Data Feminism is broken up into chapters that also have core principles. The first chapter’s principle was “examine power,” which is what you all wrote about in your Reading Response 1.

The second chapter on collection/analysis/imagination/teaching had a central principle of “challenge power.”

There were a few moments that I thought were worthy of more discussion that I’m interested in seeing play out on Discord. I list them below as options for you to explore further on your own.

Each of these options directly relate to the early stages of working on our data sets this term: how we might be challenging “the past” that has helped shape the data sets we look at, how we might do work that brings “justice” more than “ethics”, and how we can go beyond transparency but also be reflexive in finding our place and the place of those we are writing about in our projects.

 

Task

Go to the text channel “2-17-2021-predicting-past-chapter-2” under “Reading Discussion, and choose one of the following questions to try to answer:

• Using at least one additional quote from chapter 2, explain what you think is meant by “predicting the past” in the quote early on about machine learning and how that can relate to challenging power. (the “predicting the past” quote occurs in paragraph starting “Sociologist Ruha Benjamin has a term…”).
• Why does “data justice” challenger power in ways that “data ethics” do not? Explain why with at least one quote to assist your response.
• When D’Ignazio and Klein write about the Digital Defense Playbook, they highlighted how it was “born out of many years of relationship-building and research” and how it demonstrated “not only transparency of methods but also reflexivity: the ability to reflect on and take responsibility for one’s own position within the multiple, intersecting dimensions of the matrix of domination.” For this class, since you likely won’t be collecting data and, thus, be able to work with community members to collect and make meaning out of it, how can you account for reflexivity as much as transparency this semester? What steps can you take to do that? Use your understanding of chapter 2 to help you answer here.

 

After posting to Discord, click the button below to continue: