Dr. Kristin M. Branson (@kristinmbranson.bsky.social) is a senior group leader at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s (HHMI) Janelia Research Campus in Ashborn, Virginia.

Dr. Lisa Messeri (@lmesseri.bsky.social) is an associate professor of sociocultural anthropology at Yale University. 

Dr. Nicole C. Nelson (@nicolecnelson.bsky.social) is an associate professor in the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

In connection with Data & Society’s ongoing research on mental health and chatbots, on February 26 we explored these questions and more in a conversation moderated by researchers Livia Garofalo and Briana Vecchione. Together with Luca Belli, AI safety lead at Spring Health; Miranda Bogen, founding director of the AI Governance Lab at the Center for Democracy & Technology; and psychiatrist and psychotherapist Marlynn Wei, they discussed the profound shifts in how people seek help and support, and how mental health professionals, policymakers, and tech designers are navigating these shifts now.

Learn more about the event and Data & Society’s research on mental health chatbot interventions.

On February 17, Akanegbu, TechEquity Senior Vice President of Labor Programs Tim Newman, and Bard Computer Science Professor Annabel Rothschild held a critical conversation on the policy stakes of AI-focused workforce development at the state and national level. This conversation was  Informed by Akanegbu’s report and an accompanying policy brief co-authored by D&S Policy Manager Serena Oduro, who moderated this conversation, panelists discussed how government and industry priorities shape workers’ access to opportunity and how policy can address the real-world impacts of automation and AI on workers.

Learn more about the event

Read Anuli's report

Learn about Data & Society's 'AI Civics' Initiative

How should we understand the administration’s actions when it comes to AI? What dynamics are driving these changes in AI policymaking? What might be the downstream consequences for Americans? And how should we respond?

About 'Understanding AI'

In the fall of 2025, The New York Public Library and Data & Society collaborated to present “Understanding AI,” a four-part live event series exploring the social implications of artificial intelligence and its impacts on democracy, the environment, and human labor. Featuring key figures in the AI ethics field, these events took place at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library (SNFL)in New York City as part of the library’s7 Stories Up program, and are now available for all to watch.

Revisit the series

About 'Understanding AI'

In the fall of 2025, The New York Public Library and Data & Society collaborated to present “Understanding AI,” a four-part live event series exploring the social implications of artificial intelligence and its impacts on democracy, the environment, and human labor. Featuring key figures in the AI ethics field, these events took place at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library (SNFL)in New York City as part of the library’s7 Stories Up program, and are now available for all to watch.

Revisit the series

About 'Understanding AI'

In the fall of 2025, The New York Public Library and Data & Society collaborated to present “Understanding AI,” a four-part live event series exploring the social implications of artificial intelligence and its impacts on democracy, the environment, and human labor. Featuring key figures in the AI ethics field, these events took place at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library (SNFL)in New York City as part of the library’s7 Stories Up program, and are now available for all to watch.

Revisit the series

About 'Understanding AI'

In the fall of 2025, The New York Public Library and Data & Society collaborated to present “Understanding AI,” a four-part live event series exploring the social implications of artificial intelligence and its impacts on democracy, the environment, and human labor. Featuring key figures in the AI ethics field, these events took place at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library (SNFL)in New York City as part of the library’s7 Stories Up program, and are now available for all to watch.

Revisit the series

Read Turning the Tide: Climate Action in and Against Tech

Learn more about the event and its speakers.

On October 23, the authors discussed their book with Data & Society’s Director of Research Alice Marwick, walking us through their roadmap for understanding how AI is changing power and participation and what we can do to shape that change for the better.

Purchase copies of these books from our Bookshop:

• The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna
• Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI by Karen Hao

Featuring Dr. Julián Posada and Aiha Nguyen 

Resources and recordings are available here: https://datasociety.net/events/what-is-work-worth/

Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond (Tamara Kneese)

The Pacific Circuit: A Globalized Account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City (Alexis Madrigal)

Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside (Xiaowei Wang)

On April 10th, Anita Say Chan, author of Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future (UCP 2025 and open access), joined Émile P. Torres and Timnit Gebru for a discussion of the 21st century eugenics revival in big tech and how to resist it in a conversation moderated by Trustworthy Infrastructures Program Director Maia Woluchem. Predatory Data is the first book to draw this direct line between the datafication and prediction techniques of past eugenicists and today’s often violent and extractive “big data” regimes. Torres and Gebru have also extensively studied the second wave of eugenics, identifying a suite of tech-utopian ideologies they call the TESCREAL bundle.

