The Devil in the Data

‘Data’ can be understood broadly to mean recorded information of every kind. But ‘data’ tends now more often to mean digitised information open to rapid and comprehensive analysis and manipulation: the computer age makes it possible to gather, store and play with vast amounts of data configured into digital form. This activity can be so abstract that it now eludes common understanding. And these banks of data offer great and lightly regulated power to those holding them. The dilemmas involved in allowing for such data management call for critical enquiry.

User Content?, an installation on display in the PRONI gallery, addresses the amassing of digital data by private tech corporations from users engaging with their apps, services and devices. We will hear in this conference from the legal scholars and artists who collaborated to create the exhibition, finding that such data becomes a source of power to surveil and profile individuals, often without their awareness, and to generate economic wealth and perhaps to curtail freedom and agency.

In the public sphere, State archival authorities have for over a century been responsible for appraising, selecting and protecting data generated by governmental activity in the form of paper documents, for the sake of democratic transparency and understanding. PRONI archivists will explain how shifting from paper records to digital formats presents new challenges to archival practices of appraisal, care and access, which in turn impacts on how the public access these records. Using digital technology, large changes in practice and convention occur as data is safeguarded and preserved. Where the public interest is concerned, one of the key issues is the role of archivist as mediator between the public interest and the interests of government.

Finally, the view from a researcher accessing a public archive will offer insights into the tensions over safeguarding and data protection that arise while creating a historical record of a life.