The Eye of the Rider. Visualization and data-driven heuristics for the critical analysis of gig economy

Abstract

The digital evolution of economies and markets brings changes that go largely beyond growth and efficiency. In the gig economy, also fueled by algorithmic management solutions, digital labour platforms (DPLs) raise significant issues that include power asymmetries, new forms of workers' abuse and discrimination, algorithms' opacity and over-control. In such a scenario, while normative frameworks evolve novel safeguards, a crucial challenge is that of feeding public (social, institutional) oversight on the dynamics that, at various levels, affect the gig work world. In this paper, we show how the combination of visual analytics and data-driven heuristics can be used to offer new insights on and promote higher levels of transparency and awareness about the fairness of DPLs' activity seen, in the first place, from the workers' perspective. Solutions will be presented as part of GigAdvisor, an experimental cross-platform application developed within an ongoing research that draws on computational social science methods to enable new critical approaches to the digital economy.