Issue 41 (December 2018)
Focus on: The control of information in knowledge production today
Coordinators: José Luis de Vicente (Sónar+D) and Jordi Sánchez-Navarro (UOC)
Deadline for receiving originals: June 2018
Instructions for authors: https://bid.ub.edu/en/authors-guidelines
The current logics of information processing related to the use of big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence are the threshold of a historical transition in information management and knowledge production. This crossroads opens numerous potential conflicts that pose a set of key questions. These are conflicts related to property – Who produces data and who is the real owner?; to use – Who has the right to use the data, why and for how long?; to access – Who can see the data?; and to accountability – Who is responsible for the decisions taken with the data?; Who assesses the quality of the knowledge produced using the data?
In this context we must investigate ways in which this new order of information affects the domains of what is ethical, freedom of expression, freedom of access and use of knowledge, politics and economics.
In this dossier we want to bring together reflections on all these aspects, approaching them from different points of view, taking into account a more abstract and philosophical vision as a more specific perspective, to consider how these issues affect professionals who operate both from academia and the different industries based on the generation, distribution or exploitation of knowledge.
Moreover, we hope that this dossier will provide solutions to the need to empower all those knowledge-producing citizens in any field in the framework of the technological architectures of information we inhabit today, which in too many cases do not make clear their impact on us or open spaces for negotiation that allow us to be something more than passive subjects governed by rules we do not see or understand.
To reflect on all of this, the dossier will assess the publication of texts on the following subjects:
- New large-scale data generation dynamics.
- Economic models of personal data exploitation. The economic logic of big data (monetization of personal data on social media, data brokering).
- Management of new archives and new data heritage: Open Archives, OpenGLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) movements.
- Data enclosure and data commons (open science, citizen science, open journals, etc.).
- Data ethics (responsible personal data management).
- Decision-making in the algorithm era – algorithms as "black boxes" in decision-making based on principles without accountability. Concepts such as algorithmic accountability or algorithmic transparency.
- Ownership: dispossession processes of data generated by users on proprietary platforms (browsing history and preferences on Facebook, Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, etc.).
- Right to be forgotten.
- Individual and collective responsibility in the era of machine learning and AI.
