Dr Itzelle Medina-Perea
BA (UNAM, Mexico), MA (Sheffield), PhD (Sheffield)
Information School
Post-Doctoral Researcher


Full contact details
Information School
Room 324
Regent Court (IS)
211 Portobello
Sheffield
S1 4DP
- Profile
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I am currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at Patterns in Practice, an AHRC funded project that is exploring how practitioners’ beliefs, values and feelings interact to shape how they engage with and in data mining and machine learning– forms of ‘narrow AI’. We will be investigating three different – and contrasting – contexts: pharmaceutical drug discovery, higher education learning analytics and arts practice. The project runs from August 2021 to February 2024.
Departmental responsibilities
- Member of the Digital Societies Research Group
- Research Student Staff Committee (Research Staff Rep)
- Research interests
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I am working in the field of Critical Data Studies (CDS). My PhD thesis contributes to understanding how sociocultural values interact with material conditions to shape the 'journeys' of patient data generated in the UK health sector, focusing on the reuse of patient data for research. By applying the Data Journeys approach (Bates et al., 2016) and integrating the notion of Data Valences (Fiore-Gartland & Neff, 2015) this work helps to understand university-based researchers' culture, how it relates to other data cultures, and how that impacts the flow of patient data generated in the UK healthcare sector.
Before starting my role at Patterns in Practice, I worked at Living With Data, a research project funded by The Nuffield Foundation. Living with Data aims to understand people’s knowledge and perceptions of data practices, and what they think constitute ‘fair’ data practices.
My research interests include:
- Recent advances in datafication and AI-systems
- How socio-cultural factors shape data practices
- Use and reuse of personal data
- Publications
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Journal articles
- ‘No comment’? A study of commenting on PLOS articles. Journal of Information Science, 46(1), 82-100. View this article in WRRO
Conference proceedings papers
- Using data journeys to inform research design: Socio-cultural dynamics of patient data flows in the UK healthcare sector. iConference 2019 Proceedings
Reports
Website content
Posters
- ‘No comment’? A study of commenting on PLOS articles. Journal of Information Science, 46(1), 82-100. View this article in WRRO
- Professional activities and memberships
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- Communications Editor at Data for Policy, a global forum for interdisciplinary and cross-sector discussions around the impact and potentials of the digital revolution in the government sector.
- Invited Speaker at various external events including Society of Spanish Researchers in the UK Christmas Seminar, Workshop on ethical issues in social media research at King's College London
- Peer reviewer of research articles for Data & Policy, iConference, Online Information Review.