Evelyn Ruppert (Open University)
Social traceability: Being in Data
Social traceability: Being in Data
In the commercial
and government sectors transactional databases contain massive quantities of
digital information on individual conduct (purchases made, services used,
finances transferred, benefits received, licenses acquired, borders crossed,
tickets purchased). The data can be understood as on-going and dynamic
measurements of the activities, movements, and transactions of individuals. I
examine how patterns in this digital data model the social as a set of
associations not between humans but between data that registers the conduct,
movement and activities of individuals. The object of interest is not the substantive
elements of culture or social structural differentiations (e.g., class, gender)
but the links, relations and transformations within databases, which we can
think of as multiple registers of conduct that define both who we are and who
we are yet to be. What are we to make of such models of the social? I follow
the work of Gabriele Tarde to examine how these models enact the social as
multiple qualities that emerge from the aggregation of individual elements (or
digital data points). That is, I examine how the numbers and quantities
generated by digital data constitute thick, local descriptions of the social. I
develop and illustrate this through examples of UK government databases on
children and Tesco club card databases on shoppers.