Purchase your own copy of Anita Say Chan’s book Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future: https://bookshop.org/a/14284/9780520402843.

Learn more about the event at datasociety.net (https://datasociety.net/events/resisting-predatory-data/).

In this episode of Computer Says Maybe, host Alix Dunn speaks with Data & Society researchers Aiha Nguyen and Alexandra Mateescu, authors of the primer Generative AI and Labor: Power, Hype, and Value at Work. They discuss how automation is now being used as a threat against workers, and how certain types of labor are being devalued by AI — especially traditionally feminized work like caregiving.

Further reading:

• Generative AI and Labor: Power, Hype, and Value at Work by Aiha Nguyen and Alexandra Mateescu
• Blood in the Machine by Brain Merchant

Aiha Nguyen is the Program Director for the Labor Futures Initiative at Data & Society where she guides research and engagement. She brings a practitioner's perspective to this role having worked for over a decade in community and worker advocacy and organizing. Her research interests lie at the intersection of labor, technology, and urban studies. She is author of The Constant Boss: Work Under Digital Surveillance and co-author of ‘At the Digital Doorstep: How Customers Use Doorbell Cameras to Manage Delivery Workers’, and ‘Generative AI and Labor: Power, Hype and Value at Work’.

Alexandra Mateescu is a researcher on the Labor Futures team at the Data & Society Research Institute, where she investigates the impacts of digital surveillance, AI, and algorithmic power within the workplace. As an ethnographer, her past work has led her to explore the role of worker data and its commodification, the intersections of care labor and digital platforms, automation within service industries, and generative AI in creative industries. She is also a 2024-2025 Fellow at the Siegel Family Endowment.

Subscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work that you will definitely be interested in!

This public panel is part of Connective (t)Issues, a Data & Society workshop organized by the Trustworthy Infrastructures program in partnership with Duke Science & Society. Learn more about the workshop at datasociety.net. 

https://datasociety.net/announcements/2024/11/20/connective-tissues/

Our discussion drew on a new report by Data & Society (D&S) and AI Risk and Vulnerability Alliance (ARVA), a nonprofit that aims to empower communities to recognize, diagnose, and manage harmful flaws in AI. The report, Red-Teaming in the Public Interest, investigates how red-teaming methods are being adapted to confront uncertainty about flaws in systems and to encourage public engagement with the evaluation and oversight of genAI systems. Red-teaming offers a flexible approach to uncovering a wide range of problems with genAI models. It also offers new opportunities for incorporating diverse communities into AI governance practices.

Ultimately, we hope this report and discussion present a vision of red-teaming as an area of public interest sociotechnical experimentation.

Download the report and learn more about the speakers and references at datasociety.net.

--

00:00 Opening

00:12 Welcome and Framing

04:48 Panel Introductions

09:34 Discussion Overview

10:23 Lama Ahmad on The Value of Human Red-Teaming

17:37 Tarleton Gillespie on Labor and Content Moderation Antecedents

25:03 Briana Vecchione on Participation & Accountability

28:25 Camille François on Global Policy and Open-source Infrastructure

35:09 Questions and Answers

56:39 Final Takeaways

Luckily, this is a podcast for nerds like you. Alix was joined this week by Brian Chen from Data & Society, who systematically explains the process of advanced chip manufacture, how its thoroughly entangled in US economic policy, and how Taiwan’s place as the main artery for chips is the product of deep colonial infrastructures.

Brian J. Chen is the policy director of Data & Society, leading the organization’s work to shape tech policy. With a background in movement lawyering and legislative and regulatory advocacy, he has worked extensively on issues of economic justice, political economy, and tech governance.

