[ecrea] CFP -- European J of Cultural Studies special issue on Data Mining / Analytics

Call for Papers

The European Journal of Cultural Studies

Special issue on Data Mining / Analytics

Editors: Mark Andrejevic, University of Queensland, Australia; Alison 
Hearn, University of Western Ontario, Canada; Helen Kennedy, University 
of Leeds, UK.

The widespread use of social media has given rise to new forms of 
monitoring, mining and aggregation strategies designed to monetize the 
huge volumes of data such usage produces. Social media monitoring and 
analysis industries, experts and consultancies have emerged offering a 
broad range of social media intelligence and reputation management 
services. Such services typically involve a range of analytical methods 
(sentiment analysis, opinion mining, social network analysis, machine 
learning, natural language processing), often offered in black-boxed 
proprietary form, in order to gain insights into public opinion, mood, 
networks and relationships and identify potential word-of-mouth 
influencers. Ostensibly, these various forms of data mining, analytics 
and machine learning also are paving the way for the development of a 
more intelligent or ‘semantic’ Web 3.0, offering a more ‘productive and 
intuitive’ user experience. As commercial and non-commercial 
organisations alike seek to monitor, influence, manage and direct social 
media conversations, and as global usage of social media expands, 
questions surface that challenge celebratory accounts of the 
democratizing, participatory possibilities of social media. Remembering 
that Web 2.0 was always intended as a business manifesto – O’Reilly’s 
early maxims included, after all, ‘data is the next Intel inside’, 
‘users add value’ and ‘collaboration as data collection’ – we need to 
interrogate social media not only as communication tools, but also as 
techno-economic constructs with important implications for the 
management of populations and the formation of subjects. Data mining and 
analytics are about much more than targeted advertising: they envision 
new strategies for forecasting, targeting, and decision making in a 
growing range of social realms (employment, education, health care, 
policing, urban planning, epidemiology, etc.) with the potential to 
usher in new, unaccountable, and opaque forms of discrimination, 
sorting, inclusion and exclusion. As Web 3.0 and the ‘big data’ it 
generates moves inexorably toward predictive analytics and the overt 
technocratic management of human sociality, urgent questions arise about 
how such data are gathered, constructed and sold, to what ends they are 
deployed, who gets access to them, and how their analysis is regulated 
(boyd and Crawford 2012).

This special issue aims to bring together scholars who interrogate 
social media intelligence work undertaken in the name of big data, big 
business and big government. It aims to draw together 
empirically-grounded and theoretically-informed analyses of the key 
issues in contemporary forms of data mining and analytics from across 
disparate fields and methodologies. . Contributions are invited that 
address a range of related issues. Areas for consideration could 
include, but are not limited to:

Political economy of social media platforms
Algorithmic culture
User perspectives on data mining
The politics of data visualisation
Big data and the cultural industries
Data journalism
The social life of big data methods
Inequalities and exclusions in data mining
Affective prediction and control
Data mining and new subjectivities
Ethics, regulation and data mining
Conceptualising big/data/mining
Social media intelligence at work
Social media and surveillance
Critical histories of data mining, sorting, and surveillance.

Prospective contributors should email an abstract of 500-700 words to 
the issue editors by 9th December 2013 (to (h.kennedy /at/ leeds.ac.uk)). Full 
articles should be submitted to Helen Kennedy ((h.kennedy /at/ leeds.ac.uk)) by 
12th May 2014. Manuscripts must be no longer than 7,000 words. Articles 
should meet with The European Journal of Cultural Studies’ aim to 
promote empirically based, theoretically informed cultural studies; 
essayist discussion papers are not normally accepted by this journal. 
All articles will be refereed: invitation to submit a paper to the 
special issue in no way guarantees that the paper will be published; 
this is dependent on the review process.

Details

Abstract deadline: 9th December 2013 (to (h.kennedy /at/ leeds.ac.uk));
Decisions on abstracts communicated by 13th January 2014;
Article submission deadline: 12th May 2014 (to (h.kennedy /at/ leeds.ac.uk));
Final submission/review process complete: 13th October 2014;
For publication in 2015.