Contributor biography

Helen Kennedy is Professor of Digital Society at the University of Sheffield. She recently published a monograph entitled Post, Mine, Repeat: Social Media Data Mining Becomes Ordinary (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Other recent research includes Seeing Data (www.seeingdata.org), which explored how non-experts relate to data visualisations. She is interested in critical approaches to big data and data visualisations, how to make data more accessible to ordinary citizens, and how people live with data. Over the years, her research has traversed digital media landscapes, covering topics from web homepages to data visualisation, from race, class, gender inequality to learning disability and web accessibility, and from web design to social media data mining and data visualisation.

William Allen is a Research Officer at the Migration Observatory, in the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) at the University of Oxford. His research and published work examines the links among media, policy-making and public perceptions about migration issues. He is also interested in how non-academic groups, particularly those in civil society, engage with migration data, research and statistics.