Helen Kennedy
Biographic Data
| ID | 166930 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Helen Kennedy |
| GIVEN NAMES | Helen |
| FAMILY NAME | Kennedy |
| SIGNATURE | KENNEDY H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sheffield |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0273-3825 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 235 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 38 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Generic visuals, news production and professional authority in the news industry
This article examines the role that an emergent “object of journalism”, generic visuals, plays in professional journalistic practice. Generic visuals such as stock photos and simple data visualizations have standardized formats and appearances, perform particular design functions and circulate with increasing frequency in the news media. Because they are produced, distributed and consumed regularly and at speed in today’s news texts, it is import…
Feeding the machine
This paper examines the human implications of AI's ‘data dilemma' in three different and contrasting sectors: pharmaceuticals, higher education, and the arts. The ‘data dilemma' refers to the challenge of obtaining sufficient and suitable data to effectively train AI algorithms. The research, conducted in the UK, involved interviews, focus groups, and observations with 65 practitioners employed across these three sectors. The findings reveal that…
Sustainability challenges for social enterprises in cultural and creative sectors - A case study of Impacd CIC
This research explores the sustainability challenges of social enterprises in the cultural and creative sectors, focusing on IMPACD CIC, a grassroots creative organisation in Nottingham, UK. Operating at the intersection of CCIs and social enterprise, such organisations navigate tensions between financial sustainability and social or cultural missions. Existing literature often oversimplifies this conflict, emphasises commercial activity in large…
Generic visuals in the news as public images
Generic visuals like stock photos and simple data visualizations circulate in the news with increasing frequency, and so do dominant narratives about them. Stock photos are clichéd and inauthentic, data visualizations represent facts, so the narratives go. Such narratives suggest that generic visuals have limited capacity to function as public images – that is, as visual media for social thought and civic spectatorship. Findings from our research…
What ifs
This paper explores how non-experts reflect on and come to understand ‘data uses’, a phrase we used to refer to data collection, analysis and sharing. In recent years, research into what people think and feel about data uses has proliferated, whereas this paper focuses on how they do their thinking and feeling. We argue that imagining – that is, building or creating a mental image of something that is not present – is an important aspect of refle…
How people connect fairness and equity when they talk about data uses
As a mechanism for addressing data-related harms, fairness has been subjected to considerable criticism, seen as failing to acknowledge the power relationships that produce said harms, or as a ‘floating signifier’ devoid of specific meaning. In contrast to fairness, it is argued that equity does a better job of recognising data-related harms. Criticisms such as these emerge in specific cultural contexts and rarely acknowledge everyday understandi…
Challenging assumptions about the relationship between awareness of and attitudes to data uses amongst the UK public
This article advances understanding of the relationship between (a) people's awareness of and (b) their attitudes toward the ways in which data about them is collected, analyzed, shared, and used.It draws on an online survey of 2000 adults in the UK, which found that people with greater awareness of data uses hold more negative attitudes toward them.This finding is important because it challenges the deficit model which underlies initiatives that…
Is television reformable? The ‘reformist tendency’ in inequality research in the cultural and creative industries
This article engages with research on UK Television (UKTV) and the wider cultural and creative industries by interrogating the role of academic research in industrial and social change. We argue that a ‘reformist tendency’ implicitly structures much creative industries research. This reformist tendency takes a critical approach to the problem of inequality, identifying it and making it visible, and at times developing strategies which attempt to …
Beliefs, Values and Emotions in Practitioners’ Engagements With Learning Analytics in Higher Education
Internet entrepreneurs, EdTech companies, AI enthusiasts, and other powerful stakeholders around the world have promoted the idea that big data and learning analytics (LA) have the potential to revolutionise education. LA, defined as the continuous measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their context (Gašević et al., 2015, p. 1), is increasingly being used to track and evaluate what students do in internet-medi…
Locked down and locked out
COVID-19 and the associated government lockdowns in the UK had dramatic impacts on the UK's creative industries. This article explores these impacts on mothers working in UK Television (UKTV), on their ability to work, finances, and mental health. It is based on the largest survey ever conducted of this group. It is argued that the COVID-19 crisis revealed and compounded the long-standing incompatibility between gendered, unpaid care work and the…
