Do Data Have Politics?
mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de
Do Data Have Politics?
1–5 of 5 posts
Re: Do Data Have Politics?
#2If this was about the Star Trek character, it would be called "Does Data Have Politics?" Answer (Betteridge's Law): no.
Re: Do Data Have Politics?
#3If this was about the Star Trek character, it would be called "Does Data Have Politics?" Answer (Betteridge's Law): no.
That usage would have been fine for the title regardless. Treating 'data' as a plural noun is annoyingly clumsy and should only be done if you're actually considering individual datums and need to refer to the whole. We don't treat 'information' as plural, don't do this to 'data' either.
Re: Do Data Have Politics?
#4A great game on HN to play with titles with question marks is to guess whether or not someone has mentioned Betteridge's Law yet. Herbig's Law says that within 5 minutes the chance is close to 100%.
And yet, Betteridge's Law does not apply here. Everything is an argument of some sort. It is impossible to completely divorce personal beliefs and biases from anything. The best we can do is recognize this fact and try to come close.
Re: Do Data Have Politics?
#5Without looking at the article, my answer was yes, because it's a philosophical nature-of-truth kind of question. (Then I skimmed the article, which is a mildly interesting Cold War intelligence piece.)
What guides my answer is that data models the world in ways tied to its medium and its designed intent. A written description of an event is different from a video of that same event. A description or video that shows more of the event, or less of the event, may also say something different about it. And database fields like "First Name", "Last Name", "Age", "Gender", "Race", "Nationality", "Religion", "Sexuality", etc. are premised on subjective social norms - when systems are designed around those fields they necessarily encode beliefs about how people identify themselves.
When you capture different kinds of data, or when you are presented with a filtered subset of data, your subsequent interpretation of that data changes your view of reality, which subsequently informs your politics.
Art is frequently based around changing the model, which sometimes means changing the medium, but often as not is accomplished through changing more abstract rules about the piece - what techniques, themes, etc. are and are not allowed by design.