-Store and related services. The article also presented the work performed about reconciliation algorithms and their comparative assessment and selection. Keywords Smart city, knowledge base construction, reconciliation, validation and verification of knowledge base, smart city ontology, linked open graph.
A 25 minute talk from a panel on big data curricula at JSM 2013
http://www.amstat.org/meetings/jsm/2013/onlineprogram/ActivityDetails.cfm?SessionID=208664
Civic Technologies: Research, Practice, and Open ChallengesPablo Aragón
Workshop – CSCW 2020 – October 17, 2020
Over the last years, civic technology projects have emerged around the world to advance open government and community action. Although Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) communities have shown a growing interest in researching issues around civic technologies, yet most research still focuses on projects from the Global North. The goal of this workshop is, therefore, to advance CSCW research by raising awareness for the ongoing challenges and open questions around civic technology by bridging the gap between researchers and practitioners from different regions.
The workshop will be organized around three central topics: (1) discuss how the local context and infrastructure affect the design, implementation, adoption, and maintenance of civic technology; (2) identify key elements of the configuration of trust among government, citizenry, and local organizations and how these elements change depending on the sociopolitical context where community engagement takes place; (3) discover what methods and strategies are best suited for conducting research on civic technologies in different contexts. These core topics will be covered across sessions that will initiate in-depth discussions and, thereby, stimulate collaboration between the CSCW research community and practitioners of civic technologies from both Global North and South.
Characterizing Online Participation in Civic Technologies - PhDPablo Aragón
This thesis constitutes one of the first investigations focused on characterizing online participation in civic technologies, a type of platform increasingly popular on the Internet that allows citizens new forms, on a larger scale, of political participation. Given the opportunities of civic technologies in democratic governance, it should be noted that their design, like that of any online platform, is not neutral. The ways in which information is presented or interaction between users is allowed can greatly alter the results of participation. For this reason, we analyze the impact of different interventions in civic technologies in relation to online conversation views, ordering criteria for ranking petitions, and deliberative interfaces. Since these interventions were carried out by the corresponding development teams, the analyses have required to develop novel computational and statistical methods, while also extending generative models of discussion threads to better characterise the dynamics of online conversations. Results of the different case studies highlight the social and political impact of these interventions, suggesting new directions for future research and the need to develop a paradigm of citizen experimentation for democracy.
From Aspiration to Reality: Open Smart Cities
Open smart cities might become a reality for Canada. Globally there are a number of initiatives, programs, and practices that are open smart city like which means that it is possible to have an open, responsive and engaged city that is both socio-technologically enabled, but also one where there is receptivity to and a willingness to grow a critically informed type of technological citizenship (Feenberg). For an open smart city to exist, public officials, the private sector, scholars, civil society and residents and citizens require a definition and a guide to start the exercise of imagining what an open smart city might look like. There is much critical scholarship about the smart city and there are many counter smart city narratives, but there are few depictions of what engagement, participatory design and technological leadership might be. The few examples that do exist are project based and few are systemic. An open smart city definition and guide was therefore created by a group of stakeholders in such a way that it can be used as the basis for the design of an open smart city from the ground up, or to help actors shape or steer the course of emerging or ongoing data and networked urbanist forms (Kitchin) of smart cities to lead them towards being open, engaged and receptive to technological citizenship.
This talk will discuss some of the successes resulting from this Open Smart Cities work, which might also be called a form or engaged scholarship. For example the language for the call for tender of the Infrastructure Canada Smart City Challenge was modified to include as a requisite that engagement and openness be part of the submissions from communities. Also, those involved with the guide have been writing policy articles that critique either AI or the smart city while also offering examples of what is possible. These articles are being read by proponents of Sidewalk Labs in Toronto. Also, the global Open Data Conference held in Argentina in September of 2018 hosted a full workshop on Open Smart Cities and finally Open North is working toward developing key performance indicators to assess those shortlisted by Infrastructure Canada and to help those communities develop an Open Smart Cities submission. The objective of the talk is to demonstrate that it is actually possible to shift public policy on large infrastructure projects, at least, in the short term.
This presentation was provided by Daniella Lowenberg of the California Digital Library during the NISO Virtual Conference, Advancing Altmetrics, held on Wednesday, December 13, 2017.