Defining the Civilian
This article explores how the International Committee of the Red Cross defined non-combatants during the Bosnian War (1992–1995) and how those definitions contributed to a counter-narrative that disrupts familiar conceptualizations of the war as exclusively ethnic. Through an examination of Red Cross press releases, I argue that the Red Cross defined identity primarily based on individual experiences with violence and/or transnational constructio…
Generic visuals’ of Covid-19 in the news
In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, images of the virus molecule and 'flatten-the-curve' line charts were inescapable. There is now a vast visual repertoire of vaccines, people wearing face masks in everyday settings, choropleth maps and both bar and line charts. These 'generic visuals' circulate widely in the news media and, however unremarkable, play an important role in representing the crisis in particular ways. We argue that these ge…
Approaching public perceptions of datafication through the lens of inequality
Research on data and discrimination in particular has highlighted how already socially unequal populations are discriminated against in data-driven systems. Elsewhere, there is growing interest in public perceptions of datafication, amongst academic researchers interested in producing ‘bottom up’ understandings of the new roles of data in society and non-academic stakeholders keen to establish positive perceptions of data-driven systems. However,…
Complex ecologies of trust in data practices and data-driven systems
Trust in data practices and data-driven systems is widely seen as both important and elusive. A data trust deficit has been identified, to which proposed solutions are often localised or individualised, focusing either on what institutions can do to increase user trust in their data practices or on data management models that empower the individual user. Scholarship on trust often focuses on typologies of trust. This paper shifts the emphasis to …
Data Visualization in Society
Today we are witnessing an increased use of data visualization in society. Across domains such as work, education and the news, various forms of graphs, charts and maps are used to explain, convince and tell stories. In an era in which more and more data are produced and circulated digitally, and digital tools make visualization production increasingly accessible, it is important to study the conditions under which such visual texts are generated…
Public perceptions of good data management
Low levels of public trust in data practices have led to growing calls for changes to data-driven systems, and in the EU, the General Data Protection Regulation provides a legal motivation for such changes. Data management is a vital component of data-driven systems, but what constitutes 'good' data management is not straightforward. Academic attention is turning to the question of what 'good data' might look like more generally, but public views…
Living with Data
In this paper I argue that there is an urgent need for more empirical research into everyday experiences of living with datafication, something that has not been prioritised in the emerging field of data studies to date. As a result of this absence, the knowledge produced within data studies is not as aligned to the aims of data activism as it might be. Data activism seeks to challenge existing, unequal data power relations and to mobilise data i…
Data stories. Rethinking journalistic storytelling in the context of data journalism
This paper addresses the increased use of data and data visualization in newsrooms, which has yielded a new form of storytelling: data stories. In journalism, data stories or storytelling with data are the new buzzwords. What journalists mean by data stories, however, remains blurred. We use the emergence of data stories as an opportunity to describe the changing understanding of journalistic storytelling. Based on interviews with editorial leade…
The Feeling of Numbers
This article highlights the role that emotions play in engagements with data and their visualisation. To date, the relationship between data and emotions has rarely been noted, in part because data studies have not attended to everyday engagements with data. We draw on an empirical study to show a wide range of emotional engagements with diverse aspects of data and their visualisation, and so demonstrate the importance of emotions as vital compon…
Data Power in Material Contexts
This short piece introduces the special issue of Television & New Media (TVNM) on data power in material contexts, which brings together papers which analyze the operations of data power across a range of real-world domains. It highlights the increasing connectedness of digital data tracking, aggregation, and analytics across domains that include and move beyond media, as data are increasingly combined and shared across diverse digital spaces. Th…
The work that visualisation conventions do
This paper argues that visualisation conventions work to make the data represented within visualisations seem objective, that is, transparent and factual. Interrogating the work that visualisation conventions do helps us to make sense of the apparent contradiction between criticisms of visualisations as doing persuasive work and visualisation designers’ belief that through visualisation, it is possible to ‘do good with data’ [Periscopic. 2014. Ho…
