The collection and analysis of data about us now occurs across many aspects of everyday life, but how do people come to understand these complex processes? Drawing on Living With Data research, Susan Oman, Hannah Ditchfield and Helen Kennedy show that people’s understandings of data uses are based on past experiences and predictions about the future.
Data centers are destroying the natural world, writes anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate in Wired. But is the cloud an inherently unsustainable paradigm? He foresees three possible pathways for remaking the cloud into something more sustainable for future generations.
AR features in mobile apps are plagued by usability issues such as poor discoverability and findability of items with AR, low-visibility instructions, or vague icons and signifiers.
The metaverse will be a digital graveyard if we let new technologies distract us from today’s problems
Paying individual people for their health data will widen inequalities and reduce altruism, luring people to sell their privacy. Health data should instead be treated as collective property, and commercial profits should be shared with the public.
A touchless UI has an edge over devices that require touch interactions because decreasing physical contact is helpful in diverse contexts—from food-processing plants to an airport’s self-service registration kiosks.
How can freedom and democracy survive in a world of powerful digital technologies?
How we describe the metaverse makes a difference – today’s words could shape tomorrow’s reality and who benefits from it
A report by researchers at New York University warns that biometric and other digital ID systems that are increasingly linked to large-scale human rights violations, especially in the Global South.
The first book to take an interdisciplinary and international approach to understanding how our everyday lives are being affected by automated decision-making.
Bringing together a motley crew of social scientists and data scientists, the aim of this special theme issue of Big Data & Society is to explore what an integration or even fusion between anthropology and data science might look like.
“All research is qualitative; some is also quantitative”
Harvard Social Scientist and Statistician Gary King
From transforming the ways we do business and reimagining health care, to creating planet-restoring housing and humanizing our digital lives in an age of AI, Expand explores how expansive thinking across six key areas—time, proximity, value, life, dimensions, and sectors—can provide radical, useful solutions to a whole host of current problems around the globe.
Best practices for addressing the bias and inequality that may result from the automated collection, analysis, and distribution of large datasets.
It’s easy to assume that because some data is “personal”, protecting it is a private matter. But privacy is both a personal and a collective affair, because data is rarely used on an individual basis, writes Carissa Véliz in the New Statesman.
The Response-ability Summit, formerly known as the Anthropology + Technology Conference, is a unique two-day event that brings social scientists and technologists together to foster interdisciplinary conversations on the important topic of socially-responsible tech.
In Human-Centered AI, Professor Ben Shneiderman offers an optimistic realist's guide to how artificial intelligence can be used to augment and enhance humans' lives.
Although large-scale data are increasingly used to study human behaviour, researchers now recognize their limits for producing sound social science. Qualitative research can prevent some of these problems. Such methods can help to understand data quality, inform design and analysis decisions and guide interpretation of results.
Haptics devices probably won’t ever live up to their promise to replicate physical contact, writes David Parisi (associate professor, College of Charleston) in the online Real Life magazine.
A vivid look at China’s shifting place in the global political economy of technology production by ethnographer Silvia M. Lindtner
