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The Thirteen Ps of Big Data


RESEARCH MAY 2015
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.2900.8800

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Deborah Lupton
University of Canberra
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The Thirteen Ps of Big Data

Deborah Lupton
Faculty of Arts & Design, University of Canberra

(Blog post originally published on my blog This Sociological Life, 11 May 2015:
https://simplysociology.wordpress.com/2015/05/11/the-thirteen-ps-of-big-data/)

Big data are often described as being characterised by the 3 Vs: volume (the large scale
of the data); variety (the different forms of data sets that can now be gathered by digital
devices and software); and velocity (the constant generation of these data). An online
search of the Vs of big data soon reveals that some commentators have augmented
these Vs with the following: value (the opportunities offered by big data to generate
insights); veracity/validity (the accuracy/truthfulness of big data); virality (the speed at
which big data can circulate online); and viscosity (the resistances and frictions in the
flow of big data) (see Uprichard, 2013 for a list of even more Vs).
These characterisations principally come from the worlds of data science and data
analytics. From the perspective of critical data researchers, there are different ways in
which big data can be described and conceptualised (see the further reading list below
for some key works in this literature). Anthropologists Tom Boellstorff and Bill Maurer
(2015a) refer to the 3 Rs: relation, recognition and rot. As they explain, big data are
always formed and given meaning via relationships with human and nonhuman actors
that extend beyond data themselves; how data are recognised qua data is a sociocultural
and political process; and data are susceptible to rot, or deterioration or unintended
transformation as they are purposed and repurposed, sometimes in unintended ways.
Based on my research and reading of the critical data studies literature, I have
generated my own list that can be organised around what I am choosing to call the
Thirteen Ps of big data. As in any such schema, this Thirteen Ps list is reductive, acting
as a discursive framework to organise and present ideas. But it is one way to draw
attention to the sociocultural dimensions of big data that the Vs lists have thus far
failed to acknowledge, and to challenge the taken-for-granted attributes of the big data
phenomenon.

1. Portentous: The popular discourse on big data tends to represent the


phenomenon as having momentous significance for commercial, managerial,
governmental and research purposes.
2. Perverse: Representations of big data are also ambivalent, demonstrating not
only breathless excitement about the opportunities they offer but also fear and
anxiety about not being able to exert control over their sheer volume and
unceasing generation and the ways in which they are deployed (as evidenced in
metaphors of big data that refer to deluges and tsunamis that threaten to
overwhelm us).
3. Personal: Big data incorporate, aggregate and reveal detailed information about
peoples personal behaviours, preferences, relationships, bodily functions and
emotions.
4. Productive: The big data phenomenon is generative in many ways, configuring
new or different ways of conceptualising, representing and managing selfhood,
the body, social groups, environments, government, the economy and so on.
5. Partial: Big data can only ever tell a certain narrative, and as such they offer a
limited perspective. There are many other ways of telling stories using different
forms of knowledges. Big data are also partial in the same way as they are
relational: only some phenomena are singled out and labelled as data, while
others are ignored. Furthermore, more big data are collected on some groups
than others: those people who do not use or have access to the internet, for
example, will be underrepresented in big digital data sets.
6. Practices: The generation and use of big data sets involve a range of data
practices on the part of individuals and organisations, including collecting
information about oneself using self-tracking devices, contributing content on
social media sites, the harvesting of online transactions by the internet empires
and the data mining industry and the development of tools and software to
produce, analyse, represent and store big data sets.
7. Predictive: Predictive analytics using big data are used to make inferences about
peoples behaviour. These inferences are becoming influential in optimising or
limiting peoples opportunities and life chances, including their access to
healthcare, insurance, employment and credit.
8. Political: Big data is a phenomenon that involves power relations, including
struggles over ownership of or access to data sets, the meanings and
interpretations that should be attributed to big data, the ways in which digital
surveillance is conducted and the exacerbation of socioeconomic disadvantage.
9. Provocative: The big data phenomenon is controversial. It has provoked much
recent debate in response to various scandals and controversies related to the
digital surveillance of citizens by national security agencies, the use and misuse
of personal data, the commercialisation of data and whether or not big data
poses a challenge to the expertise of the academic social sciences.
10. Privacy: There are growing concerns in relation to the privacy and security of
big data sets as people are becoming aware of how their personal data are used
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for surveillance and marketing purposes, often without their consent or


knowledge and the vulnerability of digital data to hackers.
11. Polyvalent: The social, cultural, geographical and temporal contexts in which big
data are generated, purposed and repurposed by a multitude of actors and
agencies, and the proliferating data profiles on individuals and social groups that
big data sets generate give these data many meanings for the different entities
involved.
12. Polymorphous: Big data can take many forms as data sets are generated,
combined, manipulated and materialised in different ways, from 2D graphics to
3D-printed objects.
13. Playful: Generating and materialising big data sets can have a ludic quality: for
self-trackers who enjoy collecting and sharing information on themselves or
competing with other self-trackers, for example, or for data visualisation experts
or data artists who enjoy manipulating big data to produce beautiful graphics.

