Socio-technical Relationships Research Articles

Digitalisation, neo-Taylorism and translation in the 2020s

ABSTRACT This paper aims to provide a cursory yet critical overview of digital transcultural communication in the third decade of the new millennium. Today, digital entrepreneurs create lucrative business models based on user data whilst simultaneously enticing individuals to get used to working with these digital models. We will relate these two commercial objectives to modern translation practices, interweaving our discussion with the growing debate on the computer-assisted exploitation of the workforce. Digital neo-Taylorism is especially rife in the global translation industry, which today is overwhelmingly located on globally interconnected virtual online platforms, where largely underpaid professionals tend to be exploited by means of non-creative yet laborious post editing tasks or crowdsourcing translation activities. By linking the three values speed, efficiency and quantity to neural machine translation, postediting translation and crowdsourcing translation, we embark on a cursory critical discourse analysis, partly to show digital neo-Taylorism at work in the language used to describe new digital translation processes. In doing so, we endeavour to account for the underlying sociotechnical relationships across wider systemic processes such as digitalisation, alienation and capitalist social relations, and their effects on language and translation professionals.

City Information Models (CIMs) as precursors for Urban Digital Twins (UDTs): A case study of Lancaster

City Information Models (CIMs) present several research challenges and are arguably pre-cursors for a roadmap to the transition to Urban or City Digital Twins (UDTs/CDTs) and broader smart city drives. In a period of digital transformation in urban planning, CIMs are primarily designed to intersect and merge urban GIS/BIM in what is termed GeoBIM. CIMs are often cloud-based geospatial services and data repositories with one-way data connections, which differ from integrated and high-fidelity cyber-physical complex systems for digital twins (DTs). However, there is a lack of precision in terms of defining CIMs and UDTs, and this paper examines four broad sociotechnical research challenges regarding the progress of CIMs toward full UDTs/CDTs, including (1) technical training for adoption, (2) acquisition strategies for aerial data and remote sensing, (3) data licensing types and system management, and (4) stakeholder engagement with CIM platforms. These four research challenges and digital transformation are discussed by using back-casting futuring methods, establishing a framework for CIMs through co-designed workshops, and explored in the Lancaster City Information Model (LCIM) prototype. The LCIM, as a resulting case study, was developed for architects, planners, and stakeholders to engage with 3D urban models and urban analytics (view sheds, masterplan scenarios, and solar potentials of buildings) from 2019 to 2021 to address digital inequality in planning and data fragmentation. The framework and prototype results resulted in the most extensive 3D open urban dataset published in the UK, consisting of a baseline of 1″+/− buildings and infrastructure and 7.5 cm aerial imagery and a framework for developing transitions from CIMs to UDTs. The delivery of this case and the resulting published dataset highlights the essential research needed regarding definitions and precision around terminology and systems between CIMs and UDTs and four applied challenges in digital transformation and future socio-technical relationships.

All WARC and no playback: The materialities of data-centered web archives research

This paper examines the Web ARChive (WARC) file format, revealing how the format has come to play a central role in the development and standardization of interoperable tools and methods for the international web archiving community. In the context of emerging big data approaches, I consider the sociotechnical relationships between material construction of data and information infrastructures for collecting and research. Analysis is inspired by Star and Griesemer's historical case of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology which reveals how boundary objects and methods standardization are used to enroll actors in the work of collecting for natural history. I extend these concepts by pairing them with frameworks for studying digital materiality and the representational qualities of data artifacts. Through examples drawn from fieldwork observations studying two data-centered research projects, I consider how the materiality of the WARC format influences research methods and approaches to data extraction, selection, and transformation. Findings identify three modalities researchers use to configure WARC data for researcher needs: using indexes to support search queries, constructing derivative formats designed for certain types of analysis, and generating custom-designed datasets tailored for specific research purposes. Findings additionally reveal similarities in how these distinct methods approach automated data extraction by relying upon the WARC's standardized metadata elements. By interrogating whose information needs are being met and taken into account in the design of the WARC's underlying information representation, I reveal effects on the emerging field of web history, and consider alternative approaches to knowledge production with archived web data.

