Algorithmic accountability in scholarship: what we can learn from #DeleteAcademiaEdu

The controversy surrounding Academia.edu highlights the flaws and limitations of existing scholarly infrastructures. Jean-Christophe Plantin explores the intersection of algorithms, academic research and platforms for scholarly publications. He argues that there is a need to develop a values-centred approach in the development of article-sharing platforms, with suitably designed algorithms

Data cleaners for pristine datasets: visibility and invisibility of data processors in social science

This article investigates the work of processors who curate and “clean” the data sets that researchers submit to data archives for archiving and further dissemination. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at the data processing unit of a major US social science data archive, I investigate how these data processors work, under which status, and how they contribute to data sharing. This article presents two main results. First, it contributes to the study of invisible technicians in science by showing that the same procedures can make technical work invisible outside and visible inside the archive, to allow peer review and quality control. Second, this article contributes to the social study of scientific data sharing, by showing that the organization of data processing directly stems from the conception that the archive promotes of a valid data set—that is, a data set that must look “pristine” at the end of its processing. After critically interrogating this notion of pristineness, I show how it perpetuates a misleading conception of data as “raw” instead of acknowledging the important contribution of data processors to data sharing and social science

Is open RAN the future for radio access technology?

Why are some people calling for a more open radio access network (RAN) architecture? In this post and accompanying video, LSE’s Jean-Christophe Plantin explains why there has been a move to disaggregate some of the key technology that the telecommunications industry relies on, and the challenges and implications of this

Google Maps as cartographic infrastructure: from participatory mapmaking to database maintenance

Google Maps has popularized a model of cartography as platform, in which digital traces are collected through participation, crowdsourcing, or user’s data harvesting and used to constantly improve its mapping service. Based on this capacity, Google Maps has now attained a scale, reach, and social role similar to the existing infrastructures that typically organize cartographic knowledge in society. After describing Google Maps as a configuration relying on characteristics from both platforms and infrastructures, this article investigates what this hybrid configuration means for public participation to spatial knowledge in society. First, this turn to infrastructure for Google has consequences on the status of public participation to mapmaking, which switches from creating content to providing activities of maintenance of its database. Second, if Google Maps “opens up” cartography to participation, it simultaneously recentralizes this participatory knowledge to serve its corporate interests. In this hybrid configuration, cartographic knowledge is therefore simultaneously more participatory and more enclosed

La cartographie numérique: vers une sémantique de l'espace urbain. L'exemple du projet " la Montre Verte "

Présentation du projet " la Montre verte ": http://lamontreverte.org/ Interface de visualisation " Citypulse ": http://lamontreverte.org/vis/International audienceAu cours de cet article, nous allons présenter la cartographie numérique selon ses potentialités sémantiques. La carte est en effet un instrument liant gestion de l'information et géolocalisation : ces deux fonctions sont à même de favoriser la création de sens chez les individus, au sein d'un espace en voie de désémantisation sous l'action des réseaux de communication. Afin d'illustrer ce potentiel sémantique de la carte, nous allons nous appuyer sur l'étude de l'expérimentation cartographique de la pollution urbaine : le projet " la Montre Verte ". Une analyse de ses différentes propriétés nous permettra d'évoquer les possibles usages de la carte en milieu urbain

COVID has exposed the communications infrastructure we rely on every day

With internet use at a record high, Jean-Christophe Plantin (LSE) discusses how much we actually know about the communication infrastructure on which many of us rely heavily in our daily lives

The geopolitical hijacking of open networking: the case of Open RAN

This article investigates how discourses on open networking technologies provide a social imaginary that industry and government actors mobilize in an attempt to expand their control over mobile telecommunications networks. The case of recent initiatives aiming to ‘open up’ radio access network (or RAN, a key component of telecommunications infrastructure) with an ‘open RAN’ model reveals how the US Government came to promote this nascent technology to create an opposition between its own ‘open’ telecommunications networks versus proprietary and presumed ‘untrustworthy’ networks based on foreign equipment, namely Huawei. While a closer look casts doubts on the benefits of open radio access network to increase network security or to open up the equipment market, this case reveals how openness is an ambiguous notion that can be used by governments to exclude foreign trade enemies, while advocating for trust in telecommunications networks

Internet down – learning infrastructure literacy from infrastructure failure

With level of internet use at record highs and the instability of internet services recently effecting millions across the globe, including scholarly publishers, Jean-Christophe Plantin discusses how much we actually know about the communication infrastructure on which many of us rely heavily in our daily lives. He suggests that moments of failure and outage, provide opportunities both to develop infrastructure literacy and to consider how and for whom our current infrastructures function

imagining 5g networks: infrastructure and public accountability

This study explores the social imaginaries influencing choices about the architectural design and standards for the 5G mobile network to identify how the network level of the communication infrastructure is implicated in the commercial datafication process. We focus on ambitions to establish global market leadership in the provision of the 5G infrastructure. Based on a multimethod analysis of documentation, press coverage, and a case study of 5G’s radio access network standardization, the analysis provides insight into contradictions within a dominant digital innovation social imaginary that privileges national or regional economic 5G strategies and externalizes risks and threats around 5G networks to foreign actors (mainly China). It also shows how public values, including privacy and freedom from surveillance, as well as transparent public accountability, characteristics of an alternative social imaginary of digital innovation, are suppressed in the process of materializing a new communication infrastructure