The Data Citizen: New Ways of Being in the World

Geof Bowker (Professor, School of Information and Computer Sciences, UC-Irvine) Tuesday, September 20, 2016 — 4:00-5:30PM, NCSA Auditorium

For all its hype, the phenomenon of big data and its attendant analytics is nevertheless changing what it means to be human. This talk explores the ontological dimensions of this change with a view to teasing out the impacts of its long term historical trajectory and the ethical design issues which arise.

Geoffrey C. Bowker is Professor at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences and Director of the Values in Design Laboratory at the University of California, Irvine. From 1993-1998, he was faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s School of Information Sciences, and was a faculty affiliate of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications from 1998-1999. He currently co-directs the NSF-funded Council for Big Data, Ethics, and Society with researchers from across academia and the IT industry. He has published widely on the topics of information infrastructure, classification systems in distributed scientific collaborations, and the use of web and digital resources across disciplines.

Co-Sponsored by:
The Recovering Prairie Futures IPRH Research Cluster
The Provost’s Office
The College of Engineering
The School of Information Sciences
The Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications
The Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology

with the:
College of Education
College of Fine and Applied Arts
School of Social Work
Center for Advanced Study
Center for Digital Inclusion
Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning
Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Center for People and Infrastructures
Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Disability Resources and Educational Services
Human and Dynamics Laboratory
Illinois Informatics Institute
Institute of Communications Research
Product Design Laboratory, Industrial & Enterprise Systems Engineering Department
Social Innovation at Illinois
Spurlock Museum
Subsistence Marketplaces Initiative, College of Business
Anthropology
Asian American Studies
History
Latino/a Studies
Media and Cinema Studies
Allen Hall/Unit One LLC
Innovation LLC
Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
Office of Diversity, Equity, and Access
Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research
Office of Undergraduate Research
Makerspace Urbana