Previously, Brian led campaigns to strengthen the labor and employment rights of digital platform workers and other workers in precarious industries. Before that, he led programs to promote democratic accountability in policing, including community oversight over the adoption and use of police technologies.

**Subscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work that you will definitely be interested in!**

Purchase a copy of Code Dependent: https://bookshop.org/a/14284/9781250867391

Learn more at datasociety.net (https://datasociety.net)

Today, the urgency of that vision is palpable: How societies choose to design and govern technology will determine our collective future. On September 26, we celebrated our first decade with our incredible network of alumni, friends, and supporters. Along with reflections from Data & Society Executive Director Janet Haven, Board President Charlton McIlwain, and Founder danah boyd, the program included a panel discussion and lightning talks.

00:00 Opening
00:10 Welcome | Charlton McIlwain, Board President
08:23 Creating a Field | danah boyd, Founder
19:37 Lightning Talk: Xiaowei R. Wang
27:02 Lightning Talk: Ranjit Singh
33:09 Lightning Talk: Zara Rahman
38:42 Lightning Talk: Michelle Miller
46:00 Acting on What We Know | Alondra Nelson, John Palfrey, Felicia Wong (moderator: Suresh Venkatasubramanian)
1:13:47 Creating Our Future | Janet Haven, Executive Director
1:25:42 Closing | Charlton McIlwain, Board President

In "Establishing Vigilant Care: Data Infrastructures and the Black Birthing Experience," Joan Mukogosi explores how digital health technologies can produce new forms of harm for Black birthing people — by exposing Black patients to carceral systems, creating information silos that impede interoperability, and failing to meet privacy standards. By paying close attention to how clinical contexts and their associated digital technologies impact how care is delivered, this research offers a glimpse into possibilities for improved cohesion between digital health technologies and birth work.

Learn more about Data & Society at datasociety.net.

In this three-part Databite series, Data & Society’s Labor Futures program brings together creators, platform workers, call center workers, coders, therapists, and performers for conversations with technologists, researchers, journalists, and economists to complicate the story of generative AI. By centering workers’ experiences and interrogating the relationship between generative AI and underexplored issues of hierarchy, recognition, and adaptation in labor, these interdisciplinary conversations will uncover how new technological systems are impacting worker agency and power.

Learn more about the speakers, series, and references at datasociety.net.

In this three-part Databite series, Data & Society’s Labor Futures program brings together creators, platform workers, call center workers, coders, therapists, and performers for conversations with technologists, researchers, journalists, and economists to complicate the story of generative AI. By centering workers’ experiences and interrogating the relationship between generative AI and underexplored issues of hierarchy, recognition, and adaptation in labor, these interdisciplinary conversations will uncover how new technological systems are impacting worker agency and power.

Learn more about the speakers, series, and references at datasociety.net.

Generative AI has seeped into many corners of our lives, and threatens to upend the economy as we know it, from education to the film industry. How do workers’ encounters with it differ from their experiences with other systems of automation? How are they similar, and how might this help us understand the shape and stakes of this latest technology?

In this three-part Databite series, Data & Society’s Labor Futures program brings together creators, platform workers, call center workers, coders, therapists, and performers for conversations with technologists, researchers, journalists, and economists to complicate the story of generative AI. By centering workers’ experiences and interrogating the relationship between generative AI and underexplored issues of hierarchy, recognition, and adaptation in labor, these interdisciplinary conversations will uncover how new technological systems are impacting worker agency and power.

Learn more about the speakers, series, and references at datasociety.net.

 “Creating your own terms for how you want to be in the world always has to be done in solidarity with others. That's why I get so much from these conversations and the fellowship.” - Sareeta Amrute 

Data & Society launched Race and Technology fellowships three years ago to recognize how important questions of race, and analogous concepts like caste, are to studying, developing, and using emerging technologies. This year's fellows, Lindsey Cameron and Christina Harrington, convened interdisciplinary groups to talk through shared analysis and points of difference in their respective fields, devising nuanced ways to engage with the intersections of tech and race. 

Recorded in April 2023. 

Learn more at  www.datasociety.net. 

