[CivicAccess-discuss] Thinking about data

[Hugh McGuire]

tracey, i assume you'll put this up on our dear, neglected datalibre.ca?

On Jan 2, 2009, at 1:36 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault wrote:

> 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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