Becoming “Data-Driven”: Burgeoning Data Cultures and Liminality in Civil Service - II

Abstract

Premised on the promises of being “data-driven,” nation-states across the globe are building web-based, data-driven systems to manage populations, resources, and risk. Scholarship in postcolonial STS and critical data studies critiques the widespread use of data-driven systems, pointing to the racialized, gendered, and socioeconomic consequences embedded in their production and use, and the troubled histories from which such apparatuses arise (Borocas and Selbst 2016; Browne 2017; Crawford and boyd 2012; Noble 2017; Suchman 2007). This research has productively demonstrated that data technologies are not neutral, but instead are socially, culturally, and politically situated ways of knowing and seeing (Browne 2017; Gitelman 2014; Jasanoff 2017; Thakor 2017). While scholars have studied the recent and often algorithmic proliferation of these data-driven practices (Eubanks 2018; Brayne 2017; Lyon 2014), less attention has been paid to the complex interplay between data-driven domination and the changing norms of everyday administration—the day-to-day work of forging of what Oscar Gandy calls ‘‘actionable intelligence’’ (2012: 125). And, how these systems work outside of the West is largely unattended to. Using these conditions as a starting point, we illuminate the range of practices and perceptions of being “data-driven,” from policy makers in capital cities to mid-management urban police to rural officials. How do government workers develop a sense of “data literacy” in divergent contexts across regions? How do they derive value in data and data-driven techniques? Through empirical analysis, this panel digs beneath macro trends and rhetoric to query the lived experiences of working through these burgeoning data systems.

Individual Presentations

• Engineering Ethics: Techniques and Technologies in the Moral Economy of Homeless Social Services - Jolen Martinez, Rice University

• Multiple Meanings of Data-Driven Governance: Facebook and Civil Service in Southern Cambodia - Margaret Jack, Cornell University; Nicola Dell, Cornell Tech

• Ontologies of Difference in Data Collection: Disability and the Indian Census - Kim Fernandes, University of Pennsylvania

Session Organizers

• Leah Horgan, University of California, Irvine

• Margaret Jack, Cornell University

• Cindy Lin, University of Michigan, School of Information