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

[Jo-Anne Green]

Hi All,

Also in response to Catherine's question "Do people know of artists or
cultural producers who have tried to visualize/expose power flows through
Big Data ecosystems?”

My friend Joni Seager is a scholar and activist in feminist geography and
global environmental policy -- including climate change, gender equity
measurement and gender audits of institutions towards gender mainstreaming.

Her bio:

Joni Seager -- Professor and Chair of the Global Studies Department at
Bentley University (Boston, MA) -- has authored many books, including four
editions of the award-winning "Atlas of Women in the World" (1986-2008),
two editions of "The State of the Environment Atlas," and "Earth Follies:
Coming to Feminist Terms With the Global Environmental Crisis."

Seager has been an active consultant with the United Nations on several
gender and environmental policy projects, including consulting with the
United Nations Environmental Programme on integrating gender perspectives
into their work on disasters and early warning systems, and with UNESCO and
the Division on Economic and Social Affairs on gender in water policy.

Joni has been on the front lines for more than three decades. Her most
recent atlas --
https://www.amazon.com/Penguin-Atlas-Women-World-Fourth/dp/0143114514?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc
-- isn't exactly optimistic, but she continues to work globally to improve
women's lives.

Looking forward to the discussion to come.

Warmly,
Jo

On Sun, Jul 3, 2016 at 3:19 PM, Helen Thorington <helen.thorington at gmail.com
> wrote:

>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: christina at christinamcphee.net <christina at christinamcphee.net>
> Date: Sun, Jul 3, 2016 at 1:29 PM
> Subject: [-empyre-] data visualization, equity and justice concerns around
> distribution and products
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
>
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
>
> 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  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/#
>
>
>
> 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
>
> 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
>
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
>
> -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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