Data Is About People
“We see things as we are, not as they are”
In (I believe) 2011, I attended a graduate student conference at the University of Chicago. After presenting the preliminary results of my dissertation fieldwork, I had the rare opportunity to sit down with fellow graduate students from other universities and talk with the chair of the sociology department. After a lot of back and fourth discussion about common questions and concerns about our respective work and the fields we work in, the chair, a brilliant and very thoughtful gentleman, began to think out loud. It is one thing to read someone’s polished work after it has been rigorously edited and carefully presented. It is another to hear someone’s brain construct, reflect, and reason in real time. When we, the graduate students, seemed to have hit an impasse in our discussion, the chair sat forward and in a reflective voice, as if attempting to tie together the underlying threads to our conversation said, “I still think about where the social comes from. What is the social? The study of the social, what we call sociology, implies that there’s a social - somewhere, out there, between us. What is it? Where does it come from? After all these years, all of the books and articles, I find myself always coming back to these questions. Does anyone here know?” (from my own notes). No one said anything.
I still think about this moment because it taught me that we have to continually review, reflect upon, and question the foundational underpinnings and assumptions that our work rests on. In a moment of honesty, vulnerability, and care the chair was both a student and teacher.
If I reformulate the question - what is the social? - so that it resonates in a different context, I would ask these three questions:
What does data do?
Who does it serve?
Where does it come from?
While my answer might be different five years from now, this is the best of what I have to offer at this time.
Data is an action verb. It is always doing something, evolving, and in the process of going somewhere - being collected and triangulated, combined with other sources, becoming and making an argument. We employ data to tell us something insightful about the conditions that organize our lives. Data can inform how certain realities came to be, illustrate patterns that show us where to look, and what to focus on specifically and hopefully fix. The general point is that we, people, are the source, subject, and audience for data. Data is ultimately about people. It is not objective because people are not objective. If data is ultimately about people, then we immediately implicate the many roles that power and bias play. Who is the person or people framing the question, how are they collecting data, what language and tone are they using when writing the analysis, in what format and to whom is the analysis shared?
Data is not neutral because we cannot remove ourselves from the process. This is new packaging for old questions. If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around, did it make a sound? Yes, according to many philosophers. Can we really separate the art from the artist? No, who the person is influences what they make. The art and artist can be juxtaposed so that contradictions are explored and learned from. Today, its about artificial intelligence: what is the relationship between human bias and the creators of new technologies? Tomorrow it will be about something else.
Whether it’s shared as part of an academic paper, a policy report or something that is broadcast to a larger audience, data eventually takes on a life of its own. This is why ethics, responsibility, and mutual accountability are so important. When data takes a life of its own, we have no say or control in how it gets picked up, used in public discourse and debate, and who it (positively or negatively) affects.
