scholarly journals North Perspectives for a Better South? Big Data and the Global South in Big Data & Society

2019 ◽  
pp. 84-107
Author(s):  
Guilherme Cavalcante Silva
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Big Data ◽  
Global South ◽  
The Other ◽  
The South ◽  
Local Data ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Data Practices ◽  
Academic Scholarship ◽  
The One

Over the last few years, data studies within Social Sciences watched a growth in the number of researches highlighting the need for more proficuous participation from the Global South in the debates of the field. The lack of Southern voices in the academic scholarship on the one hand, and of recognition of the importance and autonomy of its local data practices, such as those from indigenous data movements, on the other, had been decisive in establishing a Big Data in the South agenda. This paper displays an analytical mapping of 131 articles published from 2014-2016 in Big Data & Society (BD&S), a leading journal acknowledged for its pioneering promotion of Big Data research among social scientists. Its goal is to provide an overview of the way data practices are approached in BD&S papers concerning its geopolitical instance. It argues that there is a tendency to generalise data practices overlooking the specific consequences of Big Data in Southern contexts because of an almost exclusive presence of Euroamerican perspectives in the journal. This paper argues that this happens as a result of an epistemological asymmetry that pervades Social Sciences.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Josiah Ober
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Documented Case ◽  
The Social ◽  
Greek History ◽  
The One

The introduction to the volume outlines the approaches represented in the following chapters, discusses their importance and identifies running themes and the avenues of research that they open, and sets them into the wider framework of possible forms of fruitful engagement between ancient Greek history and the social sciences. It explores the methodologies employed in recent work, in particular by the author (Josiah Ober), to show that engagement with the social sciences is not just about using quantified data to test explanatory hypotheses. The chapter is also, explicitly, written for two audiences: on the one hand it strives to describe the advantages that thoughtful engagement with the social sciences can bring to the ancient historian; on the other hand, it addresses social scientists and makes the case for the significance of the ancient world (and of the ancient Greek polis in particular) as the source of privileged and (relatively speaking) abundantly documented case studies for testing modern theories.

Representing disability and development in the global south

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 281-284
Author(s):  
Leslie Swartz
Keyword(s):  
Global South ◽  
The Other ◽  
Development Work ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
The South ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

I reflect on two aesthetics which are at play in the presentation of critical disability and development work in the global south. On the one hand, authors of critical texts commonly use very complex and abstruse language, which may make such texts relatively inaccessible to some disabled people in the global south. On the other hand, the ways in which development work in the south is portrayed sometimes emphasises methods of engagement which may seen to be infantilising. Drawing on my own experience in such engagement activities, I suggest that it is important to understand, and to subvert, dominant forms of representation.

From Fieldwork to Research Theory on an Indian Pilgrimage

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rémy Delage
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Random Sampling ◽  
South India ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
The Other ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Major Research ◽  
Research Hypothesis ◽  
Sources Of Knowledge ◽  
The One

Using as the example of the pilgrimage to Sabarimala (Kerala, South India), I propose here to explore the links existing between sources, research hypothesis and research theory in social sciences. The choice of research materials in the process of investigation, sources of knowledge about the studied object, is not mere random sampling; it is processed in accordance with the questions of the researcher. It inevitably assumes a selective dimension. After a critical reading of the sources used by Indian studies, I will highlight on the connections between the sources and the methodological tools on the one hand, and the major research hypothesis about pilgrimage on the other. The links between the data taken from the field and the legitimacy of scientific discourse on India will be examined at the end before providing some keys for the interpretation of Sabarimala phenomenon in South India during the contemporary period.

The Fable of the Writer in Southern Fiction

Prospects ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 249-266
Author(s):  
Lewis P. Simpson
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Deep South ◽  
The South ◽  
Southern Fiction ◽  
Yoknapatawpha County ◽  
The One

No scene in Faulkner is more compelling than the one that transpires on a “long still hot weary dead September afternoon” in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, toward the end of the first decade of this century. Quentin Compson sits with Miss Rosa Coldfield in a “dim airless room” still called “the office because her father called it that,” and listens to Miss Rosa tell her version of the story of the “demon” Sutpen and his plantation, Sutpen's Hundred. As she talks “in that grim haggard amazed voice”—“vanishing into and then out of the long intervals like a stream, a trickle running from patch to patch of dried sand”—the 22-year-old Mississippi youth discovers he is hearing not Miss Rosa but the voices of “two separate Quentins.” One voice is that of the “Quentin preparing for Harvard in the South, the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous baffled ghosts.” The other voice is that of the Quentin “who was still too young to deserve yet to be a ghost, but nevertheless having to be one for all that, since he was born and bred in the deep South the same as she [Miss Rosa] was.” The two Quentins talk “to one another in the long silence of notpeople, in notlanguage: It seems that this demon—his name was Sutpen—(Colonel Sutpen)—Colonel Sutpen. Who came out of nowhere and without warning upon the land with a band of strange niggers and built a plantation”.

