Locative media and data-driven computing experiments

Sung-Yueh Perng, Rob Kitchin, Leighton Evans

Research output: Contribution to journalArticle

Abstract

Over the past two decades urban social life has undergone a rapid and pervasive geocoding, becoming mediated, augmented and anticipated by location-sensitive technologies and services that generate and utilise big, personal, locative data. The production of these data has prompted the development of exploratory data-driven computing experiments that seek to find ways to extract value and insight from them. These projects often start from the data, rather than from a question or theory, and try to imagine and identify their potential utility. In this paper, we explore the desires and mechanics of data-driven computing experiments. We demonstrate how both locative media data and computing experiments are ‘staged' to create new values and computing techniques, which in turn are used to try and derive possible futures that are ridden with unintended consequences. We argue that using computing experiments to imagine potential urban futures produces effects that often have little to do with creating new urban practices. Instead, these experiments promote big data science and the prospect that data produced for one purpose can be recast for another, and act as alternative mechanisms of envisioning urban futures.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1-12
Number of pages12
JournalBig Data and Society
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jun 2016

Bibliographical note

Creative Commons Non Commercial CC-BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial
3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction
and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages
(https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

Keywords

  • Data analytics
  • computing experiments
  • locative media
  • location-based social network (LBSN)
  • staging
  • urban future
  • critical data studies

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