Danish Institute for Study Abroad
Communications:
New Media and Changing Communities
Dublin Visit
Tracey P. Lauriault
NIRSA Seminar Room
National University of Ireland Maynooth
2nd April 2015
Canada is a data and technological society. There is no sector that is uninformed by data or unmediated by code, algorithms, software and infrastructure. Consider the Internet of Things (IoT), smart cities, and precision agriculture; or smart fisheries, forestry, and energy and of course governing. In a data based and technological society, leadership is the responsibility of all citizens, a parent, teacher, scholar, administrator, public servant, nurse and doctor, mayor and councillor, fisher, builder, business person, industrialist, MP, MLA, PM, and so on. In other words leadership is distributed and requires people power. This form of citizenship, according to Andrew Feenberg, Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology, requires agency, knowledge and the capacity to act or power. In this GovMaker Keynote I will introduce the concept of technological citizenship, I will discuss what principled public interest governing might look like, and how we might go about critically applying philosophy in our daily practice. In terms of practice I will discuss innovative policy and regulation such as the right to repair movement, EU legislation such as the right to explanation, data subjects and the right to access and also data sovereignty from a globalization and an indigenous perspective.
Government Information Day
Oct. 26, Library and Archives Canada
10:45 – 12:30 Government information & data ecosystem
Data Diversity & Data Cultures = Flexible Open by Default Policy
http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/about-us/events/Pages/2017/government-information-day.aspx
NOTE: The slides have animated images which are not interactive in a ppt
Authors:
Tracey P. Lauriault, Programmable City Project, Maynooth University
Peter Mooney, Environmental Protection Agency Ireland and Department of Computer Science Maynooth University
Title:
Crowdsourcing: A Geographic Approach to Identifying Policy Opportunities and Challenges Toward Deeper Levels of Public Engagement
Presented:
The Internet, Policy and Politics Conference, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, September 25-26, 2014
See the abstract here:
http://ipp.oii.ox.ac.uk/2014/programme-2014/track-c-politics-of-engagement/community/tracey-p-lauriault-peter-mooney
Characterizing Data and Software for Social Science ResearchMicah Altman
This presentation describes the landscape of data and software use across the social sciences in terms of the abstract dimensions of data and data use. It then examines three use cases.
Presentation for DASPOS < https://daspos.crc.nd.edu/index.php/workshops/workshop-2 > Workshop at JCDL.
Open Data Seminar
Department of Public Expenditure and Reform
D/Public Expenditure and reform, Government Buildings,
Merrion Street, Dublin 2
Conference Room 0.2, South Block
2.00pm, Wednesday 11 February 2015
Tracey P. Lauriault and Rob Kitchin
Programmable City Project, NIRSA, Maynooth University
Visualizing Exports of Personal Data by Exercising the Right of Data Portabil...FarzaneH Karegar
A transparency enhancing tool called Data Track has been developed at Karlstad University. The latest stand-alone version of the tool allows users to visualize their data exports. For analyzing the users’ perceptions of the Data Track in regard to transparency features and the concepts of data export and data portability, we have conducted a qualitative user study.We observed that although users had rather little interest in the visualization of derived data activities revealed in the Google location file, they were interested in other kinds of derived data like usage patterns for different service providers. Also, as earlier user studies revealed, we again confirmed that it is confusing for users to differentiate between locally and remotely stored and controlled data. Finally, in spite of being concerned about the security of the data exported to their machines, for exercising data portability rights pursuant to the General Data Protection Regulation, most participants would prefer to first export and edit the data before uploading it to another service provider and would appreciate using a tool such as the Data Track for helping them in this context.
Série de webinaires sur le gouvernement ouvert du Canada
L'équipe du #GouvOuvert est de retour avec un nouveau webinaire le 28 novembre! Nous allons discuter au sujet des #coulisses des #donnéesouvertes au avec la professeure
@TraceyLauriault
de
@Carleton_U
et
@JaimieBoyd
. Inscrivez-vous maintenant: http://ow.ly/UQvu50xabIb
Week 13 (Apr. 8) – Assemblages, Genealogies and Dynamic Nominalism
Course description:
The emphasis is to learn to envision data genealogically, as a social and technical assemblages, as infrastructure and reframe them beyond technological conceptions. During the term we will explore data, facts and truth; the power of data both big and small; governmentality and biopolitics; risk, probability and the taming of chance; algorithmic culture, dynamic nominalism, categorization and ontologies; the translation of people, space and social phenomena into and by data and software and the role of data in the production of knowledge.
