Do you live you in Brighton & Hove, and surrounding areas? We’d like to know about how the pandemic has affected you physically, mentally, financially and any support you have accessed.
There is so much data around the coronavirus pandemic – whether it’s the number of cases, the rate of testing or the numbers of people who have died. Then there’s the effect on the economy, numbers of children missing school and so on. The thing is … we know the data don’t show everything. Which is why we’d like to know how you’re doing.
The data and stories we collect will be combined with other types of data, such as national statistics, by the local data designer and artist Caroline Beavon, to create an online story that everyone can access.
Join us for the first ART/DATA/HEALTH public event, part of the 2019 Brighton Digital Festival
Four exciting speakers will discuss and demonstrate the cutting-edge opportunities and challenges that digital data tools and technologies present for health and wellbeing. What is the role of art and creativity in public engagement with health data? How is the digitization of health records changing public attitudes and medical practices? And how can virtual/augmented reality help us experience our bodies in a different way?
Full details: Wednesday 23rd October, 6.30-8pm, at Phoenix Art Space (Green Room, ground floor), 10-14 Waterloo Place, Brighton, BN2 9NB. The venue is fully wheelchair-accessible, with accessible toilets.
Who is it for: Everyone, especially people interested in digital health, health data, arts and health, immersive technologies, and data for the social good.
Sarah Ticho (@SarahTicho), specialist in arts, health and immersive technology. Sarah has extensive experience working across the interdisciplinary arts, academia, healthcare and virtual reality as a producer, curator, artist and researcher. She is the founder of Hatsumi, producer at Deep VR, and Healthcare Lead at Immerse UK.
‘My healthcare data: What does it look like and what can it be used for?’
Dr. Liz Ford (@DrElizabethFord), Senior Lecturer in Primary Care Research, Brighton and Sussex Medical School. Liz’s research focuses on mental health and dementia in primary care and community settings, with a particular focus on novel methods for using electronic health data such as patient records.
‘You can’t manage what you can’t measure’
Jo-Anne Welsh (@BOPjo_anne), CEO, Oasis Project. Jo-Anne qualified as a general nurse many years ago. Her career has included working in both acute and community settings and in the voluntary and statutory sector. Throughout her career she has been interested in health inequalities and has worked in both HIV services and for the last 12 years in Substance Misuse provision. Jo-Anne was awarded a Wellcome Fellowship for a project exploring attachment and how it relates to clients’ experiences in 2016.
‘Enhancing public engagement with health data through art practice’
Dr. Aristea Fotopoulou (@aristeaf), Principal Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Media and Communications in the School of Media, University of Brighton. Aristea is a UKRI Innovation Fellow/AHRC Leadership Fellow whose research focuses on social transformations that relate to digital media and data-driven technologies (e.g. self-tracking, wearables, big data, AI).
Moderator: Rifa Thorpe-Tracey (@rifa), an events organiser, coach, producer and advocate for inclusivity in tech. Rifa launched SheSays Brighton (@SheSaysBrighton), curates Spring Forward Festival, runs Refigure Ltd, co-hosts a weekly arts podcast and is also a yoga and meditation teacher.
My new research project is about to start (once a Research Assistant joins me: see job ad here). I have become very interested lately in what can constitute the principles of a critical data literacy that is central for citizen engagement. Big data are everywhere, and they are transforming the way we live. But making sense of data and communicating in ways that are relevant to broad audiences and for the social good requires the skills and literacy to access, analyse and interpret them. My new University of Brighton research project addresses the need to develop practices that allow citizens to work with data, to make data more relevant and appealing to communities, and enable their engagement in policy debates. Instead then of focusing on enhancing data analysis and technical skills, I am interested to explore how a combination of creative media, storytelling and analytics allows participants to generate debates around specific issues that affect their communities.
I will be working with community organisations in the Brighton area, running a Datahub workshop focusing on sexuality/gender as they play out with other social issues, such as poverty, unemployment and housing. For updates see https://criticaldataliteracy.com.
Our article in the British Journal of Sociology is (early) online . This article argues against the assumption that agency and reflexivity disappear in an age of ‘algorithmic power’ (Lash 2007). Following the suggestions of Beer (2009), it proposes that, far from disappearing, new forms of agency and reflexivity around the embedding in everyday practice of not only algorithms but also analytics more broadly are emerging, as social actors continue to pursue their social ends but mediated through digital interfaces: this is the consequence of many social actors now needing their digital presence, regardless of whether they want this, to be measured and counted. The article proposes ‘social analytics’ as a new topic for sociology: the sociological study of social actors’ uses of analytics not for the sake of measurement itself (or to make profit from measurement) but in order to fulfil better their social ends through an enhancement of their digital presence. The article places social analytics in the context of earlier debates about categorization, algorithmic power, and self-presentation online, and describes in detail a case study with a UK community organization which generated the social analytics approach. The article concludes with reflections on the implications of this approach for further sociological fieldwork in a digital world.
Cite: Couldry, N., Fotopoulou, A. and Dickens, L. (2016), Real social analytics: A contribution towards a phenomenology of a digital world. The British Journal of Sociology. doi: 10.1111/1468-4446.12183
In my article Digital and networked by default? Women’s organizations and the social imaginary of networked feminism, which got published online at the end of September in the academic journal New Media & Society, I discuss some key findings from my doctoral research. The article is a taste of what will follow in the book, hopefully coming out in early 2016 by Palgrave/MacMillan, which is really exciting news!
The article analyses the social imaginary of ‘networked feminism’ as an ideological construct of legitimate political engagement, drawing on ethnographic study conducted with London- based women’s organisations.
For many women’s groups, the desire to connect echoes libertarian visions of Web 2.0 as an ‘open’ and ‘shared’ space, and it is encouraged by widely circulating governmental narratives of digital inclusion. In the context of public services becoming digital by default, and severe funding cuts to volunteer organisations in the United Kingdom, feminist organisations are invited to revise the allocation of resources, in order to best accommodate the setting up of digital platforms, and at the same time, to maintain their political and social aims. It is argued that there are tensions between the imaginaries of a ‘digital sisterhood’ and the material realities of women’s organisations: age, lack of resources and media literacy were found to be the three most important factors that modulate participation, and in many cases become new types of exclusions of access to publicity and recognition.
By interrogating the circulation of dominant liberal narratives of digital engagement and digital inclusion that motivate new communicative practices between many feminist organisations today, the article offers a fuller understanding of networked media and activism for social justice.
Our article in the British Journal of Sociology is (early) 
Aristea Fotopoulou 