[CivicAccess-discuss] Thinking about data

[Tracey P. Lauriault]

I will!

On Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 9:22 AM, Hugh McGuire <hugh at hughmcguire.net> wrote:

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