Everyday Adventures with Unruly Data

Description

Paired informal and scholarly essays show how everyday events reveal fundamental concepts of data, including its creation, aggregation, management, and use. Whether questioning numbers on a scale, laughing at a misspelling of one’s name, or finding ourselves confused in a foreign supermarket, we are engaging with data. The only way to handle data responsibly, says Melanie Feinberg in this incisive work, is to take into account its human character. Though the data she discusses may seem familiar, close scrutiny shows it to be ambiguous, complicated, and uncertain: unruly. Drawing on the tools of information science, she uses everyday events such as deciding between Blender A and Blender B on Amazon to demonstrate a practical, critical, and generative mode of thinking about data: its creation, management, aggregation, and use.   Each chapter pairs a self-contained main essay (an adventure) with a scholarly companion essay (the reflection). The adventure begins with an anecdote—visiting the library, running out of butter, cooking rice on a different stove. Feinberg argues that to understand the power and pitfalls of data science, we must attend to the data itself, not merely the algorithms that manipulate it. As she reflects on the implications of commonplace events, Feinberg explicates fundamental concepts of data that reveal the many tiny design decisions—which may not even seem like design at all—that shape how data comes to be. Through the themes of serendipity, objectivity, equivalence, interoperability, taxonomy, labels, and locality, she illuminates the surprisingly pervasive role of data in our daily thoughts and lives.    Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: A Spirit of Adventure Wayfaring and Transport Data in the Everyday Chapter Structure: Adventure and Reflection Thematic Sequence and Connecting Arguments This Book as Methodological Invitation Antecedents 1. Serendipity Adventure: A Trip to the Library An Uncomfortable Encounter with an Enthusiastic Librarian An Enchantingly Strange Museum A Call Number That I Can’t Find Danish Supermarkets Two Serendipitous Books Reflection: How Do We Attend to Data in the Everyday? The Intellectual Heritage of Knowledge Organization Reciprocal Themes across Multiple Disciplines Information Design, Power, and Accountability 2. Objectivity Adventure: That Scale Must Be Wrong Stepping on a Scale Step Counters on Smartphones The Allure of Numbers Measurement and Convention Reflection: How Is the Quantitative Not? The Two Cultures of the Sciences and the Humanities Human Judgment in Quantitative Measurement The Conduit Metaphor and the Mathematical Theory of Communication Objectivity as That Which Speaks for Itself The Human Work of Data Collection 3. Equivalence Adventure: When Is Butter Lurpak Butter in Denmark and Lurpak Butter in the United States Thin Mints in California and Thin Mints in Texas American Coke and Mexican Coke Editions of Hamlet in North American Library Catalogs Editions of Mr Jelly’s Business in the Austlit Catalog Reflection: Is This Thing the Same as That One? What One Thing Might Constitute Disciplinary Assumptions about Information Things (Documents) Decisions about Things in Data Design and Implementation 4. Interoperability Adventure: I Can’t Cook Rice in Copenhagen Cooking Rice French Bread in Different Languages The Provenance of an Afternoon Pastry A Thai Robot Curry Taster Protocols for Removing Dangerous Posts from Social Media Reflection: How Does the Same Process Lead to Different Outcomes? Scientific Reproducibility as an Unsettled Concept The Challenge of Semantic Data Interoperability Empirical Outcomes in the Pursuit of Interoperable Data The Imperative of Data Criticism 5. Taxonomy Adventure: Not That Hierarchy A Vile Hierarchy The Vile Hierarchy, Revised That Jumble Drawer in Your Kitchen Confessions of a Data Snob “User-Centered” Taxonomy Reflection: How Does Classificatory Structure Matter? A Constellation of Fundamental Data Concepts Taxonomies and Data Users Taxonomy Development as Design Rather Than Discovery Structural Constraint as an Invitation to Creativity 6. Labels Adventure: A Mistake on My Mastercard A Mistaken Name That I Like Greece and Macedonia Mrs., Miss, and Ms A Magic Wand Orientals, the Yellow Peril, and the Chinese Virus Reflection: What’s in a Name? Common-Sense Distinctions between Concepts and Labels Distinctions between Concepts and Labels in the Practical Literature of Controlled Vocabularies Empirical Realities of Extracting Concepts from Documents Reconfiguring Concept-Label Relationships 7. Locality Adventure: Have You Ever Been to Louisiana? A Poet Talking about American Racism Height Measurement at the Doctor’s Office Race and Ethnicity in the US Census Race and Ethnicity in Online Dating Sites A Novelist Talking about Danish Racism Reflection: How Is Data Situated? Constraint and Creativity in Cognitive Categorization Local Conditions and Cognitive Prototypes Historical Efforts to Standardize Data Collection across Locations Data Creation as an Assertion of Values (An Extended Example from Library Cataloging Data) Cherishing the Humanity in Our Data Conclusion: Still Life With Data Notes References Index