Deconstructing the data life-cycle in digital humanitarianism

ABSTRACT

The role that technologies have historically played in producing and reproducing global inequalities is well documented. Although technological innovation is associated with progress that does not mean that it necessarily narrows the gap between rich and poor, instead technological inequalities tend to exacerbate other inequalities. This applies also to information and communication technologies (ICT) and Big Data, which play an increasingly important role in humanitarianism. In this article, we address the socio-technical work that is necessary to acquire, process, store and use data and study the power relations that are embedded in these processes. We focus in particular on the use of Big Data in digital humanitarianism and argue that at each stage of the digital data life-cycle (data acquisition, data processing, data storage, and data usage and decision making) different resources are required. These include not only access to hardware, software and connectivity but also the ability to make use of the affordances of digital technologies. We posit that in the context of humanitarianism, ICT and Big Data are a particularly intriguing to study due to their ambivalent position of seeking to address inequalities while at the same time perpetuating them.

KEYWORDS:

• Big Data
• data life-cycle
• digital humanitarianism
• inequality
• power

Acknowledgement

We gratefully acknowledge the perceptive comments from Susan Halford and the anonymous reviewers which helped us to clarify our argument.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Silke Roth is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Southampton in the Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology. She is interested in the contributions of voluntary organisations, social movements, and nongovernmental organizations in achieving social justice and undoing inequality. Her publications include the books The Paradoxes of Aid Work. Passionate Professionals (Routledge 2015) and Gender Politics in the Expanding European Union (Berghahn 2008), articles in Gender & Society, Interface, Journal of Risk Research, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, Sociological Research Online, Sociology, Third World Quarterly, and various book chapters and edited volumes. [email: [email protected]].

Markus Luczak-Roesch is Senior Lecturer in Information Systems at Victoria University of Wellington in the School of Information Management. A computer scientist by education, Markus works on the formal and philosophical foundations of temporal dynamics in information sequences that can be observed in sources as diverse as online communities, literature, linguistics, and the human brain. Furthermore, he is involved in interdisciplinary collaborations to develop a holistic understanding of humans in the information age. He is also an active contributor to the public understanding of science by regularly providing lectures and media commentaries about contemporary issues of technology and society. [email: [email protected]].

Notes

1 The relationship between development and humanitarianism is long and complex (Roth, 2015). This also applies to the relationship between ICT for Development (ICT4D) and digital humanitarianism, the latter can be seen as a subcategory of the former. For a critical assessment (Unwin, 2017, ch 6) and post-colonial review of ICT4D see Chipidza and Leidner (2017).

2 Following Hutchby (2001) we define affordances as possibilities that enable and constrain action.

3 Of course, post-modern theory provides critical perspectives on technology with respect to power relations and the impact on the environment.

4 However, social media have also been used by authoritarian regimes (cf. Tufekci, 2017).

5 The proportion of individuals in Africa using the Internet has increased from 2.1% in 2005 to 21.8% in 2017 Internet access and is lowest compared to all other world regions. Moreover, it is vastly unequal within Africa, in 2016, Internet access of individuals varied between 1.18% in Eritrea and 1.88% in Somalia, 11.77% in Sierra Leone, 20% in Rwanda, 26% in Kenya, 34.67% in Ghana, 48.05% in Gabon, and 54% in South Africa. https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Pages/stat/default.aspx (accessed 4 April 2018).

6 For an illustration of the data life-cycle see the advice for researchers how to create and manage data which can be deposited and reused provided by the UK Data Archive. http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/create-manage/life-cycle

7 https://data.humdata.org/ accessed and investigated on 11 March 2018.