[-empyre-] data visualization, equity and justice concerns around distribution and products

[christina at christinamcphee.net]

Catherine asks,


"Do people know of artists or cultural producers who have tried to visualize/expose power flows through Big Data ecosystems?”


On Turbulence.org <http://turbulence.org/>  some gorgeous and provocative projects take this exposure on.  One is Luke Dubois’ Hard Data (2009).  He writes: "Hard Data is a data-mining, sonification, and visualization project that uses statistics from the American military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq as source material for an interactive audiovisual composition based around an open-source “score” of events. Using Xenakis’ understanding of formalized music as a starting point, DuBois draws upon a variety of statistical data ranging from the visceral (civilian deaths, geospatial renderings of military actions) to the mundane (fiscal year budgets for the war) to generate a dataset that can be used for any number of audiovisual compositions. The intention of the project is to recontextualize the formal stochastic music in the context of real-world statistics, and to provide a compositional and metaphoric framework for creating an electroacoustic music relevant and significant to our time.”  http://turbulence.org/project/hard-data/# <http://turbulence.org/project/hard-data/#>



If---as Orit Halprin observes, “Postwar design and communication sciences, believing the world to be inundated with data, produced new tactics of management for which observers had to be trained and the mind reconceived”, 
inducing, like forced labor, “a range of new tactics, and imaginaries , for the management and orchestration of life,” —— the reverse direction can also be observed in Luke’s Hard Data— here the orchestration of life sonifies
as a symphonic texture on war, death.  

Yet Catherine, you’re casting out this query in a slightly different key— one that strikes on a properly design research question…. if Luke’s project deconstructs the military data for a stochastic music, this is ‘enough’ as an aesthetic-political gesture- yet you are wanting something more, a tool or machine that can help people with equity and justice goals, right?  “Hard Data” visualizes/exposes …. but there’s more here… 

You also ask, “In my work this has translated to working on data literacy in order to do my small part to counteract these imbalances and to get more voices to the table, particularly journalists, artists, educators, policymakers. What might taking a feminist approach mean for interrogating, intervening in this asymmetry

As an example, here’s a start up that works on making financing available for small scale projects in affordable housing, schools, and other  projects by local public agencies in the US — https://neighborly.com/minibonds <https://neighborly.com/minibonds>

It’s an intervention into the mainstream system of bond finance for public projects that makes it possible for anyone to approach possibilities for investing in local projects— in a way it goes one step beyond Kickstarter and similar
crowd-funding venues.  Does this kind of new business interface connect the dots in a way that makes sense to ‘counteract these imbalances and get more voices to the table..’ literally by funding education through these micro-bonds?

On a much larger scale, in light of your questions, it’s interesting to look at a very large data visualization project that has an explicit goal of putting big data analysis to use, for provoking political change and economic resource improvement for women and girls around the world.  Certainly only possible with the funding backing of the Gates Foundation and the Clinton Foundation!  http://noceilings.org <http://noceilings.org/>
 

The website indicates Includes approximately 850,000 data points on 1,000 indicators across 10 categories from 1995-2014. http://noceilings.org/report/report.pdf <http://noceilings.org/report/report.pdf>





-c



On Jul 3, 2016, at 2:49 AM, kanarinka <kanarinka at ikatun.org> wrote:

----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
One aspect of taking a feminist approach to data visualization that I have been thinking about a great deal has less to do with visualization and more to do with equity and justice concerns around the distribution of data and the products that come from it. 

Big Data, medium data and even small data are all asymmetric in the sense that:
- who has the capacity to collect and store the data is not equally distributed (basically it's large corporations and states)
- access to data is not equally distributed (those collecting agencies are selective when it comes to what data is "open", it's debatable whether some of the data called "open" actually is open or not, i.e. PDFs)
- know-how to analyze and make meaning (or "business intelligence") from data is not equally distributed (see Kate Crawford's recent article "Artificial Intelligence's White Guy Problem" - http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/opinion/sunday/artificial-intelligences-white-guy-problem.html?_r=0)
- understanding of impacts is not transparent - actions and decisions that result from data and often have serious consequences are not transparent. I.e. if someone is being denied a loan, it's not clear what part of the algorithm flagged them

In my work this has translated to working on data literacy in order to do my small part to counteract these imbalances and to get more voices to the table, particularly journalists, artists, educators, policymakers. 

What might taking a feminist approach mean for interrogating, intervening in this asymmetry? Do people know of artists or cultural producers who have tried to visualize/expose power flows through Big Data ecosystems?  

///////////////////////////// 
kanarinka at ikatun.org   ||   @kanarinka   ||   +1 617 501 2441   ||   www.kanarinka.com
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Christina McPhee

http://christinamcphee.net




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