Aging in Data

The Aging in Data (AiD) project brings together a collaborative, socially engaged, and interdisciplinary network of scholars and community-based activists and organizations to research the intersections of age studies, communications/media studies, and critical data studies. Our primary goal is to understand what it means to age and, more specifically, to be old in an era of unprecedented digital data-gathering. The rapid expansion of mobile services, online communications, social media platforms and the digitization of information over the last decade is changing the nature of our engagements with communication and media: media generate valuable digital data that is shared across networks (Zuboff, 2019). The primary goal of this new project to examine what it means to age in a world of digital data: what we might term the “datafication of ageing.”

Concordia University’s engAGE, the Trent Centre on Aging and Society (TCAS) and the Graz Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Aging and Care (CIRAC) are the three primary academic centers that will provide direction to the project, other partners include the Université de Montréal, Queen’s and Ryerson in Canada, CoAgeCare in Finland, Brunel University’s BORG (Brunel Older Research Group) in UK, Ben Gurion University, Israel, the Open University of Catalonia’s IN3, and other community partners.