'Big Data'

I’m the next speaker at the ACSPRI 2024 conference, presenting our new practice mapping method for this study of multimodal networks. Slides are below:

The final speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Sidiq Madya, whose interest is in the discussion of the idea of data sovereignty by civil society organisations. Data sovereignty is a spectrum of approaches by nation states to subject data flows to national jurisdictions, and/or the ability or right of individuals to control their personal data and information.

This addresses the misuse and abuse of personal data for surveillance or microtargeting, seeks to mitigate increasing datafication, and seeks alternative models of data governance that limit the free flow of data and encourage local data ownership. There are a large …

The final speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Aaron Willcox, presenting work with the Scanlon Research Institute to explore local government-level civic opportunities. For organisations, such opportunities include hosting events, offering memberships, involving individuals through volunteering, and taking action through advocacy and campaigns.

The project used the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission database, which contains valid information on the activities of some 30,000 charities around the country; it used Web scraping and human coding to identify civic activities, and utilised Large Language Models to directly code the data as well as to emulate the coding process of human …

The first session at the ACSPRI 2024 conference is on generative AI, and starts with Lachlan Watson. He is interested in the use of AI assistance to analyse public policy submissions, here in the context of Animal Welfare Victoria’s draft cat management strategy. Feedback could be in the form of written submissions, surveys, or both, and needed to be analysed using quantitative approaches given the substantial volume of submission.

The organisation chose Relevance AI as a tool for this – this is a low code AI solution not unlike ChatGPT, but data is hosted in a private environment and none …

From the AANZCA conference in Melbourne of the last few days I’ve moved on to the ACSPRI 2024 conference in Sydney for the rest of the week, which starts with a keynote by Maggie Walter, on methodologies for Indigenous statistics and quantitative research. Maggie is a Palawa woman from Tasmania. Data and population statistics have changed dramatically over the past decade or more; conventionally, Australian Indigenous people have been presented merely as average statistics that show what Maggie calls the Statistical Indigene: documenting prolonged disadvantage and inequality.

This is the case because these are the things we have data about …

The next session at the AANZCA 2024 conference starts with a paper by Terry Flew, Agata Stepnik, and Tim Koskie, who begin by noting the changing contours of Internet governance. There is increasing nation-state regulation in liberal democracies as well as authoritarian states, as well as renewed debate about the treatment of digital and social media platforms and a populist push towards greater regulation.

This regulatory turn has also been driven by significant shocks and scandals as well as growing regulatory activism, and is often directed at curbing the power of platforms, out of a general sense that governments should …