The next session at "Compromised Data" is the last I'm going to be able to liveblog, as I'll have to go to the airport this afternoon to head to my next destination on this trip (apologies to the presenters in the final session, whose papers I'll miss). We start with Gavin Adamson, whose interest is in the circulation of mental health news on Twitter. Generally, the journalistic coverage of mental illness in Canada and elsewhere is poor: mental illness is covered mainly in the context of (as a reason for) crime and violence; there are few good news …

The final speaker in this "Compromised Data" session is Anatoliy Gruzd, whose interest is in the automated discovery and visualisation of communication networks from social media data. (He's also just launched a new journal in this field, Big Data and Society.) How can such networks be discovered and visualised, and how can we evaluate the sense of community which may exist in them?

Social network analysis enables us to investigate the connections between users in social networks. It reduces large quantities of messages to a smaller number of nodes exchanging communication; it can track longitudinal developments over …

The next speaker at "Compromised Data" is Robert Gehl, whose interest is in critically reverse-engineering social media as a form of critiquing and producing alternatives to current social media platforms. This builds on reverse-engineering approaches in engineering, economics and law, on science and technology as well as software studies, and on critical humanism.

Reverse-engineering is a method of producing knowledge by dissociating human-made artefacts. Such knowledge is then used to produce new associated artefacts that bear some relation to the old. Some reverse-engineering has merely functional and pragmatic reasons, but in other cases reverse-engineering takes a more critical …

The next speaker at "Compromised Data" is Ingrid Hoofd, whose interest is in how new technologies make certain types of representation possible or impossible. The neoliberalisation of universities, for example, leads to a quantification of research data which generates poor research. This is the violence of numbers: how do we assess the way new media technologies change the face of social sciences research, then?

Social media data mining methodology provides an allegory of the technological apparatuses that use it. This hinges on these technologies' propensity to speed up, and on the associated notion of change. There is a …

The second day of "Compromised Data" starts with Lisa Blackman, who is tracking social media controversies and mapping information contagion. Can we use quantitative methods in non-positivist ways to understand these processes?

Lisa introduces the idea of haunted data, and suggests that we need to think about digital methods as performative: we need to move behind infographics when thinking about visualising data. Part of this is about priming: creating an experimental apparatus that makes people feel that their actions are self-directed, but actually generates such actions through the interventions of the apparatus. Such research is controversial because of …

The final speaker on this first day of "Compromised Data" is Sidneyeve Matrix, who shifts our focus towards geosocial information as generated by smartphones and other mobile devices. Only 12% of US users as surveyed by the Pew Centre posted Foursquare check-ins in 2013, for example, down from 18% in 2011 - but this may mask a greater take-up of other location-based services, not least the Frequent Locations functionality in iOS7.

There is a continuing trend towards the consumerisation of geodata. Geosocial cultural arrangements are explored through the use of mobile communication patterns, but such analysis is notoriously …

The next speaker at "Compromised Data" this afternoon is Asta Zelenkauskaite, who notes the increasing interweaving of social and mainstream media; based on the properties of 'big data' it therefore becomes important to explore how users engage with mass media and cross-media contexts. How relevant are 'big data' to the mass communication field?

Traditional media outlets have been mainly focussing on a quasi-passive engagement with media content, while social media now offer a two-way interaction by providing back channel functionality. Mass media content, user-generated content, and user interactions' digital imprints are coming together to shape this cross-media environment. …

The next speaker at "Compromised Data" is Joanna Redden, whose interest is in government uses of 'big data', especially in Canada. There's a great deal of hype surrounding 'big data' in government at the moment, which needs to be explored from a critical perspective; the data rush has been compared to the gold rush, with similarly utopian claims - here especially around the ability for 'big data' to support decision-making and democratic engagement, and the contribution 'big data'-enabled industries can make to the GDP.

But how are 'big data' actually being used in government contexts? New tools and …

The final presentation in this "Compromised Data" session is by Mary Francoli and Dan Paré, who focus on the question of engagement and mobilisation in a time of rapidly evolving social media use. One initial observation is that these terms lack definitional clarity - there are some very high-level definitions (e.g. building on UN definitions), but these remain vague; political and civic engagement are conflated, and specific forms of engagement are not necessarily defined in detail.

Simply voting is a form of engagement, for example, but is clearly different from other, more complex forms of political engagement. The …