Critical Data Studies - Further Reading List


Andrejevic, M. (2014) The big data divide, International Journal of Communication, 8,
1673-89.
Boellstorff, T. (2013) Making big data, in theory, First Monday, 18 (10).
http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4869/3750 , accessed 8
October 2013.
Boellstorff, T. & Maurer, B. (2015a) Introduction, in T. Boellstorff & B. Maurer (eds.),
Data, Now Bigger and Better! (Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press), 1-6.
Boellstorff, T. & Maurer, B. (eds.) (2015b) Data, Now Bigger and Better! Chicago, IL:
Prickly Paradigm Press.
boyd, d. & Crawford, K. (2012) Critical questions for Big Data: provocations for a
cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon, Information, Communication
& Society, 15 (5), 662-79.
Burrows, R. & Savage, M. (2014) After the crisis? Big Data and the methodological
challenges of empirical sociology, Big Data & Society, 1 (1).
Cheney-Lippold, J. (2011) A new algorithmic identity: soft biopolitics and the
modulation of control, Theory, Culture & Society, 28 (6), 164-81.
Crawford, K. & Schultz, J. (2014) Big data and due process: toward a framework to
redress predictive privacy harms, Boston College Law Review, 55 (1), 93-128.
Gitelman, L. & Jackson, V. (2013) Introduction, in L. Gitelman (ed.), Raw Data is an
Oxymoron. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 1-14.
Helles, R. & Jensen, K.B. (2013) Making data - big data and beyond: Introduction to the
special issue, First Monday, 18 (10).
http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4860/3748 , accessed 8
October 2013.
Kitchin, R. (2014) The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and
Their Consequences. London: Sage.
Kitchin, R. & Lauriault, T. (2014) Towards critical data studies: charting and unpacking
data assemblages and their work, Social Science Research Network.
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http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2474112 , accessed 27
August 2014.
Lupton, D. (2015) Chapter 5: A Critical Sociology of Big Data in Digital Sociology.
London: Routledge.
Lyon, D. (2014) Surveillance, Snowden, and Big Data: Capacities, consequences, critique,
Big Data & Society, 1 (2).
http://bds.sagepub.com/content/1/2/2053951714541861 , accessed 13
December 2014.
Madden, M. (2014) Public Perceptions of Privacy and Security in the post-Snowden Era,
Pew Research Internet Project: Pew Research Center.
McCosker, A. & Wilken, R. (2014) Rethinking big data as visual knowledge: the sublime
and the diagrammatic in data visualisation, Visual Studies, 29 (2), 155-64.
Robinson, D., Yu, H., and Rieke, A. (2014) Civil Rights, Big Data, and Our Algorithmic
Future. No place of publication provided: Robinson + Yu.
Ruppert, E. (2013) Rethinking empirical social sciences, Dialogues in Human Geography,
3 (3), 268-73.
Tene, O. & Polonetsky, J. (2013) A theory of creepy: technology, privacy and shifting
social norms, Yale Journal of Law & Technology, 16, 59-134.
Thrift, N. (2014) The sentient city and what it may portend, Big Data & Society, 1 (1).
http://bds.sagepub.com/content/1/1/2053951714532241.full.pdf+html ,
accessed 1 April 2014.
Tinati, R., Halford, S., Carr, L., and Pope, C. (2014) Big data: methodological challenges
and approaches for sociological analysis, Sociology, 48 (4), 663-81.
Uprichard, E. (2013) Big data, little questions?, Discover Society, (1).
http://www.discoversociety.org/focus-big-data-little-questions/ , accessed 28
October 2013.
van Dijck, J. (2014) Datafication, dataism and dataveillance: Big Data between scientific
paradigm and ideology, Surveillance & Society, 12 (2), 197-208.
Vis, F. (2013) A critical reflection on Big Data: considering APIs, researchers and tools as
data makers, First Monday, 18 (10).
http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4878/3755 , accessed
27 October 2013.

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