Unruly data & digital Black afterlives
Who makes the classifications and controls data distribution are questions of power
This week, CITAP hosted two speakers—Melanie Feinberg discussed her new book Everyday Adventures with Unruly Data, and Tonia Sutherland keynoted the Symposium on Information for Social Good with a talk on Resurrecting the Black Body.
Everyday Adventures with Unruly Data
With examples ranging from the grocery store cheese case to Schema.org, Melanie Feinberg explored many of the ways in which what we know resists easy distillation into data.
While the fact that ‘ordinary’ cheeses are organized by form (block, slices, shreds) while ‘fancy’ cheeses are organized by origin and type (French, sheep’s milk) may not trouble the average grocery shopper, decisions about how to classify photographs with gender attributes are fraught with questions of power, scope, and purpose. To this latter type of classification, Feinberg showed a photograph of herself smiling widely and considered what it would mean if a data-tagging exercise labeled it “extrovert.” “You could label a picture of me as either introverted or extroverted and that might provide data about how you understand the image. However if that label wouldn't have anything to do with my actual feeling as a person; it would just be someone's way of describing something about an image.”
Resurrecting the Black Body
On April 15, 2012, Tupac Shakur performed at Coachella. Except Tupac Shakur had been dead for 15 years. In a keynote talk today for the School of Information and Library Science’s Symposium on Information for Social Good, Tonia Sutherland linked this performance to the famous carte de visite photograph known as “the scourged back,” lynching mementos, and the video of George Floyd’s death to explore how Black bodies are commercialized and exploited even after death. Across these examples, the systems that distribute and control these images and representations of Black bodies are “prison” institutions, where the archivists serve the needs of oppressive higher power.
She also considered how technologies like Replica, designed to digitally resurrect the dead as customized chatbots, create a new channel for digital blackface. These types of AI representations allow white users to create and interact with chatbots of other races: “in other words, Replica makes it possible to try on Blackness.”
CITAP is hiring
We’re looking for an administrative associate to support our research, public scholarship, partnerships, and community. Know someone who should be part of the CITAP team? Please send them our way!
Publications and appearances
Video of Francesca Tripodi’s presentation at Frank is now available. Watch her lightning talk about the Propagandists’ Playbook.
The open acknowledgment of social media’s inner workings, with content creators exposing the foundations of their content within the content itself, is what Alice Marwick, an associate communications professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, described to me as “meta-content.” The Atlantic considers how even influencers worry about the harms of social media.
For this week’s PolComm Friday, the APSA and ICA Political Communications Divisions highlighted recent publications from Deen Freelon, Daniel Malmer, Meredith Pruden, Daniel Kreiss, and Shannon McGregor.
Deen Freelon summarized his thoughts on the polarization provocation from Daniel Kreiss and Shannon McGregor’s: “My gloss of their main takeaway is that polarization research valorizes social comity over the pursuit of justice and portrays opposed social groups as politically/morally equivalent when they are not. Hard agree on both counts… I have a minor quibble with their suggestion to substitute "polarization" with "extremism" as the primary object of study. The former term suggests a moral parallelism their own review refutes.”
Shannon McGregor spoke with Mina Kim on KQED about NPR’s departure from Twitter. She pointed out that much of the news we find on the site is circulated by reporters, readers, and other stakeholders, making NPR’s departure an important signal against Twitter’s own legitimacy that may not hurt the organization’s reach on the site.
"People always talk about local news as something bounded by the place — but then, for some communities, it’s really more than that." Yiping Xia sat down with the Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media to talk about his research.
Coming soon
April 23: Tressie McMillan Cottom will give a keynote at the Faculty Women of Color conference. Program and registration.
May 2-3: Join us at “Social Justice and Technological Futures,” hosted by the University of Tübingen. Registration is free.
May 30: Release date for Alice Marwick’s The Private Is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media.
December: Release of Platforms, Power, and Politics: An Introduction to Political Communication in the Digital Age, a textbook from Ulrike Klinger, Daniel Kreiss, and Bruce Mutsvairo
Rest of Web
Affiliate Amelia Gibson is recruiting a postdoc to start this fall working on health information and equity in obstetric care.
I’ve been experimenting with Notes here on Substack. If you’re also dipping a toe in, let me know!