This class format is a graduate MA seminar and a collaborative workshop. We will work with Ottawa Police Services and critically examine the socio-technological data assemblage of that institution. This includes a fieldtrip to the Elgin street station; a tour of the 911 Communication Centre and we will meet with data experts.
April 4, 2019, 17:30-19:30
IOG's Policy Crunch
Disruptive Innovation and Public Policy in the Digital Age event series
The Global Race in Digital Governance
https://iog.ca/events/the-global-race-in-digital-governance/
March 25, 2019, 9:30 AM
International Meeting of NAICS code Experts
Statistics Canada
Simon Goldberg Room, RH Coats building
100 Tunney’s Pasture Driveway
With research contributions by Ben Wright, Carleton University and Dustin Moores, University of Ottawa
Presented at the:
Canadian Aviation Safety Collaboration Forum
International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)
Montreal, QC
January 23, 2019
This presentation was made in real-time while attending the Forum. The objective was to observe and listen, and share some examples outside of this community that may provide insight about data sharing models with a focus on governance.
This week we will learn about user generated content (UGC), citizen science, crowdsourcing & volunteered geographic information (VGI). We will also discuss divergent views on data humanitarianism.
Financé par : GéoConnexions
Dirigé par : Nord Ouvert
Le noyau de l’équipe :
Rachel Bloom et Jean-Noé Landry, Nord Ouvert
Dr Tracey P. Lauriault, Carleton University
David Fewer, Clinique d’intérêt public et de politique d’Internet du Canada (CIPPIC)
Dr Mark Fox, University of Toronto
Assistant et assistante de recherche, Carleton University
Carly Livingstone
Stephen Letts
Open Smart City in Canada Project
Funded by: GeoConnections
Lead by: OpenNorth
Project core team:
Rachel Bloom & Jean-Noe Landry, Open North
Dr. Tracey P. Lauriault, Carleton University
David Fewer, LL.M., Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC)
Dr. Mark Fox, University of Toronto
Research Assistants Carleton University
Carly Livingstone
Stephen Letts
Introductory remarks
- Jean-Noe Landry, Executive Director, Open North
Webinar 2 includes:
- Summary of Webinar 1: E-Scan and Assessment of Smart -
Cities in Canada (listen at: http://bit.ly/2yp7H8k )
- Situating smart cities amongst current digital practices
- Towards guiding principles for Open Smart Cities
- Examples of international best practices from international cities
- Observations & Next Steps
Webinar Presenters:
- Rachel Bloom, Open North
- Dr Tracey P. Lauriault, School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University
Content Contributors:
- David Fewer CIPPIC,
- Mark Fox U. of Toronto,
- Stephen Letts (RA Carleton U.)
Project Name:
- Open Smart Cities in Canada
Date:
- December 14, 2017
AoIR 2017
Panel 17 Dorpat-Ewers, Tartu 9-10:30AM
Data Driven Ontology Practices
The Real world objects of Ordnance Survey Ireland
Abstract is available here: https://www.conftool.com/aoir2017/index.php?page=browseSessions&form_session=258&presentations=show
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Automating Homelessness
1. Conference of Irish Geographies 2018
The Earth as Our Home
Automating Homelessness
May 12, 2018
Dr. Tracey P. Lauriault
Assistant Professor of Critical Media and Big Data
School of Journalism and Communication
Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada
Tracey.Lauriault@Carleton.ca
ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1847-2738
2. TOC
1. Critical Data Studies
2. Theoretical Framework
3. Methodology
4. Intake System Case Studies
5. Next Steps
6. Acknowledgements
Dr Tracey P. Lauriault, School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University
3. 1. Critical Data Studies
Dr Tracey P. Lauriault, School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University
4. Research and thinking that applies critical social
theory to data to explore the ways in which:
Data are more than the unique arrangement of objective
and politically neutral facts
&
It is understood that data do not exist independently of
ideas, techniques, technologies, systems, people and
contexts regardless of them being presented in that way
1.1 Critical Data Studies
Tracey P. Lauriault, 2012, Data, Infrastructures and Geographical Imaginations. Ph.D. Thesis,
Carleton University, Ottawa, http://curve.carleton.ca/theses/27431
5. 1.2 Framing Data
1. Technically
2. Ethically
3. Politically &
economically
4. Spatial/Temporal
5. Philosophically
6. Technological
Citizenship + Engaged
Scholarship
Rob Kitchin, 2014, The Data Revolution, Sage.
