Social informatics of data norms

Big data has been widely promoted across disciplines and sectors for its potential to enhance lives and promote knowledge discovery. However, challenges arise at all stages of the data lifecycle due to the complexity of interactions between data and the contexts within which they are collected and managed, which has implications for interpretations of this data and eventual use of information and the creation of knowledge products from these data. Starting from the perspective of social informatics, this panel will discuss: the reciprocal relationships between data and context; specific challenges in distinct stages of data generation, data repository implementation, data curation, data use, and data reproducibility; and the implications of these challenges and their potential solutions for both social informatics research and society in general

Like trainer, like bot? Inheritance of bias in algorithmic content moderation

The internet has become a central medium through which `networked publics' express their opinions and engage in debate. Offensive comments and personal attacks can inhibit participation in these spaces. Automated content moderation aims to overcome this problem using machine learning classifiers trained on large corpora of texts manually annotated for offence. While such systems could help encourage more civil debate, they must navigate inherently normatively contestable boundaries, and are subject to the idiosyncratic norms of the human raters who provide the training data. An important objective for platforms implementing such measures might be to ensure that they are not unduly biased towards or against particular norms of offence. This paper provides some exploratory methods by which the normative biases of algorithmic content moderation systems can be measured, by way of a case study using an existing dataset of comments labelled for offence. We train classifiers on comments labelled by different demographic subsets (men and women) to understand how differences in conceptions of offence between these groups might affect the performance of the resulting models on various test sets. We conclude by discussing some of the ethical choices facing the implementers of algorithmic moderation systems, given various desired levels of diversity of viewpoints amongst discussion participants.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, 9th International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo 2017), Oxford, UK, 13--15 September 2017 (forthcoming in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Designing and evaluating mobile multimedia user experiences in public urban places: Making sense of the field

The majority of the world’s population now lives in cities (United Nations, 2008) resulting in an urban densification requiring people to live in closer proximity and share urban infrastructure such as streets, public transport, and parks within cities. However, “physical closeness does not mean social closeness” (Wellman, 2001, p. 234). Whereas it is a common practice to greet and chat with people you cross paths with in smaller villages, urban life is mainly anonymous and does not automatically come with a sense of community per se. Wellman (2001, p. 228) defines community “as networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging and social identity.” While on the move or during leisure time, urban dwellers use their interactive information communication technology (ICT) devices to connect to their spatially distributed community while in an anonymous space. Putnam (1995) argues that available technology privatises and individualises the leisure time of urban dwellers. Furthermore, ICT is sometimes used to build a “cocoon” while in public to avoid direct contact with collocated people (Mainwaring et al., 2005; Bassoli et al., 2007; Crawford, 2008). Instead of using ICT devices to seclude oneself from the surrounding urban environment and the collocated people within, such devices could also be utilised to engage urban dwellers more with the urban environment and the urban dwellers within. Urban sociologists found that “what attracts people most, it would appear, is other people” (Whyte, 1980, p. 19) and “people and human activity are the greatest object of attention and interest” (Gehl, 1987, p. 31). On the other hand, sociologist Erving Goffman describes the concept of civil inattention, acknowledging strangers’ presence while in public but not interacting with them (Goffman, 1966). With this in mind, it appears that there is a contradiction between how people are using ICT in urban public places and for what reasons and how people use public urban places and how they behave and react to other collocated people. On the other hand there is an opportunity to employ ICT to create and influence experiences of people collocated in public urban places. The widespread use of location aware mobile devices equipped with Internet access is creating networked localities, a digital layer of geo-coded information on top of the physical world (Gordon & de Souza e Silva, 2011). Foursquare.com is an example of a location based 118 Mobile Multimedia – User and Technology Perspectives social network (LBSN) that enables urban dwellers to virtually check-in into places at which they are physically present in an urban space. Users compete over ‘mayorships’ of places with Foursquare friends as well as strangers and can share recommendations about the space. The research field of Urban Informatics is interested in these kinds of digital urban multimedia augmentations and how such augmentations, mediated through technology, can create or influence the UX of public urban places. “Urban informatics is the study, design, and practice of urban experiences across different urban contexts that are created by new opportunities of real-time, ubiquitous technology and the augmentation that mediates the physical and digital layers of people networks and urban infrastructures” (Foth et al., 2011, p. 4). One possibility to augment the urban space is to enable citizens to digitally interact with spaces and urban dwellers collocated in the past, present, and future. “Adding digital layer to the existing physical and social layers could facilitate new forms of interaction that reshape urban life” (Kjeldskov & Paay, 2006, p. 60). This methodological chapter investigates how the design of UX through such digital placebased mobile multimedia augmentations can be guided and evaluated. First, we describe three different applications that aim to create and influence the urban UX through mobile mediated interactions. Based on a review of literature, we describe how our integrated framework for designing and evaluating urban informatics experiences has been constructed. We conclude the chapter with a reflective discussion on the proposed framework

