Digital data and professional

practices: New
accountabilities, stewardship,
and literacies

Terrie Lynn Thompson Jan 2018

datafication: “ways of seeing
and engaging with the world
by means of digital data”
(Gray, 2016)
wearable physical activity tracker
datafication of teaching &
research practices
learning analytics: the
measurement, collection,
analysis and reporting of data
about learners and their
contexts, for purposes of
understanding and optimizing
learning and the environments
in which it occurs
(Long & Siemens, 2011)
• algorithms to write earnings
reports and sports commentary
• eBay and online dispute
resolution software to replace
the lawyer
• tax preparation software rather
than accountants
• robotic pharmacists

changing how expertise of specialists is

made available in society
(Susskind & Susskind, 2016)
 why does this matter?
• the way the digital can “strip down complex phenomena into binary form
so that they can be manipulated more easily” (Savage, 2015). issues can
be made simpler

• datafication is “taking a process or activity that was previously invisible

and turning it into data”: data that can then be “tracked, monitored, and
optimized” (Sylvester, 2013). “dark data” and also “dark activities” are now
being made visible

• outsourcing to algorithms creates a significant shift in responsibility and

control (Marsden, 2015)

• powerful discourse that encourages professionals to view digital

technologies as a “natural and naturalised part of their work” (Edwards &
Fenwick, 2016)
platform capitalism: the intersection of
commercial technological
infrastructures
and the new currency of data
Players like Google and Facebook enable access
while serving a set of global commercial
purposes as they harvest and monetise data
generated through everyday work-learning-living
activities. Operate in gray areas of accountability
and governance around data practices.
How do we live with and trust the
algorithms and data analysis used to
shape key features of our lives?
 
Digital data as the raw material for
much of what is unfolding in
people’s everyday work, learning,
and living. Most days, most people
will generate, interact with, and
interpret some kind of digitally-
rendered data: some knowable and
accessible by the person and much
that churns quietly in the
background.
 think about the data implicated in your own work-
learning-living activities

1. What data do you use to make decisions about what you or

others should do? about policies or processes?

2. What data is used to make decisions that impact your

work-learning-living activities?

3. What data would you like to have to help with things you
need to do: work – learning – living?

4. Have you ever been affected by a “data disaster”?

how the use of learning analytics, coupled
with social network analysis and
visualization software, worked in and on
the research and teaching practices in an
online post-graduate course

the oPEN project (online professional

education network)
today
• posthumanism
• a posthuman sociomaterial analysis of
datafication practices (aka learning
analytics)
• implications vis a vis re-distribution of
labour: accountabilities, stewardship &
literacies/fluencies
theory and methodology
when computational
“solutions” come from an
“instrumentalising humanistic
perspective which sees the
technology as in service to
social ‘need’, resistance to such
methods also takes humanistic
forms positing essentialism”
(such as the human “touch”) as
the “main locus for resistance
to cold technocratic
imperative” (Bayne, 2015)
Badminton 2000
Braidotti 2013
Barad 2003
Graham 2002
Hayles 1999
Wolfe 2010
posthumanism pushes beyond human-centric notions of
being to a more hybrid and humble conception of human
actions in the world … re-envisioning the human as
intimately entangled and inseparable from technologies,
environments, and other species
sofas that
shout ‘sit!’
beyond who or what to
who-what

calling into question the

givenness of the differential
categories of “human” and
“nonhuman” (Barad, 2003)
 Seeing Double
One does not have to fix one’s gaze on a
material world from which all traces of humanity
have been expunged; or on its residue – a social
world from which the material world has been
magically whisked away by linguistic conjuring
tricks. … One can try seeing double: seeing the
human and the nonhuman at once, without
trying to strip either away. This shift in the unit
of analysis is the move to a posthumanist
perspective (Pickering, 2005)
Attending to objects, attuning to things
• gathering anecdotes
8 Heuristics
• following the actors to Interview
• listening for the invitational quality of things
• studying breakdowns, accidents & anomalies Things
 
Loosening the meshwork, analyzing digital
materialities
• discerning the spectrum of human-technology
relations
• applying the Laws of Media
• unraveling translations
• tracing responses and passages

Researching a posthuman world: Interviews with

digital objects (Adams & Thompson, 2016 )
 the oPEN project
• 16-week masters level online course

• 43 practicing professionals, 2 university tutors, and 5

Critical Colleagues (senior teachers recruited from the
partner local authorities)

• students required to actively engage with a range of online

artefacts, post in discussion forums and blogs, and use wikis
for group work in order to advance the learning of the
collective

• examined the digital traces of student activity in the online

space: relationship to learning?
Learning Analytics
measure learning efforts

predict learning outcomes

recommend learning pathways

& strategies
data detours
Adams, C., & Thompson, T. L. (2016). Researching a posthuman
world: Interviews with digital objects. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wilson, A., Watson, C., Thompson, T. L., Drew, V. and Doyle, S. (2017).
Learning analytics: Challenges and limitations. Teaching in Higher
Education.

Thompson, T. L. (June, 2017). Digital data and professional practices: A posthuman

exploration of new responsibilities and tensions. Paper to be presented at 3rd ProPEL
International Conference (Linköping, Sweden).

Wilson, A., Thompson, T. L., Watson, C., Drew, V., & Doyle, S. (2017). Big data and
learning analytics: Singular or plural? First Monday, 22(4).