Andrew Feenberg, 2011, Agency and Citizenship in a Technological Society, https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/copen5-1.pdf
6. 1.3 Critical Data Studies Vision
• Unpack the complex assemblages that produce, circulate,
share/sell and utilise data in diverse ways;
• Chart the diverse work they do and their consequences for
how the world is known, governed and lived-in;
• Survey the wider landscape of data assemblages and how they
interact to form intersecting data products, services and
markets and shape policy and regulation.
Kitchin and Lauriault, 2015
8. Material Platform
(infrastructure – hardware)
Code Platform
(operating system)
Code/algorithms
(software)
Data(base)
Interface
Reception/Operation
(user/usage)
Systems of thought
Forms of knowledge
Finance
Political economies
Governmentalities - legalities
Organisations and institutions
Subjectivities and communities
Marketplace
System/process
performs a task
Context
frames the system/task
Digital socio-technical assemblage
HCI, Remediation studies
Critical code studies /
Software studies
Media studies
Critical Social Science
Science Technology Studies
Platform studies Places
Practices
Flowline/Lifecycle
Surveillance Studies
Critical data studies
2.1 Socio-Technological Assemblage (Kitchin 2014)
Algorithm Studies
AI / Machine Learning
Game Studies
9. 1. Classification
2. Object of Study
3. Institutions4. Knowledge
5. Experts
Looping Effect
a. Counting b. Quantifying
c. Creating Norms d. Correlation
e. Taking Action f. Scientification
g. Normalization
h. Bureaucracy i. Resistance
Engines of Discovery
Derived Engines
2.2 Dynamic Nominalism
Modified Dynamic Nominalism Hacking (Lauriault 2012)
10. 2.3 Reassembling the Data Person / Subject
from Intake Systems
• Data Double (Virilio, 2000)
• Digital doppelgänger (Robinson, 2008)
• Data Ghost (Sports analytics)
• Data Trails / Traces / Shadows /
Footprints
• Data (statistical) Person (Dunne &
Dunne, 2014)
• Dataveillance (Clarke, 1988)
11. 20101990 1995 2000 20051985 2015
Data
Liberation
Initiative (DLI)
Geogratis Data
Portal
GeoBase
Canadian
Internet
Public Policy
Clinic
Maps Data and Government
Information Services
(MADGIC) Carleton U
GeoConnections
GeoGratis
Census Data Consortium
Canadian Association of
Research Libraries
(CARL)
Atlas of Canada
Online (1st)
CeoNet Discovery
Portal
Research Data
Network
How'd they Vote
CivicAccess.ca
Campaign for
Open
Government
(FIPA)
Canadian
Association of
Public Data
Users
Datalibre.ca
VisibleGovernment.ca
I Believe in Open Campaign
Change Camps Start
Nanaimo BC
Toronto
Open Data Portals
Edmonton
Mississauga launches open data
Citizen Factory
B.C.'s Climate Change Data Catalogue
Open Parliament
DatadotGC.ca
Ottawa
Ottawa, Prince George, Medicine Hat
Data.gc.ca
Global TV
Hansard in XML
Langley
Let the Data Flow
GovCamp
Fed. Expenses
Montreal Ouvert
Fed.Gov. Travel and
Hospitality
Expenses
London
Hamilton
Windsor
Open Data Hackfest
Aid Agency
Proactive.ca
DataBC
Hacking
Health
14 Cities
Quebec
Ontario
OGP
3 Cities
Alberta
G8
Community Data Program
FCM Quality of Life Reporting
System
Geographic and
Numeric Information
System (GANIS)
Int. Open
Data
Charter
ODX/PSD
CODS
VancouverG4+1
GO Open
Data
Census
E4D
First Nations
Information
Governance
OCAP
2.4 Genealogy
14. 3. Methodology
Dr Tracey P. Lauriault, School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University
15. 3.1 Ethnography of data collection practices
and digital objects
• Semi-Structured & Transcribed Interviews with:
• Developers
• Creators
• Policy advisors and analysts
• Users – Agencies
• Dublin
• Grey literature in Boston and Ottawa
• Engaged research
• Participation in Rough Sleeper / Street Counts / Point in Time Counts
• Ireland CSO Census Working Group on Homelessness
• Member of the Dublin Regional Homelessness Initiative
• Attend 2 Calgary Homeless Foundation Homelessness Research Symposium
Dr Tracey P. Lauriault, School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University
16. 3.2 Modified Walkthrough
• Downloading & using the
software
• Observing users
• Call for Tender
• Specification Manuals
• Training Manuals
• Examining data models
• Screen captures of interfaces
Dr Tracey P. Lauriault, School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University
DOI: 10.1177/1461444816675438DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2016.1168471
DOI: 10.1177/1461444815589702
17. 3.3 Grey Literature
• Policies, directives, strategies
• Laws, regulation
• Performance indicators, metrics
• Reports
• Community literature
• Funding mechanisms
Dr Tracey P. Lauriault, School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University
18. 4. Intake System: 3 Case Studies
Dr Tracey P. Lauriault, School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University
19. 4.1 Programmable City
Translation:
City into code & data
Transduction:
Code & data reshape city
Understanding the
city
(Knowledge)
How are digital data materially &
discursively supported &
processed about cities & their
citizens?
