A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
C
Counterdata
Data produced by civil society groups or individuals in order to challenge unequal power. Producing counterdata is not (only) about countering missing data or inadequate official data from institutions but is also used to challenge state bias and inaction, to galvanize media and public attention, to reframe political debates, to work toward policy change, and to help heal wounded communities.
Co-Liberation
This is the idea that all of us are harmed by systems of unequal power
and that we, working together, can free ourselves of its multiple burdens—material, psychic, spiritual, and intergenerational. There is a well-known quote from Aboriginal activists in Queensland, Australia, that best represents this idea: “If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
D
Data Activism
The use of data and software to pursue collective action and exercise political agency. Producing counterdata and engaging in restorative/transformative data science are specific ways—but far from the only ways—of engaging in data activism.
Data Epistemologies
Theories and approaches to knowing things about the world with data. Mainstream data epistemologies are heavily positivist—seeking to use data to find universal truths over a consideration of context. This results in hegemonic data science. Many scholars and activists have highlighted how mainstream data epistemologies replicate violent and extractive and colonial modes of knowledge generation. Emerging alternative data epistemologies include data feminism, feminist data refusal, emancipatory data science, environmental data justice, decolonial AI, Indigenous data sovereignty, and queer data.
Discordant Data
Describes the fact that official data and counterdata often deliberately do not coincide; they are discordant because they intentionally use different definitions, measurements, and classification strategies.
G
Geographies of Missing Data
Refers to the analysis of how missing data are distributed geographically and socially, highlighting structural inequalities in data collection and availability.
H
Hegemonic Data Science
Dominant data science that works to concentrate wealth and power, accelerate racial capitalism, perpetuate patriarchy, uphold colonialism, and worsen environmental excesses and social inequalities.
I
Intersectionality
An idea from Black feminism that systems of power compound and combine and cannot be understood in isolation. For example, a single-axis analysis that looks only at patriarchy will miss the ways in which patriarchy intersects with white supremacy, with settler colonialism, with ableism, and so on. Intersectionality comes from theorizing the experiences of Black women in the United States, and substantial contributions to it have been made by the Combahee River Collective, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Patricia Hill Collins, among many others.
O
Official Data
Data that are produced by the state, international governing bodies, and/or other mainstream institutions such as large corporations or professional associations.
P
Power
The current configuration of structural privilege and structural oppression, in which some groups experience unearned advantages—because various systems have been designed by people like them and work for people like them—and other groups experience systematic and violent disadvantages—because those same systems were not designed by them or with people like them in mind. Specific systems of privilege and oppression include, but are not limited to: cisheteropatriarchy, colonialism, white supremacy, racial capitalism, and ableism. Hegemonic data science reinforces this power and the unequal status quo it produces, while counterdata science seeks to challenge it.
R
Restorative/Transformative Data Science
An approach to working with systematic information that seeks, first, to heal communities from the violence and trauma produced by structural inequality and, second, to envision and work toward a world in which such violence has been eliminated. Restoration involves the use of data for restoring life, living, and vitality to the individuals, families, communities, and larger publics harmed by unequal systems of power. It also seeks the restoration of rights—the right to live a life free from violence, for example, or the right to adequate housing, or the right to ancestral homelands. Transformation involves the use of data to dismantle and shift the structural conditions that produced the violence in the first place. It is both visionary and preventative.
T
Triangulation
Using multiple sources of information about the same event or phenomenon to cross-reference and verify details. This is often necessary when official data are suspect or sparse or when there is not a single authoritative source of information in the information ecosystem.