About the event
Organisers:
- James Stewart (STIS, University of Edinburgh),
- Robin Williams (STIS, University of Edinburgh)
- Rob Procter (Dept. of Computer Science, University of Warwick and Turing Institute)
- Jonathan Crook (Business School, University of Edinburgh)
- Wifak Gueddana (Usher Institute, University of Edinburgh)
- Rafaella Calabrese (Business School, University of Edinburgh)
This workshop is funded by the University of Edinburgh College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CAHSS) and co-sponsored by the Alan Turing Institute.
Day 1: 10:00 - 17:00 (Agenda tbc)
Day 2: 11:30 - 17:00 (Agenda tbc)
Workshop Day 1: Thin files and the data poor: opportunities in new data sources to strengthen personal files for credit, work, welfare, health...
Researchers in academia, government and commerce need access to new sources of data, and mechanisms to experiment, test and validate potential uses to support data inclusion. Data holders and commercial organisations could benefit from access to expertise and emerging methods from academia. It is also clear that this opens a more critical agenda on which organisations are able to do this and how their goals and resources coincide with democratically shaped values and goals.This workshop explores a number of areas where decisions about risks and entitlement are often made on information that is partial and erroneous, and with resulting sub-optimal outcomes for individuals, communities, organisations and government, including reputation damage, and political controversy. It also aims to contribute to an emerging research agenda in data science, data poverty and precarity. We invite contributions from scholars and organisations:
- Experts in the public and private sectors who are attempting to explore and unlock emerging sources of data and to address the challenge of financial exclusion
- Scholars and organisations making a broader exploration of what it means to be ‘data poor’ in a data society
Day 2: Using Data Science Tools to Study Platform Workers, their Struggles and Joy.
The aim of this workshop is to help identify ways in which advances in data science could be deployed to help researchers gain access to and draw insights from a currently under-used resource that is the digital life of gig workers (online communications in bulletin boards, social media and specialised platforms).Many use fora, social media, emails and instant messaging apps to facilitate peer engagement, communicate and deliver jobs and work. They use these tools to identify sources of income, to cope with site and app features, to find solutions to personal problems, to game the system and to organise collective mobilisation. This way, work practices and relations established online but off-platform dovetail with platform transactions, creating a loosely coupled digital infrastructure of labour. To study changes in work and gig workers, we argue that the challenge for research is how to study practices of work on, through and across platforms such as, Uber, Deliveroo, AirBnB, eBay, Taskrabbit, AMKT, Upwork, ODesk, Appen, Clixsense and Freelancer. This workshop will bring together a core of researchers from Warwick, Oxford and Edinburgh university, as well as other participants from any other academic, politic, NGO or commercial organisations to debate this and share experience on how data science methods can be used to support research on digital labour. Speakers tba
If you would like to give a presentation please contact Wifak @ ([email protected])