All datasets emerge from and are enmeshed in power-laden semiotic systems. While emerging data ethics curriculum is supporting data science students in identifying data biases and their consequences, critical attention to the cultural histories and vested interests animating data semantics is needed to elucidate the assumptions and political commitments on which data rest, along with the externalities they produce. In this article, I introduce three modes of reading that can be engaged when studying datasets—a denotative reading, a connotative reading, and (...) a deconstructive reading. I then outline how I have taught students to engage these methods when analyzing three datasets in Data and Society—a course designed to cultivate student competency in politically aware data analysis and interpretation. I show how combined, the reading strategies prompt students to grapple with the double binds of perceiving contemporary problems through systems of representation that are always situated, incomplete, and inflected with diverse politics. While I introduce these methods in the context of teaching, I argue that the methods are integral to any data practice in the conclusion. (shrink)

In this paper, we document the counter-data action and data activism of a grassroots affordable housing advocacy group in Atlanta. Our observation and insight into these data activities and strategies are achieved through ethnographic and engaged research and participatory design. We find that counter-data action through community-collected data is rooted in a legacy of Atlanta’s black activism and black scholarship; that this data activism enabled resource mobilization and critical conscious making; and that design and media production are essential post counter-data (...) action activities in data activism. Based on these findings, we urge the field of open government data to broaden their concept of social impact of data to include the use data to mobilize resources within oppressed communities not to influence policy and government but to build capacities within community in order to transform, not join, political structures. We also advocate that scholars within the fields of open government data, critical data studies, and data activism recognize the legacy and historic practice of data activism by black communities working towards social change. (shrink)

Recent work on Big Data and analytics reveals a tension between analyzing the role of emerging objects and processes in existing systems and using those same objects and processes to create new and purposeful forms of action. While the field of science and technology studies has had considerable success in pursuing the former goal, as Halford and Savage argue, there is an ongoing need to discover or invent ways to “do Big Data analytics differently.” In this commentary, I suggest that (...) attempts to produce new ways of working with Big Data and analytics might be hindered by how science and technology studies-influenced scholars have conceptualized assemblages. While these scholars have foregrounded objects’ relations within existing assemblages, new materialist philosophers draw attention to properties of objects that transcend those relations and might indicate opportunities for more creative or generative uses of Big Data and analytics. (shrink)