Engaging with (big) data visualizations
As data become increasingly ubiquitous, so too do data visualisations, which are the main means through which non-experts get access to data. Most visualizations circulate and are shared online, and many of them are produced by Internet researchers. For these reasons, data visualization is an important object of study for Internet research. This paper proposes that Internet research should engage critically with data visualization, and it does so…
The Pleasure and Pain of Visualizing Data in Times of Data Power
This article reflects on the growing urge among researchers to visualize large-scale digital data. It argues that the desire to visualize unfolds in the context of a complex entanglement of (1) the pragmatics of data visualization, (2) the problematic ideological work that visualizations do, (3) the politics of data power and neoliberalism, and (4) visualization pleasures. The article begins by outlining the considerations that constitute data vi…
Visualizing Junk
The datafication of culture has led to an increase in the circulation of data visualizations. In their production, visualizers draw on historical antecedents which define what constitutes a good visualization. In their reception, audiences similarly draw on experiences with visualizations and other visual forms to categorize them as good or bad. While there are often sound reasons for such assessments, the gendered dimensions of judgments of cult…
Balancing the potential and problems of digital methods through action research
This paper reports on an action research project with public sector organizations in the UK which experimented with a range of digital methods (social media data mining, social network and issue network mapping and data visualization), in order to explore their potential usefulness for the public engagement activities of these organizations. We argue that there is a need for small-scale, qualitative studies of cultures of large-scale, quantitativ…
The Feeling of Numbers
This article highlights the role that emotions play in engagements with data and their visualisation. To date, the relationship between data and emotions has rarely been noted, in part because data studies have not attended to everyday engagements with data. We draw on an empirical study to show a wide range of emotional engagements with diverse aspects of data and their visualisation, and so demonstrate the importance of emotions as vital compon…
Beyond anonymity, or future directions for internet identity research
This article draws on empirical research into internet use by minority ethnic women to consider whether anonymity remains a useful focus for sociocultural studies of internet identities. The central argument of the article is that the time has come for internet identity research to reposition itself conceptually, to move away from a preoccupation with the generalized, enduring claim that internet identities are anonymous, multiple and fragmented-…
Cultural studies of data mining
Data and agency
This introduction to the special issue on data and agency argues that datafication should not only be understood as the process of collecting and analysing data about Internet users, but also as feeding such data back to users, enabling them to orient themselves in the world. It is important that debates about data power recognise that data is also generated, collected and analysed by alternative actors, enhancing rather than undermining the agen…
Known or knowing publics? Social media data mining and the question of public agency
New methods to analyse social media data provide a powerful way to know publics and capture what they say and do. At the same time, access to these methods is uneven, with corporations and governments tending to have best access to relevant data and analytics tools. Critics raise a number of concerns about the implications dominant uses of data mining and analytics may have for the public: they result in less privacy, more surveillance and social…
Generic visuals’ of Covid-19 in the news
In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, images of the virus molecule and 'flatten-the-curve' line charts were inescapable. There is now a vast visual repertoire of vaccines, people wearing face masks in everyday settings, choropleth maps and both bar and line charts. These 'generic visuals' circulate widely in the news media and, however unremarkable, play an important role in representing the crisis in particular ways. We argue that these ge…
Data stories. Rethinking journalistic storytelling in the context of data journalism
This paper addresses the increased use of data and data visualization in newsrooms, which has yielded a new form of storytelling: data stories. In journalism, data stories or storytelling with data are the new buzzwords. What journalists mean by data stories, however, remains blurred. We use the emergence of data stories as an opportunity to describe the changing understanding of journalistic storytelling. Based on interviews with editorial leade…
Subjective Intersections in the Face of the Machine
