New methods to analyse social media data provide a powerful way to know publics and capture what they say and do. At the same time, access to these methods is uneven, with corporations and governments tending to have best access to relevant data and analytics tools. Critics raise a number of concerns about the implications dominant uses of data mining and analytics may have for the public: they result in less privacy, more surveillance and social discrimination, and they provide new ways of controlling how publics come to be represented and so understood. In this paper, we consider if a different relationship between the public and data mining might be established, one in which publics might be said to have greater agency and reflexivity vis-à-vis data power. Drawing on growing calls for alternative data regimes and practices, we argue that to enable this different relationship, data mining and analytics need to be democratised in three ways: they should be subject to greater public supervision and regulation, available and accessible to all, and used to create not simply known but reflexive, active and knowing publics. We therefore imagine conditions in which data mining is not just used as a way to know publics, but can become a means for publics to know themselves.

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This article• Critically reviews e-democracy policy thinking in the UK. • Surveys and evaluates e-democracy activity in key areas, including online forums, open government and data, e-petitioning, and more recent 'crowdsourcing' initiatives. • Defends the on-going importance of a more deliberative approach to e-democracy policy and practice. This paper evaluates the UK Government's e-democracy policy and considers what lesson should be learned for future policy and practice. Despite some isolated examples of success, we argue that policy experimentation in the area has been disappointing overall, especially when compared with the ambitious rhetoric that has surrounded it, and has failed to culminate in a coherent strategy for using the Internet to support democratic citizenship. Our analysis emphasizes the on-going importance of online deliberation in achieving inclusive, informed, and negotiated policy formation and political decision-making. In the absence of inclusive sites and practices of public deliberation, the democratic value of non-deliberative experiments with petitioning and crowdsourcing and recent government efforts to open up public information and data for citizen auditing and evaluation is likely to remain limited.For over a decade now, political leaders in the UK have paid lip service, and sometimes more, to the democratic potential of the Internet. They have supported various practical initiatives designed to promote public participation online. They have even expressed some interest in more deliberative ways of involving the public in policy-making than traditional partisan or populist opinion harvesting. However, despite some isolated examples of success, the results of these efforts have been disappointing overall and policy experimentation in the area has failed to culminate in a clear and coherent strategy for using the Internet to support democratic citizenship.In this paper, we evaluate critically the UK Government's approach to e-democracy and consider what lessons should be learned for future policy and practice. We begin by setting out how the New Labour Government initially introduced and discursively constructed e-democracy. We then focus on four main areas of e-democracy activity: experiments with deliberative forums, efforts to promote open government by liberating data online, the use of e-petitioning, and more bs_bs_banner

This paper reports on an action research project with public sector organisations in the UK which experimented with a range of digital methods (social media data mining, social network and issue network mapping, data visualisation), in order to explore their potential usefulness for the public engagement activities of these organisations. We argue that there is a need for small-scale, qualitative studies of cultures of large-scale, quantitative data like ours, to open up spaces in which to reflect critically on the methods with which such data is produced. However, in the paper we highlight the difficulties we had enacting through action research a commitment to both the potential (which might be seen as the action part of action research) and the problems (which might be seen as the research part of action research) of digital methods. Following Hammersley (2002), we suggest that an equal balance between action and research may always be difficult to sustain, in both action research and the use of digital methods. Despite this, we argue that critical discussion of digital methods needs to extend beyond academic spacesthrough this move, we suggest, we might open up a space in which to reflect on how these methods might be used for the public good.