Inflated granularity: Spatial “Big Data” and geodemographics

Abstract

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.

Data Derives: Confronting Digital Geographic Information as Spectacle

“…From this, Google correctly infers that Jim likes coffee and, specifically, likes that coffee shop. As an author, Jim can testify that he does like their coffee, though even without that statement, the data is sufficient for the purposes of both targeting ads at him and selling his amalgamated digital personality to other advertisers (Dalton and Thatcher 2015). This is only part of the data spectacle's rendering of Jim on that day.…”

“…New data systems, especially those that link location and temporal information, have been investigated as 'fixes' for capitalism's tendencies towards overaccumulation (Greene and Joseph 2015), their historical entanglement in social physics and geodemographic profiling examined and their role and function as a commodity explored in detail (Barnes and Wilson 2014;Dalton and Thatcher 2015). While much (often digital) ink has been spilled regarding the fallacies and capitalist imperatives at the heart of new data accumulation and analysis regimes (not the least of which is our own), this recognition has done little to curb either the generation of said data or its valuation as a commodity.…”

Introduction: Spatial Big Data and everyday life

“…Many Big Data productions and attendant analytics regimes have their precursors in identifiably spatial/geographical antecedents. For example, location-based advertising, premised on the aggregation of individual spatial histories, real-time locations, and past consumptive behaviors, emerged from geodemographic information systems (GDIS), which coupled geodemographic analytics to interfaces of geographic information systems (Dalton and Thatcher, 2015). GDIS' themselves grew out of what Bouk (2015) refers to as ''massifying'' data practices of the 20th century, particularly those of mass marketing.…”

“…At the same time, Big Data, spatial and otherwise, is implicated within new modes of subject formation and subjectivity that allow for nascent data practices of assembling and disassembling subjects, as well as targeting individuals within data-driven practices of surveillance (Tufekci, 2014) and location-based advertising (Dalton and Thatcher, 2015). Accordingly, a second circuit of intensification may be identified around the targeting and governance of subjects.…”

Digitize and punish: Computerized crime mapping and racialized carceral power in Chicago

“…GIS maps present a schema in which humans are cast as interchangeable objects defined by reductive bureaucratic categories, space is reduced to an invariant XY-coordinate system, and connections between the two are locked into formalized relationships that elide political economic transformations and social particularity (Currie et al, 2016;Dalton and Thatcher, 2015;Kirby, 1996b). And on the terrain of public policy, the mere act of geocoding most often designates the coded object as a problem, even if that object is a human (Curry, 1995;Lake, 1993;Taylor, 1990;Yapa, 1998).…”