Online/Virtual Event

Thursday, July 15th 2021 from 7:00pm to 8:00pm

The following is a summary of the event by Mary Bakija, Program Manager, METRO, published on July 30, 2021.

Jer Thorp joined Davis Erin Anderson, Assistant Director for Programs and Partnerships at METRO Library Council, for a discussion on his new book, Living in Data: A Citizen’s Guide to a Better Information Future, on Thursday, July 15. Below is a summary of the conversation; you can read a full transcript at the link at the bottom of this post.

When data is used to tell people what they’re like and how they feel, rather than asking them what they’re like and how they feel, does that help them? For a group of teenagers in New York, when data painted a picture of them that they didn’t recognize, it wasn’t helpful at all. Researchers had applied sentiment analysis to hundreds of thousands of tweets in Manhattan, and they pinpointed an area of extreme unhappiness coming from what looked to be ​​Hunter College High School. Those students, the researchers claimed, were super sad.

However, as Jer Thorp explained in a recent talk we at METRO hosted via Zoom, the study was flawed in a couple of key ways. “They had a technical error, first of all, which meant that the sad place wasn’t actually in the high school,” he said. “But then I went and talked to the vice principal, and after a long conversation, she told me, ‘Well, we knew it was wrong because our students don’t use Twitter. Twitter’s for old people.'”

The media coverage that came out of this faulty study was the seed in Jer’s mind for his book, and, as he told us in our discussion, the first time he wondered: What does it feel like to live in data? His recently-published book, Living in Data: A Citizen’s Guide to a Better Information Future, is a look at how we got to the point where the public views data as, according to Jer, “some kind of technological magic, this wonder that can only be produced at a certain scale.” He also hopes it’s an opportunity for people—perhaps with help from librarians—to consider ways to adjust the narrative and tell new stories about data.

The Source of Wisdom

Looking at the kinds of data that is and isn’t being collected by various institutions and corporations, Jer pointed to the original data processing creators as the problem.

“We’ve spent a decade building this vast computational structure that costs trillions of dollars, and its whole purpose, from an advertising perspective, is to make sure we never have to talk to people. We want to try to find out as much about their lives without talking to them,” he said. “That same machinery is an amplifier of the existing exclusions and the existing marginalizations. There’s a good reason for that, too. This machine was built by people who are in the margins, and as such, it doesn’t do a good job of listening to people outside of the margins. I can pick almost any type of inequity, and this system magnifies it.”

A foundational concept for those in-margin engineers is the DIKW pyramid: data is the base that leads to information, knowledge, and, finally, wisdom.

“The fundamental idea of that is that wisdom cannot be arrived at unless we collect the data, and therefore it’s a moral imperative to collect data,” he said. “It’s a nice philosophy that conveniently fits the profit models of all these companies. The truth is, of course, you can arrive at wisdom without collecting the data. And sometimes it’s actually the wisdom to not collect the data that’s the most important part.”

Traditionally, wisdom has often come from our elders—a group that has been left out of data conversations. Jer described it as incredibly short-sighted to ignore that, and to attempt to answer questions as though they’ve never been asked before.

Reconnect People to Their Data

Another big challenge is how data is often inaccessible to those from whom it’s being collected. Even when data is “open,” how accessible is it, really? If you need technical expertise to work with it, if it’s only available in English, if there’s poor or no documentation, is that truly “open”?

“What we’ve been given is tremendously insufficient. It’s ‘open’ to the same people who already benefit from data,” Jer said. “We need to be thinking about ways that we can open even existing datasets.”

People working in information fields can help in this work by finding ways to make data more accessible—for instance, by creating better standards before and while data is collected, or by improving the accessibility of existing datasets.

“That act of adding those things is an act of data liberation,” he said. “The data is already there, but it’s invisible. We can make it visible in ways that I think are exciting.”

Reclaim Data and Use It

Some questions Jer posed for librarians working with communities that might be interested in reclaiming their data:

  • What data is being collected from your neighborhood?
  • What are some ways that data can be brought back to your neighborhood?
  • If people outside the community are using the community’s data, how can you help bridge that divide?
  • How can you keep data local—that is, within the library’s infrastructure rather than relying on outside resources?
  • How can you tell new stories with data? Could that be ​​An Artist in Every Library, a makerspace integration, a series of workshops? Or something else entirely?

We hope to explore these and more questions about data in upcoming events, but in the meantime, if you have questions for Jer, he welcomed folks to reach out.