Author: Penny Andrews
Foaming Data: end to end and where will it end?
The majority of workers in the Global Norther subject to metricisation, targets, disciplinary quantified practices such as the Bradford Factor and technologically-enhanced surveillance. Now in higher education, we witness the transformation of the professions, of academia and academic librarianship, and the quantification and loss of jurisdiction experienced by professionals is hitting hard. This is a post-fact economy, an anti-expert economy, and yet the oligopoly of academic publishers that we rely on for the accreditation of our work via the publication of articles is also knee-deep in the monitoring and evaluation of every other aspect of our work. Snowball Metrics. DataSearch. SciVal. The tracking of "responsible" and "sustainable" sharing of research between colleagues. Control of the data flows and workflows we rely on, including those parts of the pipeline fed by "open" and "personal" data. Resistance is futile...or is it?