Reconsidering learning in a socio-material world. A response to Fischer et al.'s contribution

PurposeThe purpose of this commentary is to comment on Fischer's et al. (2022)Design/methodology/approachThis commentary responds to Fischer's et al. (2022) call on envisioning alternate conceptualizations of learning for the digital era. In doing so, the author argues for reconsidering learning in its socio-material condition, situated and made of a web of social and technological relations. In this context, the author takes a relational lens on learning to interrogate taken-for-granted views of (1) personalizing data increasingly used for student learning, (2) emerging educational infrastructures for higher education and (3) the student–teacher relationship mediated by data and algorithms.FindingsIn this commentary, the author suggested unpacking assumptions about learning that get reflected in the design and discourses about socio-technical arrangements and transformations in education. Taking the example of personalized learning, the author has illustrated a relational mode of thinking that leads the author to argue that, renewed definitions of learning must be discussed multidimensionally and, most importantly, situated in the material world that learning is already part of.Research limitations/implicationsFollowing Fischer et al. (2022, this issue), the author agrees that the focus should be on finding “new ways of organizing learning by exploring opportunities for radically new conceptualizations and practices.” In order to do that it is of utmost importance to problematize the social and material conditions that actively configure learning today and infrastructure tomorrow's learning. Hopefully, these observations will entice others to discuss further the educational transformations at stake in the age of datafication and algorithmic decision-making.Originality/valueThe author argues for reconsidering learning in its socio-material condition, which is situated and made of a web of social and technological relations. In this context, the author argues that any attempt to reconceptualize learning from a transformational perspective in the 21st century, as mentioned by Fischer et al. (2022), needs to interrogate views and assumptions about the socio-technical relationships researchers, practitioners and educators are contributing to via their practices and discourses.

Building Software Applications Securely with DevSecOps: A Socio-Technical Perspective

While continuous real-time software delivery practices induced by agile software development approaches create new business opportunities for organizations, these practices also present new security challenges in the DevOps environment. DevSecOps attempts to incorporate advanced automated security practices for agility in the DevOps environment. Mainstream perspectives of DevSecOps tend to overlook the collaborative role played by social actors and their relations with technologies in securing software applications in organizations. The first perspective emphasises the use of technologies such as containers, microservices, cryptographic protocols and origin authentication to secure the continuous deployment pipeline. The other dominant perspective focuses almost exclusively on the social aspects such as organizational silos, culture, and team collaboration. Such one-sided perspectives neglect the socio-technical argument that secure software applications from continuous deployment emerges when developers, quality assurers, operators and security experts combine their collective expertise together with DevSecOps technologies. The article presents a socio-technical framework of DevSecOps based on a systematic literature review. The review focused primarily, but not exclusively, on the computing and information systems literature and identified 26 peer reviewed articles from 2016 to 2020 which met the quality criteria and contributed to the analysis. The authors used a critical appraisal checklist and member checking to assess the quality of the articles. The authors then used thematic analysis to develop a comprehensive framework for DevSecOps based on the insights from these articles and a socio-technical lens. The socio-technical framework can be used by practitioners to perform a more holistic analysis of their DevSecOps practices. It highlights the key social and technical themes that underpin the effectiveness of DevSecOps and how insights about these themes can be used by practitioners to improve the instrumental and humanistic goals of DevSecOps. An interdisciplinary approach is proposed to adequately address challenging socio-technical relationships in DevSecOps. Future research can empirically test the importance of the interplay between technology and human activities to improve the overall performance of DevSecOps and other domains in cyber warfare and security.

‘Don’t mess with my algorithm’: Exploring the relationship between listeners and automated curation and recommendation on music streaming services

Given access to huge online collections of music on streaming platforms such as Spotify or Apple Music, users have become increasingly reliant on algorithmic recommender systems and automated curation and discovery features to find and curate music. Based on participant observation and semi-structured interviews with 15 active users of music streaming services, this article critically examines the user experience of music recommendation and streaming, seeking to understand how listeners interact with and experience these systems, and asking how recommendation and curation features define their use in a new and changing landscape of music consumption and discovery. This paper argues that through daily interactions with algorithmic features and curation, listeners build complex socio-technical relationships with these algorithmic systems, involving human-like factors such as trust, betrayal and intimacy. This article is significant as it positions music recommender systems as active agents in shaping music listening habits and the individual tastes of users.

