Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis is concerned with understanding how smart technologies are conceived, created and implemented, and explores the ways these processes are shaped by historical, geo-political, economic and technical contexts. At its core the thesis is concerned with understanding how technical citizenship and democracy can be preserved within the design process against a backdrop of increasing neoliberalism and technocracy. This is investigated by means of a comparative study of smart public bikeshare schemes in Dublin, Ireland and Hamilton, Canada. These schemes are configured and systemized using a variety of technical and ideological rationales and express the imaginaries of place in significantly different ways. Utilising a conceptual framework derived from Andrew Feenberg’s critical theory of technology, the thesis unpacks and problematizes the innovation process in order to understand how the outcomes of these schemes support the way of life of one or another influential social group. The philosophical orientation of the study is critical constructivism which combines a form of constructivism with more systematic and socially critical views of technology. The axis of comparison between the schemes is democratization and the manner in which the rationalizations and embedded cultural assumptions characterizing particular places operate to support or resist more egalitarian forms of participation. Methodologically, Feenberg’s critical framework is supported both by theory-driven thematic coding and critical hermeneutics which is an interpretative process that compliments the theoretical framework and positions issues of power and ideology within a wider, macro-level context. Data sources supporting the research comprise interviews, a variety of documentary sources and the architectures and technical specifications of both smart bikeshare systems. The findings from the research illustrate that despite the pervasiveness of a neoliberal orthodoxy conditioning technology production, citizen-centric design is still possible within a climate of consensus building and cooperation. As such, the thesis adds to the body of knowledge on philosophy of technology, critical urbanism, smart city development, democratic engagement and collaborative infrastructuring. In addition, the conceptual framework, developed in response to the empirical cases, represents an elaboration of Feenberg’s work and so the thesis also makes an important contribution to the analytic and methodological potential of critical theory of technology.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".