This article is a call to feminist science and technology studies (STS) to engage with debates about the intersectionality of gender with race and class in analyses of women’s relationships with their computers - these debates are well established in the broader field of gender studies, but comparatively absent from studies of gender and technology. Furthermore, in order to understand women’s many and varied technological relationships, it is nec…
Data Power in Material Contexts
This short piece introduces the special issue of Television & New Media (TVNM) on data power in material contexts, which brings together papers which analyze the operations of data power across a range of real-world domains. It highlights the increasing connectedness of digital data tracking, aggregation, and analytics across domains that include and move beyond media, as data are increasingly combined and shared across diverse digital spaces. Th…
Technologies Between Games and Culture
This article introduces and situates the ensuing collection of four essays on the theme of games and technology. It argues the need for videogame studies to develop a more rigorous and focused perspective on the theorization of technology as it relates to research into games and culture. The ``and'' in games and culture cannot begin to be understood comprehensively without a thinking of the profound reliance of both terms on technology. Players a…
Visualizing Junk
The datafication of culture has led to an increase in the circulation of data visualizations. In their production, visualizers draw on historical antecedents which define what constitutes a good visualization. In their reception, audiences similarly draw on experiences with visualizations and other visual forms to categorize them as good or bad. While there are often sound reasons for such assessments, the gendered dimensions of judgments of cult…
Net work
Public perceptions of good data management
Low levels of public trust in data practices have led to growing calls for changes to data-driven systems, and in the EU, the General Data Protection Regulation provides a legal motivation for such changes. Data management is a vital component of data-driven systems, but what constitutes 'good' data management is not straightforward. Academic attention is turning to the question of what 'good data' might look like more generally, but public views…
The Pleasure and Pain of Visualizing Data in Times of Data Power
This article reflects on the growing urge among researchers to visualize large-scale digital data. It argues that the desire to visualize unfolds in the context of a complex entanglement of (1) the pragmatics of data visualization, (2) the problematic ideological work that visualizations do, (3) the politics of data power and neoliberalism, and (4) visualization pleasures. The article begins by outlining the considerations that constitute data vi…
Generic visuals in the news as public images
Generic visuals like stock photos and simple data visualizations circulate in the news with increasing frequency, and so do dominant narratives about them. Stock photos are clichéd and inauthentic, data visualizations represent facts, so the narratives go. Such narratives suggest that generic visuals have limited capacity to function as public images – that is, as visual media for social thought and civic spectatorship. Findings from our research…
Locked down and locked out
COVID-19 and the associated government lockdowns in the UK had dramatic impacts on the UK's creative industries. This article explores these impacts on mothers working in UK Television (UKTV), on their ability to work, finances, and mental health. It is based on the largest survey ever conducted of this group. It is argued that the COVID-19 crisis revealed and compounded the long-standing incompatibility between gendered, unpaid care work and the…
Knowing your publics
The analysis of social media data promises significant new ways of knowing publics, but an understanding of the value of social media analytics for different organizations in practice is only just emerging. Drawing on research conducted with two city councils in the UK, this article examines the cu rrent and potential use of social media analytics in local government. We outline a range of purposes that social media analytics might serve - from c…
Against Amateur Economies
The rise and rise of the amateur cultural producer has been greeted with a spectacular amount of celebratory rhetoric, in both popular and academic writing . It has also been criticised, often for the inferior quality of amateur productions compared to the fruits of professional labour. But apart from that by a small number of journalism scholars, little empirical research has been carried out with professional creative labourers about the impact…
Technobiography
This article is an argument for technobiography, a term coined in Cyborg Lives? Women's Technobiographies, a collection I coedited in 2001. I outline what technobiography is, and how, by allowing access to what it feels like to live certain digital experiences, it can contribute to building a comprehensive picture of cybercultural landscapes. If we want to understand lived experiences of the Internet, we need to study not only online, virtual rep…
Technobiography
This article is an argument for technobiography, a term coined in Cyborg Lives? Women's Technobiographies, a collection I coedited in 2001. I outline what technobiography is, and how, by allowing access to what it feels like to live certain digital experiences, it can contribute to building a comprehensive picture of cybercultural landscapes. If we want to understand lived experiences of the Internet, we need to study not only online, virtual rep…
