scholarly journals Data journalism’s many futures: Diagrammatic displays and prospective probabilities in data-driven news predictions

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 732-750
Author(s):  
Christian Pentzold ◽  
Denise Fechner
Keyword(s):  
Predictive Analytics ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Archival Data ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Data Journalism ◽  
Time Frames ◽  
Data Visualizations

This article explores how newsmakers exploit numeric records in order to anticipate the future. As this nascent area of data journalism experiments with predictive analytics, we examine its reports and computer-generated presentations, often infographics and data visualizations, and ask what time frames and topics are covered by these diagrammatic displays. We also interrogate the strategies that are employed in order to modulate the uncertainty involved in calculating for more than one possible outlook. Based on a comprehensive sample of projects, our analysis shows how data journalism seeks accuracy but has to cope with a number of different prospective probabilities and the puzzle of how to address this multiplicity of futures. Despite their predictive ambition, these forecasts are inherently grounded in the past because they are based on archival data. We conclude that this form of quantified premediation limits the range of imaginable future thoughts to one preferred mode, namely extrapolation.

A Means to an End

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Prieto
Keyword(s):  
Wealth Distribution ◽  
Roman History ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Ancient Slavery

Can data-driven approaches help researchers reconstruct Roman history? Scientific methods are now being used to reexamine ancient slavery, wealth distribution, health, and the costs of trade. Such approaches are demonstrated in The Science of Roman History: Biology, Climate, and the Future of the Past, edited by Walter Scheidel. But Alberto Prieto finds not enough of the book’s data to be Roman.

scholarly journals From pre-emption to slowness: Assessing the contrasting temporalities of data-driven predictive policing

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (9) ◽  
pp. 1528-1544
Author(s):  
Mark Andrejevic ◽  
Lina Dencik ◽  
Emiliano Treré
Keyword(s):  
Data Processing ◽  
Predictive Analytics ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Temporal Shift ◽  
Predictive Policing ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
The Past ◽  
Automated Data Processing ◽  
Institutional Contexts ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility

Debates on the temporal shift associated with digitalization often stress notions of speed and acceleration. With the advent of big data and predictive analytics, the time-compressing features of digitalization are compounded within a distinct operative logic: that of pre-emption. The temporality of pre-emption attempts to project the past into a simulated future that can be acted upon in the present; a temporality of pure imminence. Yet, inherently paradoxical, pre-emption is marked by myriads of contrasts and frictions as it is caught between the supposedly all-encompassing knowledge of the data-processing ‘Machine’, and the daily reality of decision-making practices by relevant social actors. In this article, we explore the contrasting temporalities of automated data processing and predictive analytics, using policing as an illustrative example. Drawing on insights from two cases of predictive policing systems that have been implemented among UK police forces, we highlight the prevalence of counter-temporalities as predictive analytics is situated in institutional contexts and consider the conditions of possibility for agency and deliberation. Analysing these temporal tensions in relation to ‘slowness’ as a mode of resistance, the contextual examination of predictive policing advanced in the article provides a contribution to the formation of a deeper awareness of the politics of time in automated data processing; one that may serve to counter the imperative of pre-emption that, taken to the limit, seeks to foreclose the time for politics, action and life.

scholarly journals Teachers and learners in a time of big data

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Buchanan ◽  
Amy McPherson
Keyword(s):  
Digital Data ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
The Political ◽  
Educational Systems ◽  
Educational Models ◽  
Technological Transformation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Educational Culture ◽  
The Future

