Short reflection on putting data justice in context

During the workshop I thought in new and interesting ways about questions posed by the group. On the second day, for example, we were asked to reflect on the question:

I think we’ve all probably asked ourselves this question when conducting ethnographic research and writing out our theoretical perspectives – producing the stories and ideas so many positivists and quantitative researchers deride as anecdotal or speculative. I’ve come to realize, however, that data isn’t just what we collect, but it is comprised of socially-created imagery, information, text, and ideas abstracted, extracted, and curated from our collective and personal realities and senses.

However, the emotional and affective feelings data (and the act of data collection) provide and provoke cannot be easily expressed or quantified, even though these remain present and palpable in so much data collection I’ve witnessed. For example, enumerators working for UNICEF or other aid organizations I worked with in the Horn of Africa struggle to convey the senses of crisis and suffering they and their interlocutors felt because it couldn’t be expressed by the surveys at hand.

These sorts of emotional entanglements inherent to the act of data collection so often cannot be expressed through the data mechanisms and platforms currently available and mandated. Consequently, we all discussed, data isn’t just a ‘thing,’ but a production, sometimes a performance, in various and variable and unfinished forms, to subjectively and momentarily represent realities, events, or circumstances.  

Second, during the course of the workshop I have been trying to understand the geography and dynamics of what I’m calling “data shadows,” mostly through my current ethnographic work with undocumented, irregular Ethiopian migrants to the Middle East, and how different data points, people, phenomena, are variably rendered visible or invisible in order to get donor assistance or media attention or remain hidden. Nothing –including data—is always or forever or necessarily either invisible or visible, true or false, useful or useless.

Sometimes, even accidentally or temporarily, people who were meant to be invisible become visible. Or people that would normally be subjects of humanitarian concern are ignored. For some migrants, like those Ethiopians evading capture and escaping violence at home, they must move out of the reach of data collectors and border patrols. They cannot become data. They cannot become data. At night, along the eastern coast of Africa, some boats go out with migrants on them, and often, these boats don’t make it across the sea. People drown on sunken boats and disappear, along with the data points that might have potentially represented them or called attention to their lives and needs.

The only time these migrants, on boats, fleeing violence at home, lacking legal documentation, are counted is when their bodies wash up, deceased, on beaches. Only then, it seems, are they counted and do they count. The kinds of slippages happen in shadows; these migrants for example are almost invisible, but not quite, or almost subjects of humanitarian concern, but soon enough to save their lives. There is, consequently, a certain strategic messiness of data and data collection that allows for lives and circumstances to sometimes, for some purposes, be rendered visible, or invisible, useful or dangerous.

Several of us kept coming back to counting:

This counting activity, however, like data, is not a stable or objective thing. It is metaphysical, symbolic, strategic, potentially powerful, and slippery, and these slippages are telling about the nature and effects of data collection, interpretation, and use. There’s invisible data, shadow data, and data people want to keep invisible for privacy, as well as on the other hand, the effects of data visualizations, data communication, and the marketing of data in all sorts of industries. Data is constituted and entwined by the affect and aesthetics of everyone involved in its consideration — but whose affect, whose aesthetics, and to what effects, all seem in the end up for grabs. Even so, we all realized, there is always the potential for data and data collection to be illuminating, life-affirming, meaningful, and even sometimes lifesaving. And this is where I ended up – data as potentially vital in many different instances across all our work, despite its messiness, manipulation, and contestation.