The Ground Keeps Opening Up: Building an Infrastructure for Data Appropriation

• In Event: Making and Doing: Activating STS through Knowledge Expression and Travel - I

Abstract

Data is regularly appropriated or contested by supposed “non-expert” groups like self-trackers and air quality activists. Supporting alternative interpretations of computationally dense datasets requires more than alternative social and cultural frameworks. It also requires alternative technical infrastructures to support the formulation of new stories told with data. By building a data exploration system, our project exposed yawning gaps between computational systems and social worlds despite decades of ‘datafication.’ Our design ethos was to help people find the story in data, rather than telling the story to them or for them. This ethos opened up a whole world of unknowns, both technical and social, precisely because of the unpredictable nature of storytelling with data. Building an infrastructure made the invisible work of data exploration more visible. What is ground and what is figure morphed as technical and social arrangements became more defined, and the definition in turn caused yet more grounds to open up. Figure and ground became entwined with one another in new ways in exploratory data analyses, which in turn complicated my own affective state. The sensibilities that are comforting as an STS scholar-exploration, plurality and uncertainty-become a simultaneous source of discomfort as a project manager, as they became shaky ground upon which to make a design decision.

Author

• Dawn Nafus, Intel