Policy and technological transformation have coalesced to usher in massive changes to educational systems over the past two decades. Teachers’ roles, subjectivities and professional identities have been subject to sweeping changes enabled by sophisticated forms of governance. Simultaneously, students have been recast as ‘learners’; like teachers, learners have become subject to new forms of governance, through technological surveillance and datafication. This paper focuses on the intersection of the metrics driven approach to education and the political as a way to re-think the future of schooling in more explicitly philosophical terms. This exploration starts with a critical examination of constructions of teachers, learners and the digital data-driven educational culture in order to explicate the futures being generated. The trajectory of this future is explored through reference to the techno-educational models currently being developed in Silicon Valley. Drawing on Deleuze’s notion of control societies we contribute to the ongoing philosophical investigation of the datafication of education; a necessary discussion if we are to explore the future implications of schooling in a technologically saturated world. We present consideration of the past, present and future, as three ways of considering alternatives to a datafied education system. Alternative conceptualisations of the future of schooling are possible which offer ways of understanding and politicising what happens when we impose data-driven accountabilities into people’s lives.

scholarly journals Peacebuilding in Northern Ireland: The Past, Present and Future

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Peace Process ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Sentimental Education ◽  
Slow Progress ◽  
Time Frames ◽  
Superordinate Goals ◽  
Made In

This article explores the reasons for the slow progress being made in the Northern Ireland peace process. It examines complications that exist in dealing with the past, present, and future of the conflict between the two main communities whilst also arguing that it is hard to separate these time frames in practice. In terms of the present, some well known difficulties with the consociational approach are identified. Recent studies have also demonstrated a failure to address sectarianism at the grass-roots level and there has been a resurgence in activity by spoilers and rejectionists. When thinking about the future the two communities still have competing views about the final constitutional destiny of Northern Ireland and this inhibits the development of a sense of a shared future. Although there have been a plethora of initiatives for dealing with the past and for truth recovery, there does not appear to have been a satisfactory approach to this important dimension of peacebuilding. The article concludes by advocating two key strategies. The first is the development of initiatives based on the pursuit of superordinate goals. The second endorses Rorty’s idea of sentimental education as a way of building greater solidarity.

Europe, spectrality and 'post-mortem cinema': The haunting of history in Christian Petzold's Transit (2018) and Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre (2011)

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-129
Author(s):  
Alice Bardan
Keyword(s):  
Post Mortem ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Exclusionary Practices ◽  
Critical Attitude ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
The One ◽  
Time Frames

Abstract This article considers the ways in which contemporary filmmakers such as Christian Petzold (Transit, 2018) and Aki Kaurismäki (Le Havre, 2011) experiment with narrative and stylistic strategies to tell their own story about a haunted Europe caught, yet again, in a paranoid policing of borders, and marked by an increasingly tense political climate that gave rise to nationalistic anxieties and exclusionary practices. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx ([1993] 2006), and on Érik Bullot's and Thomas Elsaesser's concept of 'post-mortem' cinema, I argue that by blurring time frames and by allowing the future to coexist with past and present, films such as Transit and Le Havre give a new twist to the problematic of negotiating Europe's past. Deploying the trope of haunting, both films mobilize a critical attitude towards the complacency of our own times, alerting viewers to the imagined futures and dreams of various figures from the past and to their capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-60
Author(s):  
Max Saunders
Keyword(s):  
Data Driven ◽  
Multiple Introductions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Introductory Section ◽  
The World ◽  
Scientific Approach ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Devil ◽  
Main Thread

Multiple introductions are warranted to this complex and unusual series. The first section describes its origins, its polymath editor C. K. Ogden, some of his related editorial ventures, and the books by some of the more prominent contributors. The distinctive futurological angle is discussed, together with its generally progressive orientation, and commitment to intelligent debate. The importance of the scientific approach is introduced, as a main thread running through the series and this study. Two superb, influential science volumes are introduced: the initial book, J. B. S. Haldane’s Daedalus; or, Science and the Future (1923); and J. D. Bernal’s The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1929). Some cardinal intellectual contexts are established: how the series addresses time, eugenics, and modernity. Its organization is considered. The contemporary impact is assessed, leading to a discussion of the value of studying past predictions for thinking not only about the past but about the nature of prediction. The second introductory section places the series in the history of futurological thinking from the fin de siècle to the present. It starts from a contrast between today’s data-driven professionalized group foresight exercises and individual imaginative projections.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document