What do data portals do? Tracing the politics of online devices for making data public

Abstract

The past decade has seen the rise of “data portals” as online devices for making data public. They have been accorded a prominent status in political speeches, policy documents, and official communications as sites of innovation, transparency, accountability, and participation. Drawing on research on data portals around the world, data portal software, and associated infrastructures, this paper explores three approaches for studying the social life of data portals as technopolitical devices: (a) interface analysis, (b) software analysis, and (c) metadata analysis. These three approaches contribute to the study of the social lives of data portals as dynamic, heterogeneous, and contested sites of public sector datafication. They are intended to contribute to critically assessing how participation around public sector datafication is invited and organized with portals, as well as to rethinking and recomposing them.

Exploring the practices of “data-driven innovation” in the European public sector

“…Some of our contributions offer promising avenues to reconstruct data innovation practices, for instance, by employing the ethnographic strategy of “scavenging” material (Wieringa, 2023) to assemble a variety of empirical sources that account for the different symbolic and material aspects constitutive of data innovation practices. Another promising route is by employing novel digital methods approaches that shed light on the material aspects of data infrastructure, how they envision and enact particular kinds of good social relations, and how these material aspects can be repurposed to study data practices (Gray, 2023). As Gray argues, the material traces of digital infrastructures and changes to these infrastructures may offer empirical insights into how conventions and imaginations of public value and public life are materialized and may enable or constrain certain actions with data and among actors.…”

“…We furthermore suggest that future studies could expand concepts and methods for studying data practices. While future works may usefully adopt micro-sociological research methods to reconstruct the daily activities of frontline staff, we note that the study of "larger" phenomena beyond micro-sociological settings, such as "data ecosystems" or "algorithmic systems" does not have to rely on micro-sociological concepts and methods (Nicolini, 2016, see also Gray, 2023;Wieringa, 2023). A practice-oriented study of these phenomena-for instance, how data ecosystems are done in practice-could take inspiration from recent studies of media practices that take patterns of media consumption as an entry point into the infrastructural constraints that matter for practical action (Magaudda and Piccioni, 2019;Dencik, 2020).…”

Comparison of open science portals of India: web accessibility study

“…The website has been viewed and data was downloaded 32.05 m and 9.4 m times, respectively. Gray (2023) explored the three methods, including interface, software and metadata analysis, to examine the social life of data portals as technologically political tools. They are meant to assist in rethinking and recomposing portals as well as critically evaluating how engagement around public sector data collection is sought and organized.…”