Thinking with attachments: Appreciating a generative analytic

Much current work in Science and Technology Studies inflects knowing with care. Analyses of the ethos of objectivity, and of the practices by which objectivity is crafted, have shown that knowing and caring cannot be thought apart from each other. Using case studies from our own work we analyse how, in the sociotechnical relationships that we study, knowing and caring are entangled through ‘attachments’. We appreciate – both in the sense of valuing or respecting and in the sense of evaluating or assessing – how the notion of ‘attachment’ invites re-imagining relations between the social and the technical, between knowers and objects known, and between sociotechnical work and the affective sensibilities that enable, and are brought to life by, such work. Our respective ethnographic engagements with dog-human relations, obesity surgery and dementia care demonstrate that it is agents’ diverse and shifting attachments to technologies and techniques that shape the ways in which bodies, knowledge and practices form. The affects that arise in this process, or so we claim in neo-pragmatist fashion, are not preconditions to, but rather the result of such practices of attachment; rather than a prerequisite, they are an effect of the work of attaching itself. Thinking with attachments recognizes how techno-scientific work builds and shapes passions, aesthetics and sensory experience, allowing us to trace how varied sensibilities to what constitutes ‘the good’ come to be and come to matter in practices of relating between humans, animals and things.

Left Button Picture, Right Button Bomb: Nature, Warfare and Technology in a Southern African Border Region

In this paper, we argue that the relationship between nature conservation and warfare was and continues to be actualized through socio-technical relationships and shared infrastructures. We historicize “green militari zation”—defined as the use of military techniques, technologies and partnerships in the pursuit of conservation (Lunstrum 2014)—showing that the partnership between military and nature conservation in Southern Africa has a long and violent history. Our paper accounts for the entanglements of war and nature through a shared technological infrastructure used in north-eastern Namibia during the Namibian War of Liberation (1966–1989). In particular, we focus on the Mirage IIIR2Z, an aerial reconnaissance and ground-attack supersonic jet which provided both the South African Defence Force and the civil administration’s nature conservationists with aerial photography and remote sensing data. The spatial information produced jointly by the military and the civil nature conservation department was used to produce strategic maps, but also to fight invasive plants and protect wildlife. Our reading of green militarization against this background sheds light on the long-lasting connections between warfare, conservation and ecology along Southern African border regions and contributes to a novel understanding of the contemporary “war on poachers” through a study of the techno-scientific networks that made it possible. Since there is nothing inevitable about the way technologies emerge or change over time (Bijker and Law 1992), this paper develops an empirically grounded and sustained analysis of technological change in the domain of green militarization through three interlinked concepts: “multiple” (Law 2002), “shifting down” (Latour 1994; 1999), and “firming up” (Bijker and Law 1992).

Guidance for publishing qualitative research in informatics.

Qualitative research, the analysis of nonquantitative and nonquantifiable data through methods such as interviews and observation, is integral to the field of biomedical and health informatics. To demonstrate the integrity and quality of their qualitative research, authors should report important elements of their work. This perspective article offers guidance about reporting components of the research, including theory, the research question, sampling, data collection methods, data analysis, results, and discussion. Addressing these points in the paper assists peer reviewers and readers in assessing the rigor of the work and its contribution to the literature. Clearer and more detailed reporting will ensure that qualitative research will continue to be published in informatics, helping researchers disseminate their understanding of people, organizations, context, and sociotechnical relationships as they relate to biomedical and health data.

ACM Web Science Conference 2021

The 13 th ACM Web Science Conference was hosted online by the University of Southampton from 21--25 June, 2021. The annual event is inherently interdisciplinary, integrating computer and information sciences with a multitude of disciplines including sociology, economics, political science, law, management, language and communication, geography and psychology. It is unique in the way it brings these disciplines together in creative and critical dialogue. It focuses on the full scope of socio-technical relationships that are engaged in the World Wide Web, based on the notion that understanding the Web involves not only an analysis of its architecture and applications, but also insight into the people, organisations, policies, and economics that are affected by and subsumed within it. Since it was first held in Athens in 2009, the conference has been hosted in six countries around the world.

Impact of artificial intelligence on employees working in industry 4.0 led organizations

PurposeThis study attempts to develop a practical understanding of the positive and negative employee experiences due to artificial intelligence (AI) adoption and the creation of technostress. It unravels the human resource development-related challenges with the onset of Industry 4.0.Design/methodology/approachSemi-structured interviews were conducted with 32 professionals with average work experience of 7.6 years and working across nine industries, and the transcripts were analyzed using NVivo.FindingsThe findings establish prominent adverse impacts of the adoption of AI, namely, information security, data privacy, drastic changes resulting from digital transformations and job risk and insecurity brewing in the employee psyche. This is followed by a hierarchy of factors comprising the positive impacts, namely, work-related flexibility and autonomy, creativity and innovation and overall enhancement in job performance. Further factors contributing to technostress (among employees): work overload, job insecurity and complexity were identified.Practical implicationsThe emerging knowledge economy and technological interventions are changing the existing job profiles, hence the need for different skillsets and technological competencies. The organizations thus need to deploy strategic manpower development measures involving up-gradation of skills and knowledge management. Inculcating requisite skills requires well-designed training programs using specialized tools and virtual reality (VR). In addition, employees need to be supported in their evolving socio-technical relationships, for managing both positive and negative outcomes.Originality/valueThis research makes the unique contribution of establishing a qualitative hierarchy of prominent factors constituting unintended consequences, positive impacts and technostress creators (among employees) of AI deployment in organizational processes.