How does software drive public
policy development &
implementation?
Managing
the city
(Governance)
How are discourses & practices of
city governance translated into code?
How is software used to regulate &
govern city life?
Working
in the city
(Production)
How is the geography & political
economy of software production
organised?
How does software alter the form
& nature of work?
Living
in the city
(Social Politics)
How is software discursively
produced & legitimated by vested
interests?
How does software transform the
spatiality & spatial behaviour of
individuals?
Creating the
smart city
Dublin Dashboard
Rob Kitchin, National University of Ireland, Maynooth
20. 4.2 Making up Homelessness
Object of Study:
A. Dublin Ireland:
• Pathway Accommodation and Support
System (PASS)
• Dublin Street Count
• Central Statistics Office (CSO) national census
enumeration of the homeless.
B. Boston, MA, USA:
• Homelessness Data Exchange (HDX)
Housing and Urban Development (HUD)
Housing Inventory Count (HIC)
• Boston Health Commission Annual Street/Point-
in-Time (PIT) Count of Homelessness
• US Census Bureau National Survey of Homeless
Assistance Providers and Clients (NSHAPC)
C. Ottawa, ON, Canada:
• National Homelessness Information System
(HIFIS)
• Ottawa Street Count
• Statistics Canada national census enumeration of
the homeless.
• Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM)
Municipal Data Collection Tool (MDCT)
indicators on Homelessness
Funding
• Programmable City Project
• P.I. Prof. Rob Kitchin
• NIRSA, Maynooth University
• European Research Council Advanced
Investigator Award
• ERC-2012-AdG-323636-SOFTCITY
21. 4.3 Homeless case study outputs
A. 3 site specific city case studies for comparative analysis
• 3 CS reports with accompanying data, information and literature including:
• 3 national homeless shelter intake software systems
• 3 city specific point in time street counts
• 3 national statistical agency censuses which enumerated people who are homeless
• Interview recordings and transcripts from key informants
• Repository of related grey literature
• B. Data Assemblages
• Data assemblage for each intake data system, street count and homeless census
• Comparative analysis of these data assemblages
• C. Construction of homeless people and homelessness
• Application of the modified Ian Hacking framework to the making up of homeless people and spaces
• 3 homelessness data classification genealogies
• Comparative analysis of genealogies
• D. Academic Papers
22. 4.4 3 Homelessness Intake Systems
Dr Tracey P. Lauriault, School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University
Ottawa, Canada
Homeless Individuals and Families
Information System (HIFIS)
Dublin, Republic of Ireland
Pathway Accommodation and
Support System (PASS)
Boston, US, Homelessness
Management Information
Systems (HMIS)
23. 4.5 Intake System Objectives
• HIFIS
• Comprehensive and
comparative data collection
• ESDC will grant a licence in
return for non-identifiable
personal information related
to the Service Provider and
its clientele ("Personal
Information").
• PASS
• Provision of 'real-time'
information in terms of
homeless presentation and
bed occupancy
• Dublin local authorities,
Health Service Executive
and all homeless services
• Improve service delivery
• Monitor the delivery of services
• Coordinate services
• Planning and development of
services
Dr Tracey P. Lauriault, School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University
• HUD HMIS
Coordinated housing and
services funding for homeless
families and individuals with:
• Outreach,
• Intake and assessment,
• Emergency shelter,
• transitional housing and
• permanent supportive housing.
