Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Big Data: Commercial Satellite Imagery and Its Promise of Speed and Transparency

Technological Expectations and Global Politics: Three Waves of Enthusiasm in NonGovernmental Remote Sensing

“…In this sense, practices, actor relations and artifacts inform the enthusiasm about the commercialization of satellite imagery. As such, the approach features a socio-material understanding of technology similar to ANT and socio-technical imaginaries both of which are increasingly adopted in IR scholarship [29,31,34,35,83,84]. However, the sociology of expectations more decidedly turns to the future as an analytical object.…”

“…Such studies frequently reconstruct bygone controversies and then-anticipated futures during technology development. On the other hand, the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries [32,33] more decidedly engages with the co-productive relationship between politics and technology in technological futures but hitherto found a limited resonance in IR scholarship e with a few exceptions [34,35]. Sheila Jasanoff [36] defines sociotechnical imaginaries "as collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology."…”

“…While there already are a few examples of how nongovernmental actors employ machine learning and predictive analytics [73,74], the overarching controversy of the third wave concerns coping with the inflow of large amounts of data. Both NGOs and satellite imagery providers face techno-political barriers how to analytically and economically deal with geospatial big data [34]. While analytical skills of NGOs already play an important role in the second wave, technology adoption is further complicated when expectations about the use of machine learning call for the expertise of computer and data scientists.…”

Public AI imaginaries: How the debate on artificial intelligence was covered in Danish newspapers and magazines 1956–2021

“…In line with Jasanoff's (2015aJasanoff's ( , 2015b definition of sociotechnical imaginaries, scholars have studied how (big) data imaginaries (e.g., Beer, 2019;Lehtiniemi & Ruckenstein, 2019;Olbrich & Witjes, 2016;Ruppert, 2018;Williamson, 2017) or algorithmic imaginaries (e.g., Bucher, 2017;Lomborg & Kapsch, 2019;Mager, 2015;Seaver, 2017) feed into social change. For instance, Beer (2019) highlights the sociotechnical nature of imaginaries in an analysis of how visions of (big) data futures instigate social practice when they are deployed as "actual data solutions" within the data analytics industry.…”

Inforsat: An Online Sentinel-2 Multi-Temporal Analysis Tool Set Using R Cran

“…Seen together, by all means these data can be assigned to the bigdata paradigm, as they have high volumes, variety and velocity, due to the number of sensors in orbit recording different types of EEM information at different times. It is one of the foreseen future situations that a constant influx of Earth Observation (EO) data will accelerate processes and analyses (Olbrich and Witjes, 2016).…”