Subjective Intersections in the Face of the Machine
This article is a call to feminist science and technology studies (STS) to engage with debates about the intersectionality of gender with race and class in analyses of women’s relationships with their computers - these debates are well established in the broader field of gender studies, but comparatively absent from studies of gender and technology. Furthermore, in order to understand women’s many and varied technological relationships, it is nec…
Understanding interactive practice as research
Beyond anonymity, or future directions for internet identity research
This article draws on empirical research into internet use by minority ethnic women to consider whether anonymity remains a useful focus for sociocultural studies of internet identities. The central argument of the article is that the time has come for internet identity research to reposition itself conceptually, to move away from a preoccupation with the generalized, enduring claim that internet identities are anonymous, multiple and fragmented-…
New Media's Potential for Personalization
Despite the growing maturity of new, interactive media, rhetoric about its possibilities and potentialities that abounded in its earliest days still endures. The growth of detailed and empirical work, which has sought to populate the digital landscape with grounded research calling into question this rhetoric, has not stopped new media debate from continuing to be shaped, in part, by the language of the potential. This paper is concerned with one…
Technologies Between Games and Culture
This article introduces and situates the ensuing collection of four essays on the theme of games and technology. It argues the need for videogame studies to develop a more rigorous and focused perspective on the theorization of technology as it relates to research into games and culture. The ``and'' in games and culture cannot begin to be understood comprehensively without a thinking of the profound reliance of both terms on technology. Players a…
Net work
Can the Web Be Made Accessible for People with Intellectual Disabilities
This article presents the findings of a research project that aimed to contribute to the social inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities (ID) in the World Wide Web (the Web). The Inclusive New Media Design (INMD) project brought together thirty-one Web designers and developers with twenty-nine people with intellectual disabilities to explore the best practice for building Web sites accessible to the ID community. Specifically, the proje…
Against Amateur Economies
The rise and rise of the amateur cultural producer has been greeted with a spectacular amount of celebratory rhetoric, in both popular and academic writing . It has also been criticised, often for the inferior quality of amateur productions compared to the fruits of professional labour. But apart from that by a small number of journalism scholars, little empirical research has been carried out with professional creative labourers about the impact…
Balancing the potential and problems of digital methods through action research
This paper reports on an action research project with public sector organizations in the UK which experimented with a range of digital methods (social media data mining, social network and issue network mapping and data visualization), in order to explore their potential usefulness for the public engagement activities of these organizations. We argue that there is a need for small-scale, qualitative studies of cultures of large-scale, quantitativ…
Cultural studies of data mining
Knowing your publics
The analysis of social media data promises significant new ways of knowing publics, but an understanding of the value of social media analytics for different organizations in practice is only just emerging. Drawing on research conducted with two city councils in the UK, this article examines the cu rrent and potential use of social media analytics in local government. We outline a range of purposes that social media analytics might serve - from c…
Known or knowing publics? Social media data mining and the question of public agency
New methods to analyse social media data provide a powerful way to know publics and capture what they say and do. At the same time, access to these methods is uneven, with corporations and governments tending to have best access to relevant data and analytics tools. Critics raise a number of concerns about the implications dominant uses of data mining and analytics may have for the public: they result in less privacy, more surveillance and social…
Data and agency
This introduction to the special issue on data and agency argues that datafication should not only be understood as the process of collecting and analysing data about Internet users, but also as feeding such data back to users, enabling them to orient themselves in the world. It is important that debates about data power recognise that data is also generated, collected and analysed by alternative actors, enhancing rather than undermining the agen…
The work that visualisation conventions do