Watson, C., Wilson, A., Drew, V., & Thompson, T. L. (2016a). Criticality and the exercise
of politeness in online spaces for professional learning. The Internet and Higher
Education, 31, 43-51.

Watson, C., Wilson, A., Drew, V., & Thompson, T. L. (2016b). Small data, online learning
and assessment practices in higher education: a case study of failure?. Assessment &
Evaluation in Higher Education, 1-16.
 student—instructor—
device—network—LMS
—digital resource
Visualizations

• re-present patterns of interactions

• may inform professional decisions
• are implicated in changes in
professional practices
We tell ourselves that we live in an
era of aggregation and automation.
From this perspective, raw data
patiently await assembly….Click.
Shuttled from data storage to a
computing center, the analytical
engines of the twenty-first century
assemble statistics, graphs, and
ever more clever visualizations in
response to these and many other
questions we have not yet thought
to ask. (Ribes & Jackson, 2015)
imagining data as:
temperamental and delicate
creatures, whose existence
and fraternity with one
another depend on a complex
assemblage of people,
instruments, and practices
dedicated to their production,
management, and care
(Ribes & Jackson, 2015)
 the myriad of translations of the data
prompts a re-thinking of what data is and
what it does
data visualizations are not
neutral: they come with
particular “ways of seeing”:
particular analytic, mediation,
and narrative regimes (Gray et al.,
2016)
datafication as messy process: re-distribution of
labour between human actors and digital
counterparts
 So …

• Who-what is being datafied? Who-what is doing this work?

• Is it the work of the professional to “tame” masses of potentially
unruly data? Or perhaps it is to avoid getting run over by these
rabbles of data?
• How is the availability of expertise changing?  
• How do we open the black-box of “automated, algocratic systems”
(Prinsloo, 2017)?  
• How do we continue to value (professional) work “within an
algorithmic culture defined by the new potentials of computation
and digital data” (Bayne, 2015)?
 what “we” knew and how we knew it?
NodeXL, along with its charts and graphics, classified the student
learning activities in ways that have an array of consequences.

The relationships between patterns of interaction are not simply and

rigidly correlated with final performance.

The many anomalies and contradictions: student-resource interaction

data generated from this course—and illustrated through
visualizations—are a powerful reminder of the diversity of
approaches to online study.

Professionals in these spaces should “look beyond the average of all

outcomes” and instead to the “best outcome for each student”.

Wilson et al. (2017)

data and data
analytics at
the centre of
a storm
around
ownership,
sovereignty,
and
stewardship
data controversies
 workers are dealing with
datafication and
increasing demands to
make decisions, be
accountable, work with,
and care for the digital
data moving in and out of
their day-to-day work
 There is no easy way for the average digitally
literate instructor to see, question, or change
the algorithms that generate the data in the LMS
and its assemblages of charts, tables, and
warnings.

Student A
 study “data controversies”: new theorizing to
offer “new vocabularies of ‘data speak’ and new
repertoires of ‘data work’ to ensure that
different publics have the required literacies and
capacities to align these processes with their
interests” (Gray 2016)
fluencies: confluence of digital
expertise, responsibility / citizenship,
criticality, innovation & well-being in
human-technology interactions

posthuman fluencies (Adams &

Thompson, 2016)
Student A

Student B

Student C

Student D
 does the future researcher need to be
“statistician, mathematician, computer scientist,
database administrator, coder, hardware guru,
systems administrator, researcher and
interrogator, all in one” or move to a more team
based approach? (Prinsloo et al., 2015)
worker + digital co-workers

but asymmetries of resources,

capacities, and power to participate in,
and influence, processes of data
production and interpretation (Gray 2016)
Guidelines on the Ethical Use of Student Data: A
Draft Narrative Framework (Prinsloo, 2017)
1 The moral relational duty of learning analytics
2 Defining student success in the nexus of student,
institution and macro-societal agencies and context
3 Understanding data as framed and framing
4 Student data sovereignty
5 Accountability
6 Transparency
7 Co-responsibility
How do worker-learners, work
organizations, and educational
institutions understand their choices,
decisions, responsibilities,
accountability, compromises,
influence, and leadership capacities as
they engage with differently powerful
digital actors, and especially data?
Yates et al. (2017) raise several pressing
issues:
• How do we wrestle with the power and
accountability for data and algorithms?
• What are the new data literacies required
by citizens and organizations?
• How well do we understand how people
are interacting with data and algorithms?
• What new forms of digital inclusion and
exclusion are emerging?
 
more questions
What new spaces of public dialogue can be created? “Data activism”
and its push for “data from below”?

Data itself is at the centre of storm around ownership, sovereignty, and

stewardship. How do worker-learners understand the value of their
digital data and the role it plays in their life activities?

What new critical digital and data fluencies (and leadership) are
needed in the face of the growing datafication and digital automation
of work, learning, and living?
 
How are governance practices and regulatory environments dealing
with the melee of data issues? In light of increasing platform capitalism
who is accountable for what WRT data practices?

 
• Identify the digital tools, systems, and services
at play in a particular practice and then ask:
Who created these and why?
• What data do these digital tools, systems, and
services render?
• What hidden limitations might there be to the
data rendered via these digital tools, systems,
and services? (Lynch & Gerber, 2017)
 terrielynn.thompson@stir.ac.uk
propelmatters.stir.ac.uk

Diamante Murru