EVENT | Data Feminism

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Description

How might we draw on feminist critical thought to reimagine data practices and data work? Join us for a public talk with Lauren Klein (Assistant Professor, Georgia Tech) to discuss her recent work on data feminism. Hosted by Jonathan Gray at the Department for Digital Humanities at King’s College London.

Public talk by Lauren Klein, Assistant Professor, Georgia Tech

With their ability to depict hundreds, thousands, and sometimes even millions of relationships at a single glance, visualizations of data can dazzle, inform, and persuade. It is precisely this power that makes it worth asking: “Visualization by whom? For whom? In whose interest? Informed by whose values?” These are some of the questions that emerge from what we call data feminism, a way of thinking about data and its visualization that is informed by the past several decades of feminist critical thought. Data feminism prompts questions about how, for instance, challenges to the male/female binary can also help challenge other binary and hierarchical classification systems. It encourages us to ask how the concept of invisible labor can help to expose the invisible forms of labor associated with data work. And it points to how an understanding of affective and embodied knowledge can help to expand the notion of what constitutes data and what does not. Using visualization as a starting point, this talk works backwards through the data-processing pipeline in order to show how a feminist approach to thinking about data not only exposes how power and privilege presently operate in visualization work, but also suggests how different design principles can help to mitigate inequality and work towards justice.
The hashtag for this event is #kingsdh.

Speakers

Lauren Klein is an assistant professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab. With Matthew Gold, she edits Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press), a hybrid print/digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge. Her literary monograph, Matters of Taste: Eating, Aesthetics, and the Early American Archive, is forthcoming from Minnesota in Spring 2019. She is also at work on two new projects: Data Feminism, co-authored with Catherine D’Ignazio, and under contract with MIT Press, which distills key lessons from feminist theory into a set of principles for the design and interpretation of data visualizations, and Data by Design, which provides an interactive history of data visualization from the eighteenth century to the present.

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Date and time

Thu 24 May 2018
16:00 – 18:00

Location

K2.31, King’s Building
Strand Campus, King’s College London
London
WC2R 2LS

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EVENT | The World (Wide Web) through an App: The Challenges of Smartphone Users in the Global South

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Description

Public talk by Elisa Oreglia (King’s College London)

In recent years, small networks of traders have started to bring cheap, China-made smartphones to low- and middle-income consumers in the Global South. While this has made smartphones accessible to a population that would not be able to afford them otherwise, it has also brought a series of challenges due to the quality and features of the handsets, their language support, etc. Drawing from ethnographic research carried out in Myanmar since 2014, this talk will focus on the experiences of first-time Internet users in semi-urban and rural areas in Myanmar, and their challenges in accessing an internet that can look very different from the one we take for granted. I will discuss what it means to experience the Internet through apps, rather than through a browser; to use a mobile phone while constantly facing obstacles related to infrastructure, cost, connectivity, etc; and reflect on what lessons can be drawn for human-computer interaction and interface design for marginal populations.

Speakers

Elisa Oreglia is a lecturer in Global Digital Cultures in the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. Her research is about the diffusion, appropriation, and use of digital technologies among marginal communities in East and Southeast Asia.

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Date and time

Wed 30 May 2018
16:30 – 18:00

Location

S0.13, Strand Building
Strand Campus, King’s College London
London
WC2R 2LS

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EVENT | The Field Notes Plugin: Making Network Visualization in Gephi Accountable

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Description

Public talk by Karin van Es, Daniela van Geenen and Maranke Wieringa (Utrecht Data School, Utrecht University).
Hosted by Jonathan Gray, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. The hashtag for this event is #kingsdh.

The network visualizations humanities scholars and social scientists employ to communicate research findings are often imbrued with a sense of objectivity. The impression is that these visualizations show facts about, rather than interpretations of, data. Gephi is a popular network visualization package, and used widely within scholarly research. Problematically, it saves only the spatialized network graph, whilst the steps taken and parameters of the algorithms used to get to make the visualization go undocumented. To garner legitimacy for scholarship, it is important that the interpretative decisions involved in the construction of the visualization are documented and opened up for scrutiny. Presently, academic publications in the field of media studies offer limited transparency on the matter. In this talk we explore Gephi’s “epistemological affordances” and elaborate on how the interpretative acts of practitioners, knowingly and unknowingly, privilege certain viewpoints and perpetuate particular power relations. We subsequently present the ‘field notes’ plugin for Gephi developed in collaboration with the Digital Humanities Lab. It enables account-ability through the systematic documentation of the visualization and analysis process.

Speakers

Karin van Es is Assistant Professor of Television and Digital Culture at Utrecht University (NL) and coordinator of the Datafied Society research platform. Recent publications include the edited volume The Datafied Society: Studying Culture through Data (Amsterdam University Press, 2017) with Mirko Tobias Schäfer and articles for various journals and essay collections. Karin’s current work focuses on how datafication enfolds within public service broadcasting.

Daniela van Geenen is a lecturer in data journalistic research and data visualization at the University of Applied Sciences Utrecht and a researcher at Utrecht Data School. Her work tackles the question of the scholarly conduct that the work with digital methods demands, challenged by the need to design accountable software tools. Daniela published on the role of social and technical actors on social media platforms, and their meaning for social and political practices such as public debate and cultural consumption.

Maranke Wieringa is a lecturer at Utrecht University and a researcher at Utrecht Data School. She has a background in Cultural Studies and Media Studies, and specialized in software and data analysis. Notable research to which she contributed focused on how politicians, and actors operating at the fringes of the public sphere frame, and use, news (media). Maranke’s current academic work focuses on (scholarly and municipal) accountability in data projects.

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Date and time

19 June 2018
16:00 – 18:00

Location

K-1.56, King’s Building
Strand Campus, King’s College London
London
WC2R 2LS

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