In the Shadow of Platforms

In the Shadow of Platforms

Who Cares for Agile Work? In/Visibilized Work Practices and Their Emancipatory Potential

The future of work has become a pressing matter of concern: Researchers, business consultancies, and industrial companies are intensively studying how new work models could be best implemented to increase workplace flexibility and creativity. In particular, the agile model has become one of the “must-have” elements for re-organizing work practices, especially for technology development work. However, the implementation of agile work often comes together with strong presumptions: it is regarded as an inevitable tool that can be universally integrated into different workplaces while having the same outcome of flexibility, transparency, and flattened hierarchies everywhere. This paper challenges such essentializing assumptions by turning agile work into a “matter of care.” We argue that care work occurs in contexts other than feminized reproductive work, namely, technology development. Drawing on concepts from feminist Science and Technology Studies and ethnographic research at agile technology development workplaces in Germany and Kenya, we examine what work it takes to actually keep up with the imperative of agile work. The analysis brings the often invisibilized care practices of human and nonhuman actors to the fore that are necessary to enact and stabilize the agile promises of flexibilization, co-working, and rapid prototyping. Revealing the caring sociotechnical relationships that are vital for working agile, we discuss the emergence of power asymmetries characterized by hierarchies of skills that are differently acknowledged in the daily work of technology development. The paper ends by speculating on the emancipatory potential of a care perspective, by which we seek to inspire careful Emancipatory Technology Studies.

Toward TechnoAccess: A narrative review of disabled and aging experiences of using technology to access the arts

This paper presents a narrative literature review that addresses the issue of how disabled and aging people access the arts through technology. Our review synthesized 56 studies about disabled and aging people's experiences of access through technology, with a focus on methods used and accounts of user experiences/stories to inform a Canadian research and development initiative called Accessing the Arts. We urge designers and developers to consider the complex, multimodal sociotechnical relationships surrounding technology and access—or TechnoAccess—as they develop technology with disability, aging and access in mind. Although existing evidence offers ways to improve everyone's access to the arts, recommendations are provided for research around access and technology as an inherently politicized topic that must be informed by disabled and aging people's intersectional cultural experiences, including how they wish to use technology to access the arts.

Measuring the amorphous: Substantive and methodological outcomes from concept maps

AbstractBackgroundAccreditation organizations broadened program assessment criteria in ways that present challenges for the evaluation of learning outcomes. This is especially the case in courses where there are not narrowly defined questions or definitive solutions, such as engineering ethics. While protocols for learning assessment exist, there is limited research exploring sociotechnical learning outcomes in a manner that combines theoretical, empirical, and procedural aspects of assessment.Purpose/HypothesisThis paper shares 3 years of research into the effectiveness of concept maps as an assessment tool for engineering students in courses that prioritize professional skills development and sociotechnical thinking. We show that concept maps can offer evidence of knowledge formation and learning outcomes associated with courses that introduce complex problems with multiple possible interpretations or viable solutions.Design/MethodA concept mapping activity was completed by 614 undergraduate engineering students at the start and end of three different courses to evaluate sociotechnical thinking. Student‐level longitudinal changes were evaluated using paired t tests and simple linear regression. The concept mapping activity was improved iteratively in response to pilot tests and focus groups.ResultsUndergraduate engineers demonstrated greater complexity in the representation of sociotechnical relationships as observed in the structure and content of the concept maps. The methodological results offer lessons about the administration and analysis of concept maps often excluded from conversations on course and curriculum level assessment.ConclusionsConcept maps offer insights into student learning outcomes, and they can be deployed and analyzed with minimal resources. However, assessments must be carefully designed to account for administrative and analytical challenges.

