Project of the Week – KPLEX

The Horizon2020-funded Knowledge Complexity (KPLEX) project is investigating the delimiting effect that digital mediation and datafication can have on rich, complex cultural data.

As an ICT-35 ‘sister project’, KPLEX is humanities-led and ICT-funded. The project partners are approaching this challenge in a comparative, multidisciplinary and multisectoral fashion.

The project is delivered by the consortium of these four organisations: Trinity College Dublin, Data Archiving and Networked Services, Freie Universität Berlin and Tilde.

The team is committed to sharing results widely to inform both public and private regulation as well as philosophical debates in the technical sphere. In addition to consistently working towards achieving the individual objectives as set forth in the project Grant Agreement, the project partners have actively pursued an ambitious dissemination programme.

One of the primary aims of the KPLEX project is to expand our awareness of the inherent risks within the Big Data transformation and to suggest ways in which phenomena that resist datafication can still be represented (if only by their absence) in knowledge creation approaches reliant upon the interrogation of large data corpora.

The project development can be followed on its blog and through social media. The project results are made available as a composite white paper, written for policymakers and members of the public. This work brings together all four of the case studies into a readable overview document outlining specific implications and recommendations for the balanced and ethical development of big data technologies.

Additional reads on the subject that KPLX is addressing can be found here:

· Dr Jennifer Edmond, Feature Piece, “The Problem with Talking About Big Data”· Dr Georgina Nugent-Folan, Feature Piece, “Knowledge Complexity and the Digital Humanities: Introducing the KPLEX Project”· Dr Jennifer Edmond, interview for Der Standard (one of Austria’s biggest newspapers) “Humanities and Digital Technologies are not Opposites”