Day 2

(Reflections from Bandita Deka Kalita)

The second day of the conference started with an address by Trish Reay, who made a poignant reference to the different history of big data usage by the First Nations of Canada, as she continued with thought strands about marginalized contexts from the first day. She introduced keynote speaker Wendy Espeland who delivered a fascinating talk on “Governance by Numbers”. She spoke about the increasing pressure to code meanings and value in terms of numbers, in the context of university ranking systems. The association of desired traits with measurement and quantification has implications for meaning, and hence for governance systems, and Wendy’s work investigates into matters of rationality and inclusion arising from these implications. She described some of her work with governance issues in the Yavapai community, and associated matters of power, and accountability.

Chris Steele moderated a panel on “the politics of data”, the panel consisting of Wendy Espeland, David Kirsch, Dev Jennings, and Joel Gehman. As a precursor to the panel discussion, Chris also presented some of his work around the “ecology of facticity”: how is it that certain things come to be accepted as fact? The panel discussion that ensued picked up on some of the questions inspired by Chris’s and Wendy’s presentations. Some of the many interesting points of conversation were around matters pertaining to the “what” of the data to be interpreted – how institutionally or bureaucratically freighted they may be, and what implications for stories of power and marginalization could these allude to?

Marc-David Seidel presented a session on HIBAR research, and described the suitability of HIBAR research towards making a difference by solving socio-technical problems. He urged the participants to engage in answering the following question: if you had the access to all of Google Scholar’s data, what data would you like to see included in evaluation of “metrics” for individual academics?

The two optional sessions in the afternoon of the second day registered an impressive turnout by participants. These sessions were respectively on “Deep Learning”, led by Muhammed Abdul-Mageed, and a “practicum on creating corpora, topics, and artifacts”, led by Tim Hannigan and Rodrigo Valadao.