Project description
A new way to study data loss
Data loss is inevitable in today’s digital society, whether the data disappears, is destroyed or is dispossessed. The EU-funded DALOSS project will explore data loss across the internet, European administrations and social media platforms. In this first systematic study of data loss, DALOSS will combine ethnographic and digital methods (digital forensics, counter-archiving and linkrot scoping) and will shift the focus from big data accumulation of data to the loss of data. It will engage different tracks of theory within critical data studies and critical archival studies to create an approach that enables the interconnected dynamics of data loss to be studied. The project’s findings will shed light on data loss as part of the ongoing digitisation and datafication processes.
Objective
The objective of Data Loss: the politics of disappearance, destruction, dispossession in digital societies (DALOSS) is to empirically demonstrate data loss as an integral dynamic within the current turn to digitization and big data, with deep-seated societal and political implications for the ongoing development of digital information ecologies. DALOSS examines data loss across three archival regimes the internet, European bureaucracies, and social media platforms. It provides the first systematic study of data loss, offering novel and important insights for the future of European data politics.
This project employs an original methodology combining ethnographic and digital methods, including digital forensics, counter-archiving and linkrot scoping. On this basis, DALOSS pioneers a new interdisciplinary approach, which brings together different tracks of theory within Critical Data Studies and Critical Archival Studies. This approach enables distinct but mutually interconnected dynamics of data loss disappearance, destruction and dispossession to be studied within a common analytical-theoretical framework. The analysis will offer unique insights into data loss as part of ongoing digitization and datafication processes, and the political, social and infrastructural implications of this phenomenon.
The breakthrough potential of DALOSS is two-fold. By shifting the focus in big data discourses from accumulation to loss, this project establishes an entirely new and societally important research agenda of general relevance to scholars working on big data within the humanities and social sciences. Second, by situating data loss within the broader intellectual histories of loss and technology, the project develops a theoretical apparatus for understanding data loss not merely as technical challenges, but also as a fundamental cultural and political condition.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesinternet
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyhistory
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesdata sciencebig data
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecology
- social sciencespolitical sciencespublic administrationbureaucracy
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
1165 Kobenhavn
Denmark