The Internet of Futures Past: Values Trajectories of Networking Protocol Projects

The Internet was conceptualized as a technology that would be capable of bringing about a better future, but recent literature in science and technology studies and adjacent fields provides numerous examples of how this pervasive sociotechnical system has been shaped and used to dystopic ends. This article examines different future imaginaries present in Future Internet Architecture (FIA) projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 2006 to 2016, whose goal was to incorporate social values while building new protocols to replace Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol to transfer and route information across the ever-expanding Internet. I examine the findings from two of the NSF’s FIA projects—Mobility First (MF) and eXpressive Internet Architecture—to understand the projects’ trajectories and values directives through their funding cycle and their projections into the future. I discuss how project documentation and participant articulations fall into the following three distinct themes about past experience and speculation: understanding the public, negotiating resources, and carrying project values into the future. I conclude that if the future Internet is to promote positive sociotechnical relationships, its architects must recognize that complex social and political decisions pervade each step of technical work and do more to honor this fact.

The Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation Stoelting Conference 2019: Perioperative Deterioration-Early Recognition, Rapid Intervention, and the End of Failure-to-Rescue.

The Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation Stoelting Conference 2019: Perioperative Deterioration-Early Recognition, Rapid Intervention, and the End of Failure-to-Rescue.

Engineering Education as the Development of Critical Sociotechnical Literacy.

Recent policy documents position engineering as a way to broaden participation for students in STEM fields. However, a recent review of the literature on engineering education found that fewer than 1% of reviewed articles focused on issues of equity and broadening participation. For this reason, there are few frameworks to build on when designing for equitable engineering instruction in K-12 settings. Diversifying participation in engineering means that we need to not just bring learners into existing engineering practices, structures, and ways of knowing, but that we take a critical look at the field of engineering education and challenge researchers and educators to create learning opportunities that build on diverse ways of knowing about engineering and being engineers in the world, with a focus on relating course materials to learners’ everyday lives. In this paper, we leverage the diverse histories, epistemologies, and ways of knowing in engineering to outline the possibilities for learners to critically engage with engineering in K-12 settings and we ask the question, “How can we design learning environments to help students critically understand the intrinsic and systemic sociotechnical relationships between people, communities, and the built environment?” To answer this question, we propose an instructional framework for developing learners’ critical sociotechnical literacy, which is a place-based approach for critically engaging learners in understanding the impacts of engineering and technology on their own communities and everyday lives in order to restory these spaces for a more equitable and just future.

“Looking back” at personal memories on Facebook: Co-constituitive agencies in contemporary remembrance practices

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we discuss the expression of personal memories in digital media environments. To tackle this issue, we propose a conceptualization that conceives such memories as the outcome of co-constitutive agencies that impact contemporary mnemonic practices. We look especially at sociotechnical relationships that affect the way memory contents travel temporally and through particular contexts within localized digital environments. The empirical analysis is grounded in a case study of one of the first memory-oriented features released by Facebook in 2014, the Look Back video. We asked Facebook users to answer a questionnaire about the experience of using this feature, providing insights into the production and consumption of digital mnemonic products. Our findings point to the fact that digital traces left by users in their networks interact with the performative properties of communication systems. These interactions are articulated in mnemonic products that inspire reflections on the agency of algorithms and the meaningfulness of the resulting narratives. Acknowledging the consequences of the “third memory boom” accompanying the emergence of the connective turn in memory studies, we suggest that current digital technologies demand a more comprehensive analysis of the constellation of actors and values involved in current memory processes.

La construcción del uso educativo del computador en la escuela

A pesar del apoyo que diferentes organismos responsables de promover el desarrollo de la región latinoamericana y del Caribe han dado a programas de dotación y formación en el uso de tecnologías en la escuela, diversos estudios acerca de la efectividad de dicha integración en los procesos educativos han demostrado que tal inversión no mejora necesariamente la calidad de la educación. Por el contrario, en ciertos contextos se han probado perjudiciales para el ambiente escolar. Este artículo presenta el análisis del estudio de caso de procesos de introducción de computadores en diez escuelas públicas colombianas beneficiadas por el programa Computadores para Educar. Además, se hace una propuesta interpretativa sobre la construcción del uso educativo del computador. Se quiere dar respuesta a dos preguntas: sobre qué procesos de ensamblaje y de constitución de relaciones sociotécnicas tuvieron lugar en el proceso de introducción de computadores en las aulas por este programa. Y cómo interpretar las transformaciones de los usos de esos computadores en términos educativos, a través de estos ensambles y relaciones. Para tal fin, se hizo un análisis documental y trabajo de campo (entrevistas y observaciones) en sedes educativas beneficiadas por el programa durante el periodo 2004-2008. Los principales resultados son la descripción de los procesos y una propuesta interpretativa sobre la construcción del uso educativo del computador, a partir de una elaboración teórica desde la sociología de los usos, la teoría del Actor-Red, la sociología de la tecnología, y las propuestas del triángulo pedagógico y los esquemas de utilización.