Data Colonialism

March 6, 2019

The first webinar in the inaugural series of "People in Data" webinars

Overview

This is the first webinar in the inaugural series on “People in Data,” co-hosted during Spring 2019 by Digital Scholars and the Demos Project, and open to any members of the FSU and FAMU communities, as well as greater Tallahassee, the state of Florida, and beyond. The Demos Project at FSU fosters and supports scholarship involving structured data around people (the demos) and their environment. It considers the representation of individuals, communities, and cultures in data, asks and answers questions about data in society, and applies humanistic thinking to data-driven problems.

Headlining these inaugural webinars are experts in various fields that help shape our thinking—ethically, critically, and practically—about people in data, some from within and some from beyond the United States.

The webinars are broadly imagined and may be of interest to those who want to learn more about the data humanities and its overlaps with their own areas, projects, or communities.

The timbre of this topic – “data colonialism” – rings deterministically but the idea of colonizing (or de-colonizing) data may echo more familiar quandaries shared by humanities and social science researchers who strive to be ethical in their practice and in their criticism. For scholars in many fields, colonization and decolonization processes are mediated more obviously through language, yet for this meeting we will consider the various ways that colonialism may well be conveyed through data sets and points, whether those occur in structured or unstructured ways, whether they are sought or shared. While decolonizing methodologies often call for ethics of postcolonial hybridity and accountability, we will consider whether these ethics can be reasonably attained when the subjects in question are circulatory and dynamic. Finally, we will ask whether and how a renewed attention to our culture of transparency and algorithmic obsession can help archivists, analysts, and activists avoid both the broader entrapments of “neo-colonialism” writ-large (Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, 1965) and the specific entrapments of more localized cultural erasure.

Details

Wednesday, March 6, 2019 – 12:00-1:15 p.m. EST Webinar on “Data Colonialism”

  • Kimberly Christen, Washington State U
  • Alex Gil, Columbia University
  • Larry Madowo, BBC Africa

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