In light of recent technological innovations and discourses around data and algorithmic analytics, scholars of many stripes are attempting to develop critical agendas and responses to these developments (boyd and Crawford 2012). In this mutual interview, three scholars discuss the stakes, ideas, responsibilities, and possibilities of critical data studies. The resulting dialog seeks to explore what kinds of critical approaches to these topics, in theory and practice, could open and make available such approaches to a broader audience.

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Data analytics, particularly the current rhetoric around ''Big Data'', tend to be presented as new and innovative, emerging ahistorically to revolutionize modern life. In this article, we situate one branch of Big Data analytics, spatial Big Data, through a historical predecessor, geodemographic analysis, to help develop a critical approach to current data analytics. Spatial Big Data promises an epistemic break in marketing, a leap from targeting geodemographic areas to targeting individuals. Yet it inherits characteristics and problems from geodemographics, including a justification through the market, and a process of commodification through the black-boxing of technology. As researchers develop sustained critiques of data analytics and its effects on everyday life, we must so with a grounding in the cultural and historical contexts from which data technologies emerged. This article and others (Barnes and Wilson, 2014) develop a historically situated, critical approach to spatial Big Data. This history illustrates connections to the critical issues of surveillance, redlining, and the production of consumer subjects and geographies. The shared histories and structural logics of spatial Big Data and geodemographics create the space for a continued critique of data analyses' role in society.

Software developers who create geographic web applications are a new kind of mapmaker producing new kinds of maps. They typically use private web-mapping services, such as Google Maps, without training in cartography or geographic information systems. How do software developers become mapmaking subjects producing geographic knowledges in the context of corporate mapping services? I argue that geoweb developers' subject positions and geographic knowledges are produced through the social relations of geoweb technology. Specifically, two culturally derived technical codes, playful fun and profit-seeking, are enormously influential in defining the subject positions and knowledges of geoweb applications. Utilizing both textual and in-person research, I analyze the social formation of third-party geoweb applications based on Google Maps, the social, technological limits that application developers work within, and the possibilities for developers in that context. Most developers and their knowledges stick with the technology's social codes, but a few create applications that transgress their contextual limits, opening further new possibilities for mapping, subject formation, and geographic knowledge on the web.

Key MessagesCounter-mapping offers a useful theoretical framework and practical methods for developing grassroots data science not focused on profit.Counter-mapping is inherently a situated combination of ideas and practices for developing and realizing alternative social relations and worlds.Counter-mapping requires careful sensitivity to each situation and associated power relations, especially by the map-maker(s) themselves.Counter-mapping is a combination of critical ideas and practices for social change that offers a productive and promising approach for grassroots data science initiatives. Current information technologies collect, store, and analyze data with new degrees of size, speed, heterogeneity, and detail. While much work utilizing data science technologies is dedicated to generating profit or to national security, some data science projects explicitly attempt to facilitate new social relations, though with inconsistent results and consequences. This paper reviews counter-mapping's particular combination of theory and practice as a potential point of reference for such initiatives. Counter-mapping takes the tools of institutional map-making at government agencies and corporations and applies them in situated, bottom-up ways. Moreover, counter-mapping's multiple theoretical approaches and polyglot practices offer a variety of inspirations and avenues for future work in identifying and realizing alternative, ideally better, possibilities. This paper defines counter-mapping; outlines its multiple theorizations; briefly describes three relevant case studies, The Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute, Mapping Police Violence, and the Counter-Cartographies Collective; and concludes with a few hard-learned considerations from counter-mapping that are directly pertinent for data-oriented projects focused on change.