About

Data as Relation: Governance in the age of big data is a research project at the IT University of Copenhagen that has been granted full funding by VELUX FONDEN. The project began January 2017 and features four PhD projects and one Post Doctoral research project and a series of public interventions, to be made through ETHOS Lab.

Data as Relation explores how big data is generated, negotiated and used in governance. The hypothesis of the project is that the use of big data and digitalization in the public sector and governance is not a mere technical upgrade of infrastructures, but implies a reinvention of society itself. The goal of the project is to study how innovative new data usage for decision making make new relations emerge between government, private companies, and citizens.

To pursue this hypothesis the project’s six case studies collaborate with producers and users of data in international, national, regional and municipal contexts. To ensure that the outcome of the research is communicated to and engaged with by the public, the ETHOS Lab is included in the project as a trading ground through which interventions and other public events with citizens, international scholars and practitioners will be hosted.

The seven sub-projects of Data as Relation are:

  1. At the Margins of Digital Data: Re-inventing citizenship
  2. Reconfiguring relations in the smart city
  3. Locating the Dataverse
  4. Organizing data in the Danish Tax administration
  5. Bodies of data: The health of the nation in a time of infrastructural change
  6. What is in the ‘driven’? Data driven management in the Danish municipalities
  7. Big Data Stories: Intervening with Data and Visualisations

The concluding conference for Data as Relation will be 19-20 March 2020 with Prof. Kathrine Verderey as keynote.

Read more about the project in these articles:

VELUX FONDEN is a non-profit foundation that supports scientific, cultural, social and environmental purposes to foster a knowledge-based, enlightened, spacious, inclusive and sustainable society.