Culture-based artefacts to inform ICT design: foundations and practice

Cultural aspects frame our perception of the world and direct the many different ways people interact with things in it. For this reason, these aspects should be considered when designing technology with the purpose to positively impact people in a community. In this paper, we revisit the foundations of culture aiming to bring this concept in dialogue with design. To inform design with cultural aspects, we model reality in three levels of formality: informal, formal, and technical, and subscribe to a systemic vision that considers the technical solution as part of a more complex social system in which people live and interact. In this paper, we instantiate this theoretical and methodological view by presenting two case studies of technology design in which culture-based artefacts were employed to inform the design process. We claim that as important as including issues related to culture in the ICT design agenda—from the conception to the development, evaluation, and adoption of a technology—is the need to support the design process with adequate artefacts that help identifying cultural aspects within communities and translating them into sociotechnical requirements. We argue that a culturally informed perspective on design can go beyond an informative analysis, and can be integrated with the theoretical and methodological framework used to support design, throughout the entire design process

Public health informatics in global health surveillance: A review

Background: Surveillance is the backbone for effective public health practice. Traditionally, surveillance system relies on the collection of information regarding health-related events through healthcare facilities, disease notification system from the physician, syndromic notification networks, selected sentinel healthcare facilities, or by event-based data. However, there are several limitations in using conventional surveillance. Methods: With the advancement of technology and computer science, overcoming those limitations and complementing the traditional method has been recommended. Three leading emerging technologies are applied in public health surveillance: the internet of things, artificial intelligence, and blockchain. Results: Application of informatics in public health surveillance could raise several issues including accessibility and affordability of innovations; public health informatics’ experts, law, and regulation to protect patients’ information; social and ethical considerations, norms, and standards of implementing new technologies; data ownership; privacy and sharing of information; biosecurity; biosafety; and cybersecurity. Conclusion: This article aimed to review several applications of informatics system in public health surveillance practice and its several issues related to the use of technology. Several applications of informatics could be useful for incoming challenges in public health. However, application of informatics can pose significant issues and must be taken into consideration in public health practice

Heidegger, technology and sustainability: between intentionality, accountability and empowerment

Transition is the adequate term for characterising contemporary societies. Norms and values are in transit, led by a technological revolution, which is, in itself, the tip of the iceberg of millenary social and cultural changes. Heidegger, one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century, captured this tension between social change and innovative technology and showed that the Western civilisation was captive of ontological instances whose role was already pin-pointed by Greek Antiquity philosophy but which went underground with Modernity. The product of Heidegger’s work was a revolution in Western thought, which found echoes across all areas of society. Taking Husserl’s call for “back to the things themselves”, Heidegger’s impact has empowered the calls for more sustainable and resilient societies. Sustainability models, with its three pillars of environmental, economic and social sustainability, are directly dependent upon the role of technology and of information science in shaping current patterns of production and consumption in contemporary societies. Industrial, academic and political discourses already voice such taken for granted assumptions. Nevertheless, it is crucial to clarify and to highlight the links between economic evolution and progress, social change and the catalysing role of technology, taken as an enabler of human action.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Just ticking the box: A social informatics model of the consequences of consent

Given the societal diffusion, proliferation and ubiquity of computerised systems and platforms, it is generally perceived by consumers that systems and eBusiness platforms often pose a threat to the privacy of their supplied information (Srnicek, 2017; Andreotti et al., 2018). Furthermore, as we see the replacement of systems that were once manual and paper-based migrate to digital processes and information systems (Lunt et al., 2019), consent in the information era is reduced to ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ option, often in the form of a tick box. Additionally, despite the arrival of the General Data Protection Regulation in 2018 as means to provide protection in relation to data processing, we argue that there is a lack of transparency in relation to the intention of this data processing and secondary data use for the purposes of research and marketing, for example. In light of this, we argue that there exists an increasingly difficult challenge to establish a mutual understanding of what consent actually is and what the wider permutations of it represents and comprehends. The lack of mutual understanding, in a digital world that is becoming increasingly reliant on the perceived benefits of acquiring and processing large sets of data (Kitchin, 2014; Breidbach et al., 2019) is deeply problematic. It is not only problematic for the consumer, but also to system developers, platform owners, and data processors alike. To this end, this paper presents a model, derived from action research, which positions the concept of consent within a socio-technical framing. This model approaches consent, in the context of digital platforms and eBusiness and how it comes to be represented in information systems, as a socio-technical construct of moral orders that imbues the feelings, convictions and aspirations of the consumer as they are engaged in the use of digital systems. We offer that consent is merely approached as an attribute in a data model, rather than relaying the communicative understanding of the consumer. This model introduces the areas of information processing systems and information communication systems as two differing interpretations within which digital platforms can be perceived. We offer these two distinctions as a mechanism to explain and, more importantly, explore the notion of the governance of consent and how this comes to be manifested in information systems

The unseen and unacceptable face of digital libraries

The social and organisational aspects of digital libraries (DLs) are often overlooked, but this paper reviews how they can affect users' awareness and acceptance of DLs. An analysis of research conducted within two contrasting domains (clinical and academic) is presented which highlights issues of user interactions, work practices and organisational social structures. The combined study comprises an analysis of 98 in-depth interviews and focus groups with lecturers, librarians and hospital clinicians. The importance of current and past roles of the library, and how users interacted with it, are revealed. Web-based DLs, while alleviating most library resource and interaction problems, require a change in librarians' and DL designers' roles and interaction patterns if they are to be implemented acceptably and effectively. Without this role change, users will at best be unaware of these digital resources and at worst feel threatened by them. The findings of this paper highlight the importance of DL design and implementation of the social context and supporting user communication (i.e., collaboration and consultation) in information searching and usage activities. © Springer-Verlag 2004