Benson and Miller in Perspective

1979 ◽  
Vol 3 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 242-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Kuklick
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Applied Science ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Knowledge ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Stock Of Knowledge

Despite differences in coloration Miller and Benson are birds of a feather. Although he is no Pollyanna, Miller believes that there has been a modest and decent series of advances in the social sciences and that the most conscientious, diligent, and intelligent researchers will continue to add to this stock of knowledge. Benson is much more pessimistic about the achievements of yesterday and today but, in turn, offers us the hope of a far brighter tomorrow. Miller explains Benson’s hyperbolic views about the past and future by distinguishing between pure and applied science and by pointing out Benson’s naivete about politics: the itch to understand the world is different from the one to make it better; and, Miller says, because Benson sees that we have not made things better, he should not assume we do not know more about them; Benson ought to realize, Miller adds, that the way politicians translate basic social knowledge into social policy need not bring about rational or desirable results. On the other side, Benson sees more clearly than Miller that the development of science has always been intimately intertwined with the control of the environment and the amelioration of the human estate.

1. On Annelid Tracks in the Exploration of the Millstone Grits in the South-west of the County of Clare.

1857 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 294-295
Author(s):  
Robert Harkness
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Perfect State ◽  
The South ◽  
Great Abundance ◽  
South West ◽  
Soft State ◽  
The One ◽  
To Receive

The author remarks that the existence of Annelida during the Palæozoic formations is manifested in two conditions. In the one, we have the shelly envelope which invests the order Tubicola, in the form of Seapolites; and in the other, the tracks of the orders Abranchia and Dorsi-branchiata are found impressed on deposits which were, at one time, in a sufficiently soft state to receive the impressions of the wanderings of these animals.Among the strata which have hitherto afforded annelid tracks, those which, in the county of Clare, represent a portion of the equivalents of the Millstone Grit, contain such tracks, in their most perfect state of preservation in great abundance; and these strata also furnish evidence concerning the circumstances which prevailed during their deposition.

China's Universities since Tiananmen: A Critical Assessment

1993 ◽  
Vol 134 ◽  
pp. 291-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Hayhoe
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
The Other ◽  
Western Countries ◽  
Western Influences ◽  
The One ◽  
Considerable Support ◽  
Scientific And Technological Development

China's present leadership sees universities as being of key importance for the country's economic development and for its relationship with Western countries. This is a kind of two-edged sword. On the one hand, considerable support and encouragement for scientific and technological development is provided, together with pressures for scientific findings to be applied to specific economic development needs. On the other, the reflective and theoretical social sciences and the humanities are being purged of Western influences in efforts to mobilize all resources against what is seen as the Western strategy of fostering “peaceful evolution” towards capitalism. The kinds of tension that arise out of this highly contradictory situation are severe.

scholarly journals Pragmatisme og "practice turn"

2018 ◽  
pp. 43-61
Author(s):  
Antje Gimmler
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
The Other ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
The Social ◽  
Practice Turn ◽  
Understanding Of Science ◽  
The One ◽  
Philosophical Pragmatism

Practices are of central relevance both to philosophical pragmatism and to the recent ‘Practice Turn’ in social sciences and philosophy. However, what counts as practices and how practices and knowledge are combined or intertwine varies in the different approaches of pragmatism and those theories that are covered by the umbrella term ‘Practice Turn’. The paper tries to show that the pragmatism of John Dewey is able to offer both a more precise and a more radical understanding of practices than the recent ‘Practice Turn’ allows for. The paper on the one hand highlights what pragmatism has to offer to the practice turn in order to clarify the notion of practice. On the other hand the paper claims that a pragmatism inspired by Dewey actually interprets ‘practices’ more radically than most of the other approaches and furthermore promotes an understanding of science that combines nonrepresentationalism and anti-foundationalism with an involvement of the philosopher or the social scientist in the production of knowledge, things and technologies.

Coding Inequality

2020 ◽  
pp. 100-117
Author(s):  
Sarah Brayne
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Big Data ◽  
Data Analytics ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Big Data Analytics ◽  
The Other ◽  
Surveillance Network ◽  
Data Intensive ◽  
The One ◽  
Reproduction Of Inequality

This chapter looks at the promise and peril of police use of big data analytics for inequality. On the one hand, big data analytics may be a means by which to ameliorate persistent inequalities in policing. Data can be used to “police the police” and replace unparticularized suspicion of racial minorities and human exaggeration of patterns with less biased predictions of risk. On the other hand, data-intensive police surveillance practices are implicated in the reproduction of inequality in at least four ways: by deepening the surveillance of individuals already under suspicion, codifying a secondary surveillance network of individuals with no direct police contact, widening the criminal justice dragnet unequally, and leading people to avoid institutions that collect data and are fundamental to social integration. Crucially, as currently implemented, “data-driven” decision-making techwashes, both obscuring and amplifying social inequalities under a patina of objectivity.

Late Antiquity: The Age of Crowds?*

2020 ◽  
Vol 249 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-52
Author(s):  
Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
The Other ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
City Life ◽  
The People ◽  
Urban Protest ◽  
The One ◽  
The Masses

Abstract The objective of this article is to place the study of urban protest and violence in the period from about 300 to about 600 CE in a broader perspective and to subject the investigation of plebeian activism to the basic precepts of analysis of collective action developed by social scientists and historians studying other periods. Its main argument is that, contrary to wide held assumptions in the historiography, what characterized Late Antiquity was not simply the exacerbation of violence or its tighter control, but the crisis of aristocratic hegemony and the expansion of opportunities for popular intervention in city life. What has been perceived as the product fanaticism, irrationality and deprivation of the masses, of the manipulation of bishops and aristocrats or of the failure of the mechanisms of coercion was actually the result of a dramatic social change that, on the one hand, involved a new dynamic of power and, on the other, a shift in the way the people understood their role and power in local communities.

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