Participatory Data Design: Acting in a Digital World

Jensen, Torben Elgaard; Birkbak, Andreas; Madsen, Anders Koed; Munk, Anders Kristian

doi:10.7551/mitpress/11310.003.0008

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Examples of digital anthropology scholarship include explorations of online communities (Wilson and Peterson 2002;Boellstorff 2008), digital media (Coleman 2010), domestic life, mobile phones, social media, politics, blockchain, and labor (Horst and Miller 2012; Geismar and Knox 2021). The impact of digital anthropology on our methods is also notably demonstrated in publications on digital ethnography and netnography, ethno-mining, social network analysis, text mining and natural language processing, machine learning, computer vision, participatory data design, and computational anthropology (Pink et al 2015;Kozinets 2009;Gluesing, Riopelle, and Danowski 2014;Jemielniak 2020;Munk and Winthereik 2022;Munk 2022;Munk, Olesen, and Jacomy 2022;Anderson et al 2009;Jensen et al 2021).…”

Section: Digital Anthropology and Its Relevance To Business Anthropologymentioning

confidence: 92%

The Digital Turn in Business Anthropology

Artz¹

2023

jba

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This essay examines the emerging “digital turn” in business anthropology, a phenomenon propelled by the increasing prevalence and influence of digital technologies. Despite the significant underrepresentation of digital anthropology in current literature within the Journal of Business Anthropology, its relevance to the traditionally focused areas of organizational culture, marketing, consumer research, advertising, and user experience is irrefutable, given the rapid digitalization of the business landscape. By exploring evidence of the “digital turn” and the potential for digital anthropology to overtake design anthropology as a dominant paradigm, this essay advocates for integrating digital anthropology into the professional discourses and research practices of business anthropologists. It highlights the capacity of digital anthropology to equip practitioners with the necessary tools and perspectives to navigate and respond effectively to the ever-evolving digital landscape. Furthermore, the essay delves into the potential of emerging digital technologies, such as AI, to revolutionize anthropological research and practice. Simultaneously, it underscores the entrepreneurial opportunities available to founder anthropologists, specifically by productizing anthropological knowledge and methods. However, practitioners must also acknowledge and address significant challenges such as the rapid pace of digital transformation, privacy and ethical considerations, and the risk of introducing machine bias into the research process. In conclusion, the essay posits that the emerging “digital turn” in business anthropology offers substantial opportunities that will shape the discipline in the coming years, warranting its inclusion by practitioners and academics alike.

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Section: Digital Anthropology and Its Relevance To Business Anthropologymentioning

confidence: 92%

The Digital Turn in Business Anthropology

Artz¹

2023

jba

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“…Throughout the workshops, we have shifted roles between facilitators, local organisers, participants, and ethnographers as both events have been devised, planned, conducted, documented, and analysed by the authors of this article. Leaning onto collaborative fieldwork (Lassiter 2005; Estalella and Sánchez 2018), the workshops have drawn inspiration from shortterm, participatory, and open-ended formats such as data sprints (Munk et al 2019;Jensen et al 2021). We conceive both workshops as experimentsencounters under unusual temporal, technological, and organisational constraints (Lezaun et al 2013).…”

Section: Par Ticipant Obser Vation In Videoconf Erence Wor Kshopsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Valuing Data: Attaching online data to stakes, selves, and other data

Wagenknecht,

Kocksch,

Laser

et al. 2024

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As datafication proceeds rapidly, a large, unwieldy amount of data is available online. In this article, we ask: How valuable is this data, how is it made valuable? To answer this question, we study how online data is endowed with worth in virtual collaboration workshops. Our workshops challenged participants to assert and question the worth of online data – a challenge that participants addressed by using a set of techniques of which we describe collage, hierarchy building, and calculation. Data, we show, gains value through attachment. Thinking with attachment, we foreground affect, materiality, and the situatedness of valuing online data. As ethnographers, we study how data, as haphazard as it comes, is attached to the circumstances and stakes at hand, to ourselves and to other data. Our study contributes a conceptual perspective that attends to the shifting boundaries of the personal and the public, tensions between locality and generality, the role of contiguity, and the limits of combinatorial connectivity.

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“…This paper will frame the design as the UB toolkit as the result of such socio-technical processes where distinct interests and historical trajectories came to matter. Taking inspiration from literature such as ''participatory design'' (Brandt et al, 2012;Simonsen and Robertson, 2013) and ''participatory data design'' (Jensen et al, 2021), we will describe which actors we invited into formulate design specifications and discuss how this ultimately shaped the technical features of the tool and thus the empirical practices it affords. Drawing on work in ''Design Justice'' (Costanza-Chock, 2020), ''Data Action'' (Williams, 2020), and''Data Feminism'' (D'Ignazio andKlein, 2020), we will pay specific attention to the involvement of communities that are rarely given a say in the design of digital democratic tools.…”

Section: Participatory Tool Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Urban Belonging Photo App: A toolkit for studying place attachments with digital and participatory methods

Madsen,

Burgos-Thorsen,

De Gaetano

et al. 2023

Methodological Innovations

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This paper introduces the open-source Urban Belonging (UB) toolkit, designed to study place attachments through a combined digital, visual and participatory methodology that foregrounds lived experience. The core of the toolkit is the photovoice UB App, which prompts participants to document urban experiences as digital data by taking pictures of the city, annotating them, and reacting to others’ photos. The toolkit also includes an API interface and a set of scripts for converting data into visualizations and elicitation devices. The paper first describes how the app’s design specifications were co-created in a process that brought in voices from different research fields, planners from Gehl Architects, six marginalized communities, and citizen engagement professionals. Their inputs shaped decisions about what data collection the app makes possible, and how it mitigates issues of privacy and visual and spatial literacy to make the app as inclusive as possible. We document how design criteria were translated into app features, and we demonstrate how this opens new empirical opportunities for community engagement through examples of its use in the Urban Belonging project in Copenhagen. While the focus on photo capture animates participants to document experiences in a personal and situated way, metadata such as location and sentiment invites for quali-quantitative analysis of both macro trends and local contexts of people’s experiences. Further, the granularity of data makes both a demographic and post-demographic analysis possible, providing empirical ground for exploring what people have in common in what they photograph and where they walk. And, by inviting participants to react to others’ photos, the app offers a heterogeneous empirical ground, showing us how people see the city differently. We end the paper by discussing remaining challenges in the tool and provide a short guide for using it.

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Participatory Data Design: Acting in a Digital World

Cited by 7 publications

References 20 publications

The Digital Turn in Business Anthropology

The Digital Turn in Business Anthropology

Valuing Data: Attaching online data to stakes, selves, and other data

The Urban Belonging Photo App: A toolkit for studying place attachments with digital and participatory methods

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