Making Objectivity in Data-Centric Knowledge Practices

Abstract

This panel is concerned with emergent practices of objectivity in contemporary data environments in science and technology, especially those that appear to exceed, interrupt, or displace the quest for “truth” and “facticity.” While STS has sought to understand how facts and epistemic objects are stabilized and circulated, this panel interrogates novel knowledge practices that escape the logic of a “hardening of facts.” Instead, we are interested in emerging modes of verification that present themselves as flexible, iterative, and reflexive; as operating with and through open epistemic horizons. This could take the shape of first responders’ practice of “waiting for the facts to emerge” as California’s wildfires depart from historical baselines (Petryna 2018: 582), or iterative intervention designs in Global Health that adjust their concepts and measures according to “what works” (Bemme 2018). At stake in such “horizoning” epistemic practices are the very boundaries between true or false, success or failure, normal or pathological. In light of such new data practices, we suggest revisiting the question of objectivity. It has been amply shown to be produced, not given (e.g., Harding 1991, Haraway 1989, Daston and Galison 2007); it is a set of rules and attitudes that has been, and can be, otherwise. Machine learning systems, for example, are imagined to outperform human objectivity. As such, efforts to “judge machine judgements” reconfigure what objectivity is and ought to be. We invite scholars to grapple with the questions: How is objectivity made and re-made in data-centric environments? How is ‘objectivity’ produced and practiced beyond ‘truth’ and ‘facticity’?

Individual Presentations

• “A Better World, Faster:” Epistemic Practices of Google.org - Rachel Bergmann, McGill University

• Analysis of the Rise of Deep Learning - Ravit Dotan, UC Berkeley; Smitha Milli, UC Berkeley

• Finding “What Works”: Iterative Practices of Objectivity in Global Mental Health - Doerte Bemme, McGill University

• The Datafication of Expertise: 3D Laser Scanners and Courtroom Narrative - Stacy Wood, University of California Los Angeles

• Objectivity As Displacement: The Case of the Rotten Ice Project - Julianne Yip, McGill

• Shit as a Reservoir of Resistance: How Delayed Governance May Have Catalyzed the Post-Antibiotic Apocalypse - KD Brown, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill - Dept of Geography

Session Organizers

• Doerte Bemme, McGill University

• Rachel Bergmann, McGill University

• Julianne Yip, McGill