24. 4.6 Intake System Interface
Dr Tracey P. Lauriault, School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University
25. 4.7 Intake System Governance
• HIFIS
• 1999
• 1st Developed by Canada
Housing Mortgage
Corporation (CHMC)
• 2004? Ongoing dev. by
Homelessness Secretariat,
Employment Social
Development Canada ( ESDC
Fed)
• Community Coordinators
• Deployed in independent
shelters and other service
points
• +/- 500 service points
• Not complete coverage
• PASS
• 2013
• Developed & Coordinated by
Dublin Region Homeless
Executive (DRHE)
• In collab. w/Office of the Data
Protection Commissioner
(ODPC)
• Regional PASS Coordinator
• Deployed in all service points
in Ireland that receive state
funding
• Multiple agencies, including
local authorities and Voluntary
Organizations
• Complete Coverage
Dr Tracey P. Lauriault, School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University
• HUD HMIS
• 2004
• US Dept. of Housing & Urban
Development (HUD), w/ the
Dept. of Health and Human
Services (HHS), Dept. of
Veterans Affairs (VA), of the
Data Standards
• Neighborhood Development
Supportive Housing Division,
w/ direction from Continuum
of Care Board the Boston
Continuum of Care Leadership
Council
• Coverage?
26. 4.8 Intake System Design
• HIFIS
• In collaboration with service
providers
• National consensus Bldg.
• National User Group
• Joint Application Design
• In house developers
• HIFIS 4 web based
• PASS
• w/Service Providers
• Open Sky
• Cloud based MS BI
Platform
• Cloud based
• Proprietary
• Intake and case management
Dr Tracey P. Lauriault, School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University
• HUD HMIS
• Social Solutions’ Efforts to
Outcomes (ETO®) HMIS
• Platform, SaaS
w/TouchPoint CMS
• Cloud based
• Open Path Warehouse
developed by GreenRiver
• Intake Social Solutions Inc.
27. 4.9 Intake System Policy & Regulation
• HIFIS
• PIPEDA
• Data Provision Agreements
• Homelessness Partnering
Strategy (HPS)
• National Homeless
Information System (NHIS)
• PASS
• Data Protection Acts 1988 &
2003 and fulfils the role of
certified Data Controller.
• Health Act, 1953
• Childcare Act, 1991,
• Housing Act 1988
• Housing (Miscellaneous
Provisions) Act 2009
Dr Tracey P. Lauriault, School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University
• HUD HMIS
• Housing First
• US Dept. of HUD awards
Homeless Assistance
Program funding through
Continuum of Care (CoC)
28. 4.10 Intake System Data Output & Reporting
• HIFIS • PASS
Dr Tracey P. Lauriault, School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University
• HUD HMIS
29. 4.11 Data Model Open Path Wharehouse Boston
Dr Tracey P. Lauriault, School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University
30. 5. Next Steps
Dr Tracey P. Lauriault, School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University
31. 5.1 Next Steps
• Installation and trial
• Data fields, flow line & model
• Data - Decision making processes
• Mapping governance model to the data fields
• Licencing
• Comparative analysis
• What does a person who experiences homelessness look like in
data? And do the data make a difference? Do the data affect
them?
Dr Tracey P. Lauriault, School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University
33. 6.1 Acknowledgements
The research for these studies is funded by a European
Research Council Advanced Investigator award ERC-2012-
AdG-323636-SOFTCITY.
http://progcity.maynoothuniversity.ie/
I would like to express my gratitude to Officials at Dublin
City Council, Officials at Employment and Social
Development Canada, and Boston Foundation & Metropolitan
Area Planning Council (MAPC) and all those who shared their
knowledge and time.
Co-functioning heterogeneous elements of a large complex socio-technological system – these elements are loosely coupled.
They contend that data do not exist independently from the context within which they were created, and the systems and processes that produce them. The Prime2 Data model and platform is no exception. In order to study data in their ‘habitat’ and ‘ecosystem’, Kitchin (2014) offers a socio-technological assemblage approach to guide the empirical analysis of data (See also Kitchin & Lauriault 2014). The assemblage can be conceptualized as a constellation of co-functioning, loosely-coupled heterogeneous elements, and it is these elements that guide data collection. Here, the assemblage is both a tool for research as well as a theoretical framing of data (Anderson et. al 2012).
