Open Tech Calendar

Our next Edinburgh DataVis Meetup is a joint meeting organized by the Social Network Analysis in Scotland Group (SNAS, www.socialpolicy.ed.ac.uk).

This meeting is all about complexity in networks and relational data: social networks, dynamic networks, geographic networks, network analysis. Demos, relations, interactions, clusters, a bit of statistics, and of course visualizations.

We have at least three planned speakers but can welcome additional speakers around network visualization and analysis.

1) The making of network visualizations and use of evidence in social science - Dr Wifak Gueddana, University of Edinburgh and King’s College London. More information on her talk below.

2) The Vistorian, an open online platform for visualizing dynamic, geographic and multivariate networks (vistorian.wordpress.com, vistorian.net) - Ben Bach, University of Edinburgh (benjbach.me)

3) Visualization techniques to Visualizing Geographic networks — Sara Schöttler, University of Edinburgh.

4) we have a guest speaker: Johanna Fulda from Vancouver, talking about her visualizing wind turbine data: www.johannafulda.de

As usual, the meeting is open to everyone, registered or not :) We will have an open mic session and some foods and drinks (bring along what you want to share ;) Also, spread the news and bring your friends and colleagues. There is no such thing as a meetup without new people. Take the topic of this meeting literally and help growing the relations in our community denser and stronger as well as help creating new links!

We want your input, your ideas, your participation. Come along, meet new friends and "talk visualization".

Note that this meeting will happen on a Tuesday, to accomodate for your colleagues from SNAS.

> UPDATE: We will be in Inspace as usual: www.google.com

Hope to see you all soon!
cheers,
Brendan, Ben, Uta, and Gordon

---
Information about Wifak's talk:

Abstract:
Digital Labour (Scholz 2012) blurs the lines between work and leisure, waged and unwaged work; although the term was first coined in links with knowledge and creative workers and more generally with individual bloggers and digital content publishers, digital labour is a much larger restructuring of global capital. In this paper we argue that platform work, often described in the context of food delivery (Deliveroo), transports (Uber), and domestic care (TaskRabbit) is an extension of digital labour.

However, while platforms contribute in making gig workers isolated and increasingly dispersed, research shows that gig workers are not a collection of independent workers; they communicate and collaborate via the digital infrastructure (Yin et al. 2016). Gig workers are often subscribed to group messaging apps such as WhatsApp, FB messenger and Slack; they use online communities in fora and social media to create peer-support, which often play out to be venues for solidarity and workers’ organising. Accordingly, we argue that visualisations of workers’ interpersonal networks and related topics could make visible this digital mediated sociality and enable researchers to use workers’ data to study the challenges and constraints of platform work and how gig workers could survive and thrive. We conclude this paper by discussing the ways in which this objective could be achieved and raise questions on the rhetorics and process of making visualisations