Day Two: Situating Data
SDS 189: Data and Social Justice
Lindsay Poirier
Statistical & Data Sciences, Smith College
Fall 2023
A Common Viewpoint
- The more plain, the more neutral
- The less emotional, the more objective
- The more distance between humans and numbers, the more truthful and factual
What are some of the things people do to make visualizations appear neutral?
Why do the authors argue that neutral visualizations are actually persuasive?
What does Donna Haraway mean when she refers to this as a ‘God Trick’? Why is this feminist?
Situated Knowledge and Standpoint Theory
- All knowledge is produced in a particular time, place, context, and from a particular body with particular history
- Our standpoints frame the knowledge that we produce
- We get closer to “strong objectivity” the more standpoints involved in knowledge production
- Objectivity is not about distancing humans but about diversifying knowledge production and making it more inclusive
We can only see the world from particular standpoints. We can never see everything at once.
A Situated View
How would standpoint theorists critique the idea that data collected by algorithms produce more objectivity than data collected by humans?
How would standpoint theorists critique the idea that we should distance individual human perspectives from data?
Exercise
- Imagine you are tasked with designing a dataset that represents how students in our class have experienced the impacts of Covid-19.
- Write down three questions that you would present to students in the class.
- We want to be able to compare and draw summary statistics from responses, so be sure to write multiple choice questions and list the possible responses for those questions.
Reflect
- What questions did you write down, and what were the possible options?
- Consider how your social identity (or your standpoint) might impact how you come up with the possible choices for that question.
Day Two: Situating Data SDS 189: Data and Social Justice Lindsay Poirier Statistical & Data Sciences , Smith College Fall 2023