Furthermore, data modelling requires a particular form of logical abstract thinking, in the case of the OSi and 1Spatial those that were involved in the modelling exercise were very senior, experienced and renowned spatial data experts, all formally trained in spatial database design and maintenance as well as spatial analysis at the enterprise level. The design and testing of a model is very labour intensive, re-cursive, and incredibly expensive. At the OSi, this work was not done in house, thus requiring the enactment of a procurement process to cover this major expenditure, and because of this, and because the model is key, it is a high stakes tendering process.
For example, infrastructure is not simply hardware and software it is the systems of thought that led to its creation including how object oriented modeling came to be and how that model materializes into code and algorithms which reformulated the entire data production flowline and its association with not only the equipment used by surveyors, but the entire database stack.
It is only by looking at the model and how it came to be through database specifications and requirements, the observation of data production on site in real time and in communication with database designers and mangers, that attributes of an infrastructure’s assemblage can be observed in their state of play.
The process of modelling is situated in the domain of object oriented programming, the semantic web, GIScience, modelling software, taxonomies, the burgeoning database and GIS industry, modelling schemas, mathematics, consulting firms, and offshore data re-engineering companies.
Ian Hacking, deconstructed classification systems, primary in the health sciences, to understand how these in turn produce knowledge about the work these do in the world, especially when classifications become understood as being the ‘real thing’ (1986, 1991).
Hacking suggests that there are two interrelated processes at work within a data assemblage which both produce and legitimate a class, and those processes shape how that class does work in the world.
In addition, he observed that nominal classes are not firm constructs. He calls this dynamic nominalism, wherein there is an interaction between data classifications and what they represent that leads to mutual changes in the things classified and how classifications are understood across time and space.
In the case of the Prime2 data model, Hacking’s approach illustrates how ‘real-world’ objects and their attributes, and the things those objects represent, stay the same or change between the old Prime system and the new Prime2 system in terms of how Dublin is captured and represented. Hacking calls the first part of this process (2002,2007) ‘the looping effect’.
The looping effect concerns how data are classified and organised; in other words, how a data ontology or model comes into existence and how that can reshape that which has been classified.
This is where the systems of classification work to reshape spaces and places in the image of a data ontology; for example, when ‘sites’ such as Phoenix Park become a prestigious city treasure that are acted upon in such a way by citizens. In Prime2, Phoenix Park as an object is a site with a geometry derived from the sum of topologically related objects such as vegetation, buildings (including the President’s residence, Dublin Zoo, military training grounds and the OSi offices), ways, and other sites.
Image Source: http://www.nesta.org.uk/sites/default/files/digital_person_1.jpg
Data Double - Virilio, Paul. Open Sky. Julie Rose, Trans. New York: Verso, 2000.. p. 40
Digital doppelgänger - Robinson, Sandra 2008. The Doppelganger Effect: Spaces, Traces, and Databases and the Multiples of Cyberspace
Ghost players - http://grantland.com/the-triangle/the-sportvu-follow-up-answering-the-most-common-questions-and-more-ghost-players/
Dataveillance - Clarke, Roger. 1988. Information technology and dataveillance. Communications of the ACM 31(5): 498-512.
Statistical Person – Dunne & Dunne, 2014, Person Activity Register - a statistical register of persons, Central Statistics Organization Administrative Data Seminar, http://www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/newsevents/documents/administrativedataseminar/4.10Person_Activity_Register_Dublin_Castle_20th_Feb_2014.pptx
Today I will be discussing a methodological approach for critically examining a data model.
The central question examines is how is a city translated into code and data, and how does that code and data transduce and reshape the city with the objective of trying to understand the techno-political processes by which a city is modeled / translated into a database?
What does that database model look like?
In what ways does that model transduce space and reshape the city?
Is the relationship between model and city recursive and can the city database eventually learn about itself from itself and simulate the city (Beaudrillard, 1981)?
What would be included and what would be left out of the database in order to avoid the similitude problem of Lewis Carrol’s map of the city at the scale of a ‘mile of a mile’ (Carroll 1893), or where cartography is so perfect that a map includes each house, mountain or tree represented by just that, the houses, mountains and trees as Borges’ satirically wrote in the Exactitude of Science (1946). Who decides?
The central objective of the programmable city project is to unpack“how software and data make a difference to contemporary urbanism”, by analyzing the city with “respect to four key urban practices - understanding, managing, working, and living in the city”.