Our Data Ourselves

总的来说，我们现在在两天内创建的数据比2002年全年创建的数据还要多。无论是Facebook上每天分享的40万条内容，还是2亿条推文，无论我们在手机上发短信、浏览、发布或生成内容，都有超过50亿人在密集地产生前所未有的、不可估量的社交数据。我们称之为大社会数据（BSD），它包括我们产生的象征性内容，以及我们的手机发出的元数据，通过时间和空间跟踪我们的身体。美国国家安全局（NSA）和英国政府通信总部（GCHQ）最近曝光的事件表明，我们的社会已经变得多么以数据为中心。然而，你可以说我们遭受了数据民主赤字。因此，公众对我们这个信息丰富的环境和我们被量化的自我的理解比以往任何时候都更加重要。我们的研究项目“我们的数据，我们自己”旨在使BSD民主化。大数据已经被广泛认为是一个关键的经济驱动力。我们寻求将其转化为社区资产，并开发工具，应用程序，格式和实践，这将使艺术和人文研究人员能够对BSD进行重要的新研究和使用。我们认为社区是通过社会和交流实践来表达的，这是BSD的源泉。这些中介实践影响了基于地域和身份的传统社区，并创造了新的社区，特别是与那些“天生数字化”的年轻人。“我们将与青年重新连线国家网络中的青年程序员合作，共同研究，并获得对BSD所体现的中介连接如何改变社区的特权见解。”我们将与年轻的研究人员合作，开发捕获、存储和分析BSD的工具和应用程序。我们将为BSD研究创造一个开放的环境，并开发一个数据共享的道德框架，以供广泛的社区使用。我们设想一个BSD研究公地，尊重隐私问题，并吸引年轻的技术精通社区，以更好地理解移动环境的数据密集型数字文化。我们的研究旨在探究包含个人BSD档案的元素。这需要检查我们产生的象征性内容和我们设备的元数据，这些元数据在时间和空间上映射了我们的身体，以及存储、搜索、共享、分析和挖掘数据的基础设施。这将有助于更好地理解各种社会联系、信息共享以及我们通过BSD开发的规范关系。一个主要的挑战是开发和转移捕获和分析不同形式的BSD所需的技术技能和知识，并将其转化为社区研究数据，供研究人员、生成数据的人及其社区使用。其核心问题是，BSD能否转化为公共资产，成为文化经济共同体发展的创造性资源。解决的基本问题是我们不拥有我们生成的BSD。从我们点击“发送”的那一刻起，它就在一个高度专有的环境中移动和处理，我们仍然无法访问它，通常只以定向广告的形式返回。简而言之，我们寻求将专有和不可访问的BSD转换为开放的研究数据，成为可访问的社区资源。我们开发了一个免费访问的开源在线市场，用于从智能手机中提取BSD的工具和应用程序。我们参与黑客马拉松来开发这些工具，并关注隐私问题，开发匿名技术，并制定有关道德数据共享的政策白皮书。我们试图将目前主要用于定向广告和监视的BSD转变为可用于创造性使用的社区资源。如果它是“我们自己的数据”，我们的BSD公共资源将使我们能够以新的方式使用它，无论是在社区中还是由艺术和人文研究人员使用。

Collectively, we now create more data in two days than we did in all of 2002. Whether it is the 4 B pieces of content shared daily on Facebook, the 200 M tweets, more than 5 B of us intensively produce unprecedented and unfathomable amounts of social data whenever we text, browse, post or generate content on our phones. We call this Big Social Data (BSD), and it entails the symbolic content we generate as will as the metadata our phones emit, tracking our bodies through time and space. Recent revelations about the NSA and GCHQ reveal just how data centric our society has become. Yet you could say we suffer from a data democracy deficit. As such, it is more important than ever that public understanding of our information-rich environment and our quantified selves improves.Our research project 'Our Data, Ourselves' seeks to democratise BSD. Big data has already been widely identified as a key economic driver. We seek to turn it into a community asset and develop tools, applications, formats and practices which will enable important new research on and using BSD by arts and humanities researchers. We see community as being articulated though social and communicative practices, the very wellspring of BSD. These mediated practices impact traditional communities, those based on place and identity, and create new communities, especially with young people, those 'born digital.'We will partner with youth coders in the Young Rewired State network as co-researchers, and gain privileged insight into how the mediated connectedness manifested by BSD is transforming communities. We will work with our young co-researchers to develop tools and applications for the capture, storage, and analysis of BSD. We will create an open environment for BSD research and develop an ethical framework for data sharing available for widespread community use. We envision a BSD research commons, respectful of privacy concerns, and engaging young tech-savvy communities to gain a greater understanding of the data-intensive digital culture of mobile environments.Our research aims to enquire into the elements comprising one's personal archive of BSD. This entails examining the symbolic content we generate and the metadata of our devices, which map our bodies in time and space, as well as the infrastructure, in which data is stored, searched, shared, analysed and mined. This will facilitate a better understanding of the kinds of social connections, information sharing, and normative relations we are developing to and through BSD. A major challenge is in the development and transfer of the technical skills and knowledge necessary for the capture and analysis of the different forms of BSD, and its transformation into community research data, available to researchers, those who generate it, and their communities. The basic issue raised is whether BSD can be transformed into a public asset and become a creative resource for cultural and economic community development. The basic problem addressed is that we do not own the BSD that we generate. From the moment we tap 'send' it moves and is processed in a highly proprietary environment where it remains inaccessible to us, typically returning only in the form of targeted ads. In short, we seek to transform proprietary and inaccessible BSD into open research data that becomes an accessible community resource.We develop a freely accessible, open source online market place for tools and applications enabling the extraction of BSD from smart phones. We engage in hackathons to develop these tools, and engage privacy concerns, developing anonymisation technologies and produce policy white papers on ethical data sharing. We seek to turn BSD, which is currently primarily fodder for targeted ads and surveillance into a community resource available for creative use. If it is 'our data ourselves', our BSD commons will empower us to use it in new ways, both in community and by arts and humanities researchers.