The Observatory of Digital Humanities, Complexity and Ethics is a site dedicated to the subjects studied in the Academic Group of Cognitive Studies, GAEC, based on the Faculty of Philosophy and Sciences of Unesp, in the campus of Marilia, and led by the professors Maria Eunice Quilici Gonzalez and Mariana Claudia Broens, both of the Department of Philosophy and the Philosophy Post-Graduation Program of Unesp.
Presently, the efforts of the group are being directed by the project Understanding opinion and language dynamics using massive data. The project is funded by Fapesp, in agreement with the Trans-Atlantic Platform for the Social Sciences and Humanities, having been approved in the international call Digging into Data Challenge.
Coordinated by the professor Laura Hernandez, Ph.D., of the Laboratory of Theoretical Physics and Modelization (LPTM) of the University of Cergy-Pontoise and, in Brazil, by Maria Eunice Quilici Gonzalez, Ph.D, the Brazilian activities of the project happen in the campus of Marilia of Unesp, and include seminars and discussions about fundamental texts to the study of Big Data and of epistemological and ethical questions implied by them, in the scope of Digital Humanities, specially in the fields of language and opinion formation. Such seminars are part of the biweekly meetings of GAEC.
The project also counts with another team, based on the Buenos Aires University and coordinated by José Ignacio Alvarez-Hamelin, Ph.D, professor of the Engineering Faculty of this same univesity.
Project’s abstract:
Human society has undergone unprecedented changes, driven by the sudden increase in communicating technological devices that surround us, keeping traces of a large amount of our daily activities. This extremely rapid evolution is associated with a fast adaptive dynamics that induces changes in our everyday practices and has consequences for the nature of human social relations. The rapidly increasing amount of data has generated what is known as Big Data, leading to urgent questions concerning the storage, organization, retrieval, and control of this information. Efforts have been concentrated on the technical aspects of these questions, in order to make Big Data ready to be used. From a different perspective, the present project addresses the following questions: How can sensible information be obtained from Big Data and used to help in elaborating explanatory models of human social actions in different specific circumstances? What are the possible ethical consequences of the application of Big Data analyses in the study of self-organized human actions? We are interested in both searching for traces of social behavior in rough data, and studying the impact that manipulation of Big Data might have on social action. Causal explanations of human individual and collective actions have been the object of criticisms by researchers concerned with the social and ethical aspects. It is our hypothesis that the connection between Big Data, which provides massive amounts of data correlations, and causal explanations might bring about promising novelty in the study of human social actions from the Complex Systems perspective. Our research will focus on the study of opinion dynamics and the language evolution process that might affect this dynamics, based, as a study case, on Big Data issued from two different media: The New York Times and Twitter.
Observatory of Digital Humanities, Complexity and Ethics 