Critical Data Studies: Concepts and Foundations

Vocabulary flashcards defining foundational concepts, theoretical debates, and analytical terms from Craig Dalton and Jim Thatcher's 2014 paper on Critical Data Studies.

Critical Data Studies

A systemic, critically-informed approach within geography and related fields that critiques new regimes of data by situating technologies, analyses, and data practices within their political, economic, and social contexts.

Epiphenomenality of 'Big Data'

The characteristic of 'big data' as a term specific to a particular historical moment whose dominance is shifting as it recedes into the unconsidered banality of everyday life, similar to the earlier trajectory of the term 'e-commerce'.

Precursors of 'Big Data'

The historical bodies of knowledge and practices that set the conditions for big data, including 19th-century statistical mapping, social physics, geography's quantitative revolution, and geodemographic targeted marketing.

Power Geometries of Data

The asymmetric structural relationships and flows of influence facilitated by big data among private corporations (e.g., Google, Acxiom, Foursquare), state agencies (e.g., the NSA), and consumer-citizens.

Instrumental Critiques of 'Big Data'

Critiques that focus narrowly on big data's limitations, failures, or inability to fulfill positivist modeling claims, which ultimately remain trapped within the same epistemological framing as big data itself.

Hard Technological Determinism

The conceptual perspective that technology acts autonomously out of context to determine social forms, which critical data studies rejects in favor of an understanding of recursive relationships shaped by capital accumulation and social resistance.

Technological Imaginary (of Big Data)

A mythological belief in the absolute value of quantification and faith in its capacity to model reality completely while relegating theory to a secondary role behind computation.

'Baked' Data

The concept that data is never truly raw, but is always pre-structured, encoded, and shaped by the contingent models, goals, accuracies, and cultural regimes of interpretation established by its creators.

End of Theory Claim

Chris Anderson's proposition that big data allows numbers to speak for themselves without theoretical models, widely rejected by critical scholars and data scientists who argue numbers require interpretive frameworks.

Small Data

Conventional, localized, qualitative, or smaller-scale quantitative datasets and methods that provide context, subjective intent, and thickness of description that large-scale analytics fail to capture.

Counter-Mapping

Bottom-up cartographic practices—including mapping for indigenous rights, autonomous social movements, and art—that contest the predominant imperial and capitalist power relations historically associated with maps.

Counter-Data

Emergent, liberatory, or bottom-up data practices and political interventions that seek to subvert surveillance and corporate capital accumulation in order to serve transformative social ends.

Data Fumes

Secondary digital footprints and exhaust (such as geotagged tweets or mobile location streams) produced through everyday digital usage and repurposed by researchers for geographic and behavioral analysis.

Hartshorne-Schaefer Debates

The 1950s geographic debates between idiographic (regional/particular) and nomothetic (law-seeking/quantitative) epistemologies, which historical mixed-methods geography evolved from.

Geographical Expeditions

William Bunge's activist-oriented, participatory spatial research projects in urban settings, cited as an early geographic model of critical and situated spatial analysis.