Data from the Margins

Anyone who works with data knows that it’s never neutral. A dataset is kind of like a photograph: even if it does a great job of capturing everything in its frame, lots of the world doesn’t make it in the picture.

So even as many mainstream commentators have uncritically sung the praises of big data, people from marginalized groups have often been more nuanced in their approaches. From queer people, people of color, disabled people, feminists, Indigenous people, and many others, we’ve witnessed a profusion of writing and advocacy that wields data as a tool for building power—even as these communities draw our attention to the specific ways “neutral” data can reinforce injustice.

In this class, we’ll read some of this work, talk to data activists, and we’ll build our own interactive tools for helping to communicate data’s double-edged power.