72 research outputs found
sj-docx-1-bds-10.1177_20539517221104087 - Supplemental material for The ontology explorer: A method to make visible data infrastructures for population management
No full textSupplemental material, sj-docx-1-bds-10.1177_20539517221104087 for The ontology explorer: A method to make visible data infrastructures for population management by Wouter Van Rossem and Annalisa Pelizza in Big Data & Society</p
Bridging silos or adding friction? The data work behind re-identification across interoperable data infrastructures
No full textThis paper investigates the technopolitics of identification across interoperable systems, with a particular focus on the identification of third-country nationals. In doing so, it reveals the data work required to establish and strengthen interoperability across systems. In the ongoing debate concerning interoperability's potential to bridge siloed organisations and their systems, the article focuses on iterative identification processes that make use of governmental interoperable infrastructures. Central to this investigation are the data matching practices and technologies employed at various stages of bureaucratic identification processes, including residency and naturalisation, extending beyond the initial identification of individuals at the border. The article introduces the concept of ‘re-identification' to characterise iterative processes that third-country nationals must undergo at different points in space and time. The analysis draws on data collected at the government immigration agency in the Netherlands and at the agency's data matching software supplier. We analyse how data matching technologies address ‘data frictions’ usually associated with interoperability. We argue that their utilisation in curbing data friction may entail new organisational costs. The findings show that data matching necessitates additional data work for effective re-identification, including formulating search queries, interpreting ambiguous results, and reconciling records across organisations and time
Scripts of Alterity: Mapping Assumptions and Limitations of the Border Security Apparatus through Classification Schemas
No full textThis article empirically maps and compares types of knowledge produced about people on the move by the European border security apparatus. Exploring two complementary analytical moments, the article addresses the stabilization of power and contingent practices within such apparatuses. We argue, first, that analyzing classification schemas implemented in data systems used within the European apparatus can reveal assumptions and limitations about people on the move—what we call “scripts of alterity.” Second, the comparative mapping of scripts of alterity reveals a de facto division of labor between scales of governance that would otherwise be invisible in policy. Utilizing the new Ontology Explorer software method as well as discursive analysis, we identify four scripts of alterity, which materialize relations in data systems and are thus relatively stabilized. Third, we identify as “de-inscriptions” forms of resistance specific to scripts of alterity. These can still be contested and we account for three contingent practices of de-inscription from scripts of alterity by conducting ethnographic observation of data systems’ use. Finally, we summarize three contributions that the “scripts of alterity” concept makes to the science and technology studies and to the critical security studies literature on the securitization of cross-border mobility.</p
The Ontology Explorer: A method to make visible data infrastructures for population management
No full textThis article details the methodology of the ‘Ontology Explorer’, a method and a tool to analyse data models underpinning information systems. The Ontology Explorer (OE) is a semantic method and javascript-based open-source tool thought to compare data models collected in different formats and used by diverse systems. It’s distinctive in two respects. First, it supports analyses of information systems which are not immediately comparable. Second, it systematically and quantitatively supports discursive analysis of ‘thin’ data models, also by detecting differences and absences through comparison. Used with data models underpinning systems for population management, the OE allows apprehending how people are ‘inscribed’ in information systems; which assumptions are made about them, which possibilities are excluded by design. The OE thus constitutes a methodology to capture authorities’ own imaginaries of populations, and the ‘scripts’ through which they enact actual people as such. Furthermore, the method allows comparing diverse authorities’ scripts, as this article shows by illustrating its functioning with information systems for population management deployed at the European borders. Our approach integrates a number of insights from early infrastructure studies and extends their methods and analytical depth to account for contemporary data infrastructures. By so doing, we hope to trigger a systematic discussion on how to extend those early methodical innovations at the semantic level to contemporary developments in digital methods
Sensing European Alterity. An analogy between sensors and Hotspots in transnational security networks
No full textThe experiment we propose to conduct in this Chapter explores the extent to which an analogy between architectures of sensor networks and trans-national security orders can have heuristic consequences and reveal new aspects of the latter term of comparison. Experiments’ goal does not pertain to the realm of discovery, but to that of creation. To what extent can an analogy between data and institutional architectures provide new insights for inquiry?
The two elements of the proposed analogy are sensor data infrastructures and border security networks for migration management. Not only such security networks heavily rely upon data infrastructures, they also articulate trans-national orders which “hit the ground” at distinctive, state-bound locales. One type of such locales are the so called “Hotspots”: migrant registration and identification centres set up at the external borders of Europe in 2015. Following literature on sensor architectures, we propose to consider four relevant features in order to unfold the analogy: the topological position of sensors as input devices, their ability to produce knowledge that would not otherwise exist, separation of concern and data reduction as design criteria.
In conducing this experiment, we also propose a methodological and epistemological challenge. First, the proposed analogy is followed to the point of reaching its own limits. Second, we further Bruno Latour's insight that textual accounts are the social scientist’s laboratory. A well written text is a laboratory in that it makes the production of realism and objectivity progressively more complicated by constantly listening to the objections exerted by humans and artefacts.
Such “listening to objections” has taken place through the analysis of regulation and evidence collected during fieldwork at Hotspots in the Hellenic Republic in 2018, as well as analysis of information systems and technical documents developed by Hellenic and European authorities. As a result of such “listening”, we suggest that migrant registration and identification centres can be understood as “sensing nodes of equivalence”. On one hand, they might be conceived of as “sensors” of European infrastructures for the “processing of alterity” (Pelizza 2019). On the other hand, registration and identification centres are not only input “points” of European migration management architectures: they are also “nodes” of equivalence in global security networks. We suggest that Hotspots are nodes tasked with making non-European standards and procedures linguistically and materially equivalent to national ones
The Next Generation Platform as a service: Composition and deployment of platforms and services
No full text
Manifesto on the Datafication of Mobility Across Borders
No full textWe present the
Manifesto on the Datafication of Mobility Across Borders
. Datafication is expanding the potential
to produce and circulate information about people at unprecedented speed and scope. This is particularly
revealed when people are “on the move” through territories of which they are not citizens. In this Manifesto,
we are interested in the datafication practices and infrastructures that produce people as radical others.
Practices of datafication and data infrastructures make people on the move kn
owable, but they do not
represent them neutrally. They often enact them as “alterity
,
” as inherently alien others against whom an
“us” can be identified. Allegedly implemented for security purposes, not always well designed, often sloppily
applied, practices and infrastructures of datafication of people on the move as others run the risk o
f
subjecting vulnerable people to a perpetual state of precarity and securitization, and polities to long
-
term
policies of expulsion. As sociologists of technology, ethnog
raphers, political scholars, and software
developers, we have witnessed with growing concern the recurrent instrumentalization of datafication for
assessing identities of people on the move. The ten principles of this Manifesto are drawn from research
cond
ucted over seven years by the
Processing Citizenship
research team and discussed with the international
scientific community involved in social studies of science and technology, migration, border and mobility
studies, and security studies. We offer these
principles based on best practices and empirical observation so
that policymakers can hold to account national and European agencies tasked with home security functions,
and IT developers can hold to account the infrastructures they design and implement
- …
