دانلود کتاب مطالعات داده های حیاتی

Data are incredibly important in today’s contemporary world. They form the basis for scientific progress, constitute the evidence for social policy and business decisions, underpin the workings of management and governance, and have become a major economic asset, with data markets and data services forming a significant component of the world’s economy. Yet, until recently, data received relatively little scrutiny. Traditionally, data have been treated as neutral, unproblematic measures that form the building blocks for information and knowledge or form the input for computation. While data were critical for answering scientific questions and essential for digital systems to work, attention was focused on what the data were being used for, and rarely the data themselves. If data were the focus of attention, it was usually in relation to data quality, data access or some technical aspect of their production, management, and use. This started to change two decades ago. Increasing datafication, the rise of big data and open data, and the proliferation of data infrastructures and data-driven systems and their mediation of all aspects of everyday life, led to data becoming the central focus of analysis for scholars across a number of disciplines (e.g., Media Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Sociology, Geography, Anthropology, Philosophy, Library and Archive Studies, and Data Science). Importantly, these studies did not treat data in a commonsensical way, but rather sought to critically interrogate their nature and the politics, praxes, and implications of their production and use. In 2014, these studies were identified as a new field of academic enquiry and labelled as Critical Data Studies (CDS) (Dalton and Thatcher, 2014). CDS is an umbrella term to describe the collection of scholars and their work that take data as their primary research object (Iliadis and Russo, 2016; Richterich, 2018; Hepp et al., 2022; Kitchin, 2022). CDS theorises the nature of data, how they are produced and shared, the institutional and infrastructural apparatus assembled to manage and govern the data lifecycle, how data are used to make sense of the world and to perform practical action, and examines whose agenda data and data-driven systems serve. CDS never takes data and their use at face value, but actively reflects on and questions data forms, processes, and purposes, and considers what is at stake when data are produced and deployed to create knowledge, manage society, derive business value, and perform numerous other tasks. Philosophically, CDS is rooted in a number of schools of thought that sit under the umbrella of critical social theory, such as feminism, poststructuralism, structuralism, and critical realism. These ways of thinking actively question the epistemology and methodology of the scientific method and centre questions of politics and power in the production of knowledge, and in understanding how social and technical processes work in practice to create the world in which we live. Methodologically, CDS most often uses qualitative methods to examine the politics and praxes of data work, but it also uses quantitative methods, though it does so using a post-positivist framing, such as those adopted within feminist data science, critical GIS or radical statistics. The aim is to produce reflexive and situated knowledges about and with data.