The Data Interface

23 June 2026, Department of Sociology, University of York

On 23^rd June 2026, we hosted an event at the University of York on the topic of ‘The Data Interface’. It was a free-to-attend one-day event, with talks from leading figures and open discussion exploring the different ways data interface with the social world: from the state to the body, from identities to economies, from consumption to employment, from the senses and emotions to algorithmic infrastructures and stratifications. The topic was chosen to allow the event to work across scales and contexts, and also to bring wider social issues into the debate around data and algorithms. The speakers were invited with this in ambition in mind, and also to facilitate dialogue on those broader developments that might extend extend beyond the event itself. The speakers selected from across disciplines and were chosen to cover a variety of cutting-edge work related to the topic. These speakers included Ayona Datta, Olga Goriunova, Beatrice Fazi, Rebecca Coleman, Addie McGowan, Preeti Raghunath, Ben Jacobsen and Ludmila Lupinacci. In the first session of the day, we also invited Harrison Smith to respond to the opening talks. In total we had 41 attendees at the event, at various career stages, and from very different disciplinary backgrounds. The event acted as a focal point, drawing people together around some shared and emerging interests. The outstanding quality of the talks provoked extremely engaging and lively discussion, with questions around methods and approaches, as well as the substantive, conceptual and theoretical issues coming to the fore. A number of synergies and linkages between the topics began to emerge during the day, not least around the materiality of the data interface, which was particularly prominent. The speakers, and the discussions too, brought-out aspects of the experiences of data, the infrastructures, the categories and classifications, as well as the histories and envisioned futures that shape the current conjuncture. We are hoping that the event will act as a spark for bringing people into the Leverhulme Centre for Algorithmic Life, and also for continuing these and other discussion around the relations between data, algorithms and the social world.