Labour

Collecting
(Assignment 1)

Tools

"The advantage of quantification does not lie in its ability to reveal absolute truths, but in its ability to create useful ways of knowing and acting in the world." (Wernimont, 2021)

“(…) such a ‘big data’ approach can never provide the depth and detail that comes with qualitatively learning about and understanding someone’s standpoint by actually asking them about a place and their personal feelings and motivations(…)”

- Dalton & Thatcher in "What Does a Critical Data Studies Look like, and Why Do We Care? Seven Points for a Critical Approach to ‘Big Data" pp. 4

Quantification

Critical Approach

Knowledge/results

Tools as a lens through which experience is shaped and filtered

Feelings

Datafying

Digitizing

The act of gathering and organizing a group of objects into a structured collection of data, shaped by the tools used and by the decisions that determine what is gathered, how it is gathered, and for what purpose.

Entity(item)

Entity(item)

Property

Big, connected systems that not only store data, but also provide tools, standards, and communities so different datasets can work together. (Rob Kitchen, 2022)

Semantic infrastructure

Systems for storing and arranging information function as tools that encourage specific ways of thinking (Dourish, 2017)

Ontology

Classification and Its Consequences

Classifications are social and political tools that shape how the world is organized and understood. When certain categories become embedded in infrastructures, they start to appear natural, even though they were created to serve specific institutional or cultural purposes. (Bowker & Star, 2000)

Loss of nuance

Rendering voices retrievable

A tool for making political dimensions of classification visible: keeping the perspectives and decisions of classifiers visible within infrastructures.

Labeling objects or information according to shared features, shaped by the tools that guide how similarities and differences are perceived. This process reveals certain qualities while hiding others, and in doing so it influences how knowledge is interpreted.

Graphic excellence

Avoid distorting what the data has to say

From broad overview to fine structure

Greatest number of ideas with the least ink

Visualizations as situated knowledge

Distorting data is an unavoidable part of visualizations. (D’Ignazio & Klein 2020).

Instead of trying to hide the lack of neutrality, the viewer should be made aware of the situated knowledge a visualization provide

The act of transforming information into visual form in ways that make certain patterns visible. The process depends on the tools and choices involved in creating the visualization, which shows some aspects of the data while erasing others, and thereby shape how the information is understood.

A narration of a Semester

This exhibit presents a constructed narrative of my learning, one shaped by the tools that framed my work, guided my labour, and made certain connections visible while obscuring others. Through the act of curating data (collecting, categorizing, archiving, and visualizing) I have produced a particular version of events that reflects the structure imposed by the tools themselves, and the choices and biases of my labour that emerged throughout the semester. This narrative is therefore an interpretation shaped by the relationship between tools, labour, and knowledge.

Categorizing
(Assignment 2)

Visualizing
(Assignment 3)