People’s encounters and entanglements with the personal digital data that they generate is a new and compelling area of research interest in this age of the ascendancy of digital data. Members of the public are now called upon to engage with a variety of forms of information about themselves and to confront the complexities of how these details are used by others. Personal digital data assemblages are configured as human bodies, digital devices, code, data, time and space come together.
Personal digital data assemblages
Over the past few years I have been researching the social aspects of personal digital data: how people understand and conceptualise these data, how they use their data, what people know about where their personal data go and how their data are used by second and third parties.I have analysed the metaphors that are used to describe digital data, the politics of digital data, the types of data that are collected by apps and self-tracking devices, how people use these software and devices and how personal digital data are materialised, or rendered into visualisations or three-dimensional objects. I have sought to theorise the ontology of personal digital data, drawing particularly sociomaterialism, feminist technoscience, cultural geography and sensory studies. (See My Recent Publications for further details.)
I am bringing these research questions together under a program that I have named ‘Living Digital Data’. This title builds on my conceptualisation of digital data as ‘lively’ in a number of ways.
Lively Data
The first element of the vitality of digital data relates to the ways in which they are generated and what happens thereafter. The personal digital information that is constantly generated contributes to data assemblages that are heterogeneous and dynamic, their character changing as more data points are added and others removed. Digital data may be described as having their own social lives as they circulate in the digital data economy and are purposed and repurposed. Second, digital data constitute forms of knowledge about human (and nonhuman) life itself and hence possess another type of vitality. Third, personal digital data have impacts on people’s lives, shaping the decisions and actions that people make and those that other people make about them. The profiles constructed from these data can influence decisions about the opportunities people have to travel, access employment, credit or insurance, the people that they meet on online dating sites, the knowledges that they hold about themselves and their bodies and those of intimate others. Finally, personal digital data are forms of livelihoods, contributing to the commodification and capitalisation of information. Indeed, they may be described as a form of biocapital, which possesses many forms of value beyond the personal: for research, commercial, security, managerial and governmental agencies.
This approach recognises the entanglements of personal digital data assemblages with human action. Not only are personal digital data assemblages partly comprised of information about human action, but their materialisations are also the products of human action, and these materialisations can influence future human action.
Rather than refer to data literacy or data management skills, I take up the term ‘data sense’ to encapsulate a broader meaning of ‘data sense’ that includes human senses (sight, sound, touch, smell and taste) and how these are part of people’s responses to data and also acknowledges the role played by digital sensors in the act of ‘sense-making’; or coming to terms with digital data.
Data Sense
This Sociological Life 
Reblogged this on Research Watch and commented:
Sociologist Deborah Lupton’s has published a useful summary of her ongoing research into the living nature of digital data. It’s a complex discussion of the way in which the data we’re all generating continuously as we go about our lives weaves between the human and non-human. I’ve reblogged it here so that you can see an example of current expert professional research that falls under the broadest heading of media technology research. For me this post also demonstrates the use by professional researchers of simple blog sites to keep their readers up to date with emerging projects.
Reblogged this on Der blog fuhriello macht das Fuhrwerk bekannt.
Reblogged this on Digital Data & Society Consortium.