North Perspectives for a Better South? Big Data and the Global South in Big Data & Society

• Autor(a) principal: Silva, Guilherme Cavalcante
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://repositorio.ismt.pt/jspui/handle/123456789/1172
• topic: Global South, Big Data, Big Data & Society, Social Sciences

Over the last few years, data studies within So-cial Sciences watched a growth in the number of researches highlighting the need for more proficuous participation from the Global South in the debates of the field. The lack of Southern voices in the academic scholarship on the one hand, and of recognition of the importance and autonomy of its local data practices, such as those from indigenous data movements, on the other, had been decisive in establishing a Big Data in the South agenda. This paper displays an analytical mapping of 131 articles published from 2014-2016 in Big Data & Society (BD&S), a leading journal ac-knowledged for its pioneering promotion of Big Data research among social scientists. Its goal is to provide an overview of the way data practices are approached in BD&S papers con-cerning its geopolitical instance. It argues that there is a tendency to generalise data practices overlooking the specific consequences of Big Data in Southern contexts because of an al-most exclusive presence of Euroamerican per-spectives in the journal. This paper argues that this happens as a result of an epistemological asymmetry that pervades Social Sciences.