This paper argues that visualisation conventions work to make the data represented within visualisations seem objective, that is, transparent and factual. Interrogating the work that visualisation conventions do helps us to make sense of the apparent contradiction between criticisms of visualisations as doing persuasive work and visualisation designers’ belief that through visualisation, it is possible to ‘do good with data’ [Periscopic. 2014. Ho…
Engaging with (big) data visualizations
As data become increasingly ubiquitous, so too do data visualisations, which are the main means through which non-experts get access to data. Most visualizations circulate and are shared online, and many of them are produced by Internet researchers. For these reasons, data visualization is an important object of study for Internet research. This paper proposes that Internet research should engage critically with data visualization, and it does so…
The Pleasure and Pain of Visualizing Data in Times of Data Power
This article reflects on the growing urge among researchers to visualize large-scale digital data. It argues that the desire to visualize unfolds in the context of a complex entanglement of (1) the pragmatics of data visualization, (2) the problematic ideological work that visualizations do, (3) the politics of data power and neoliberalism, and (4) visualization pleasures. The article begins by outlining the considerations that constitute data vi…
Visualizing Junk
The datafication of culture has led to an increase in the circulation of data visualizations. In their production, visualizers draw on historical antecedents which define what constitutes a good visualization. In their reception, audiences similarly draw on experiences with visualizations and other visual forms to categorize them as good or bad. While there are often sound reasons for such assessments, the gendered dimensions of judgments of cult…
Data Power in Material Contexts
This short piece introduces the special issue of Television & New Media (TVNM) on data power in material contexts, which brings together papers which analyze the operations of data power across a range of real-world domains. It highlights the increasing connectedness of digital data tracking, aggregation, and analytics across domains that include and move beyond media, as data are increasingly combined and shared across diverse digital spaces. Th…
Living with Data
In this paper I argue that there is an urgent need for more empirical research into everyday experiences of living with datafication, something that has not been prioritised in the emerging field of data studies to date. As a result of this absence, the knowledge produced within data studies is not as aligned to the aims of data activism as it might be. Data activism seeks to challenge existing, unequal data power relations and to mobilise data i…
Data stories. Rethinking journalistic storytelling in the context of data journalism
This paper addresses the increased use of data and data visualization in newsrooms, which has yielded a new form of storytelling: data stories. In journalism, data stories or storytelling with data are the new buzzwords. What journalists mean by data stories, however, remains blurred. We use the emergence of data stories as an opportunity to describe the changing understanding of journalistic storytelling. Based on interviews with editorial leade…
The Feeling of Numbers
This article highlights the role that emotions play in engagements with data and their visualisation. To date, the relationship between data and emotions has rarely been noted, in part because data studies have not attended to everyday engagements with data. We draw on an empirical study to show a wide range of emotional engagements with diverse aspects of data and their visualisation, and so demonstrate the importance of emotions as vital compon…
Complex ecologies of trust in data practices and data-driven systems
Trust in data practices and data-driven systems is widely seen as both important and elusive. A data trust deficit has been identified, to which proposed solutions are often localised or individualised, focusing either on what institutions can do to increase user trust in their data practices or on data management models that empower the individual user. Scholarship on trust often focuses on typologies of trust. This paper shifts the emphasis to …
Data Visualization in Society
Today we are witnessing an increased use of data visualization in society. Across domains such as work, education and the news, various forms of graphs, charts and maps are used to explain, convince and tell stories. In an era in which more and more data are produced and circulated digitally, and digital tools make visualization production increasingly accessible, it is important to study the conditions under which such visual texts are generated…
Public perceptions of good data management
Low levels of public trust in data practices have led to growing calls for changes to data-driven systems, and in the EU, the General Data Protection Regulation provides a legal motivation for such changes. Data management is a vital component of data-driven systems, but what constitutes 'good' data management is not straightforward. Academic attention is turning to the question of what 'good data' might look like more generally, but public views…
Sociology (29 works) · Computer Science (19 works) · Political science (18 works) · Data science (11 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Public relations (10 works) · Social Media and Politics (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Social science (8 works) · Media studies (7 works)