NOON: CIMS Colloquium with Jennifer Pybus, 330 Fisher Bennett Hall
“Super SDKs: Tracking Personal Data and Platform Monopolies in the Mobile Ecosystem”
VISITOR, 4-5:30pm: Jennifer Pybus, Assistant Professor, Politics; Canada Research Chair in Data, Democracy and AI, York University. Dinner afterward for today’s student hosts!
This is the first of three weeks designed around the CIMS Colloquium; the other two will take place in late October and November.
Today we welcome Jennifer Pybus, who’ll lead us through a workshop she co-developed to help participants better understand the hardware, software, and digital political economies comprising our mobile phones. As we take part, let’s think about the workshop itself as a method(ology) for participant observation and action research, and about the various complementary methods integrated into the workshop: how do we analyze seemingly impenetrable hardware and black-boxed software, how do we conduct textual analysis on technical and legal documents and datasets, how do we assess the way users experience digital privacy, etc.? And how might the creation of a software archive — that is, archive-building-as-method — constitute a form of knowledge production?
Before Dr. Pybus arrives, we’ll situate her work within a larger methodological context and outline the types of questions we’d like to ask about her work. Then, after the workshop, we’ll reverse-engineer her methods and discuss how her approaches and experiences can inform our own.
To Read for Today:
- Jennifer Pybus, “Super SDKs: Tracking Personal Data and Platform Monopolies in the Mobile,” Big Data & Society [under review; please do not circulate].
- Tobias Blanke and Jennifer Pybus, “The Material Conditions of Platforms: Monopolization Through Decentralization,” Social Media + Society 6:4 (2020).
- Jennifer Pybus, Mark Coté, and Tobias Blanke, “Hacking the Social Life of Big Data,” Big Data & Society 2:2 (2015) [note that this and the previous article are both “open access”].
- Jennifer Pybus and Alistair Alexander / Tactical Tech, “The Trillion-Dollar Platform(s) in Your Pocket: Who Really Owns Your Smartphone?” re:publica (2022).
- Skim through other issues of the aforementioned journals — especiallyBig Data & Society — and read the abstracts of a few articles that pique your interest, to familiarize yourself with other digital methods. Please browse through our Arena collection of “Digital Methods,” and check out the Price Lab for Digital Humanities.
- If the workshop itself can constitute a method, what about other forms of research “gatherings?” We’ll host our own project workshop — or salon, or potluck — next week.