[CivicAccess-discuss] Thinking about data

[Tracey P. Lauriault]

So these days i have to write a proposal, and it involves data,
infrastructures, imagination and such wonderful things. And as I was reading
an article about criminological data models, govern-mentality, and
biopolitics i came across this fellow Ian Hacking who wrote a few books on
how statistical probability came to be in the 17th century, how the science
of prediction and probability shaped categorizations of people into this and
into that, and how those categories that did not exist before the
statistical analysis came to become social realities. Also, that probability
can allow you to predict occurences within a population according to a set
of probabilities but alas at the scale of the individual things are totally
random! (Hacking is a canadian and a fellow at the College de France - the
only anglo accepted thus far - same schools as foucault and levi-strauss)

Why do I care and why am I sending this to the list.  well, it has to do
about access to data and who is creating the categories we come to live by
and believe, what it means when government rationalization comes in the form
of statistics discussing populations, and that only the government and
wealthy organizations have access to the means to those rationalizations.

So I listened to a CBC ideas interview with Ian Hacking here -
http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/science/#episode4.  Brilliant! He discusses
taming chance, statistical thinking, normativity, wanting to be normal and
adapting to categories which make up people and shape a type of social
reality.  Access to data i think is about enabling more than a few to
question, assess and shape reality.

Andrew Pickering was also interviewed in this episode, and he brought up
Deleuze and Guattari's concept of nomad science vs royal science.  The
latter a science that continues to support the known and accepted ways of
doing things the former a more distributed form of science out of the
academe.  I think web 2.0, open access, open source, open data are about
nomad science - which i will explore a little more.

Finally, I then listened to a Brian Wynne (
http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/science/#episode10) who discussed how
science and technology are beyond the realm of politics.  He discusses in
his works The Public Value of Science and how some sciences are imagined,
delusions, and provocation - its publics - basically how it is constructed
in the public mind.

Bref,  I am trying to get at the idea that data help us form a picture of
reality, and the more of us that get the opportunity to play with them,
learn about them, value them, the more pictures we may create that may
invert, contest and change about what we are currently being told, we are
not told, what is silenced or worse just plain ingnored, how we are shaped,
we want to shape and some new social realities we may want to aim for.

Also, the entire CBC lecture series on How to Think about Science is just
plain great - http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/science/

Happy new year!
t

-- 
Tracey P. Lauriault
613-234-2805
https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault
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