HELDIG Forum // Big Data and Identity Construction

Welcome to HELDIG Forum on Monday 23.9.2019 at 14:15 with a talk by
Prof. A. Aneesh from Sociology and Global Studies, University of
Wisconsin, Milwaukee (https://uwm.edu/sociology/people/aneesh-a/). The session takes place in in Metsätalo Hall 2 (spiral staircase up from the lounge, on the right). The topic of Aneesh’s presentation is:

“Big Data and Identity Construction”

Abstract:

“While social identity is an identity continually renegotiated through linguistic interactions and social performances, bureaucratic identity – glimpsed in passports, driver’s licenses, and other identity cards – is a construction of fixed personhood for the purposes of modern organizational needs, ensuring that the member has remained essentially the same despite changes in personality, body, and behavior. With the spread of digital technologies, however, there has emerged a new variation of identity—system identity, which represents persons as dynamically forming clouds of data. While system identities can serve the bureaucratic need for identifying members, their role far surpasses the organizational necessities of inclusion and exclusion. The notion of system identities posits a space of identity construction that does not have a substrate or foundation on which identity is based. It describes an operation in which various systems – financial, legal, medical, governmental or any number of others – incorporate their own foundations by adapting themselves to their own results. This presentation highlights the importance of this differentiation and charts its latest development.”

HELDIG Forum sessions are open and free for everybody to join. These meetings are educational and dissemination activities targeted especially for researchers and teachers willing employ digital methods more in their work. Welcome!

Coffee is served at 14:00-15:00 at Metsätalo, Unioninkatu 40. See the programme details and the registration form below – please register so that we can order the right amount of coffee:

http://heldig.fi/forum