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Data & Society studies the social implications of data-centric technologies, automation, and AI. Through empirical research and active engagement, our work illuminates the values and decisions that drive these systems — and shows why they must be grounded in equity and human dignity.

Data & Society launched Race and Technology fellowships three years ago to recognize how important questions of race, and analogous concepts like caste, are to studying, developing, and using emerging technologies. This year's fellows, Lindsey Cameron and Christina Harrington, convened interdisciplinary groups to talk through shared analysis and points of difference in their respective fields, devising nuanced ways to engage with the intersections of tech and race. 

Recorded in May 2023. 

Learn more at www.datasociety.net. 

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Data & Society studies the social implications of data-centric technologies, automation, and AI. Through empirical research and active engagement, our work illuminates the values and decisions that drive these systems — and shows why they must be grounded in equity and human dignity.

In The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition, Dalit American activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan puts forth a call to awaken and act, not just for readers in South Asia, but around the world. She ties Dalit oppression to fights for liberation among Black, Indigenous, Latinx, femme, and queer communities, examining caste from a feminist, abolitionist, and Dalit Buddhist perspective — and laying bare the grief, rage, and stolen futures enacted by Brahminical social structures.

Purchase your copy of The Trauma of Caste: https://bookshop.org/a/14284/9781623177652

Shaka McGlotten is Professor of Media Studies and Anthropology at Purchase College-SUNY, where they also serve as Chair of the Gender Studies and Global Black Studies Programs. Their work stages encounters between Black study, queer theory, media, and art. Their research focuses on networked intimacies and messy computational entanglements as they interface with QTPOC lifeworlds.

Sarah Chander leads EDRi's policy work on AI and non-discrimination with respect to digital rights. She is interested in building thoughtful, resilient movements and she looks to make links between the digital and other social justice movements. Sarah has experience in racial and social justice, previously she worked in advocacy at the European Network Against Racism (ENAR), on a wide range of topics including anti-discrimination law and policy, intersectional justice, state racism, racial profiling and police brutality. Comment end

Fenwick McKelvey is an Associate Professor in Information and Communication Technology Policy in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University. He studies digital politics and policy. He is the author of Internet Daemons: Digital Communications Possessed (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) winner of the 2019 Gertrude J. Robinson Book Award. He is co-author of The Permanent Campaign: New Media, New Politics (Peter Lang, 2012) with Greg Elmer and Ganaele Langlois.

Jacob (Jake) Metcalf, PhD, is a researcher at Data & Society, where he is a member of the AI on the Ground Initiative, and works on an NSF-funded multisite project, Pervasive Data Ethics for Computational Research (PERVADE). For this project, he studies how data ethics practices are emerging in environments that have not previously grappled with research ethics, such as industry, IRBs, and civil society organizations. His recent work has focused on the new organizational roles that have developed around AI ethics in tech companies.

Brittany Smith is the Policy Director at Data & Society. Prior to joining Data & Society, Brittany worked at DeepMind and Google in policy, ethics and human rights roles. Brittany also currently serves on the Advisory Board of JUST AI, a humanities-led network inviting new ways of thinking about data and AI ethics. Brittany graduated from Northwestern University and the London School of Economics.

Sareeta Amrute (@SareetaAmrute) is an anthropologist, associate professor at the University of Washington, and Director of Research at Data & Society.

Emiliano Treré (@EmilianoTrere) is a senior lecturer in Media Ecologies and Social Transformation and co-director of the Data Justice Lab at Cardiff University.

"Becoming Data" is co-produced by Data & Society and Public Books.

Ranjit Singh (@datasociety) is a Postdoctoral Scholar at Data & Society.

Laura Forlano (@laura4lano) is associate professor at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology.

"Becoming Data" is co-produced by Data & Society and Public Books.

Speaker Bios

One of Silicon Valley's leading advocates for fairness and ethics, Ellen Pao is also a long-time entrepreneur and tech investor. Her landmark gender discrimination case against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins sparked other women, especially women of color, to fight harassment and discrimination in what’s been called the "Pao Effect.” Currently, Ellen is CEO of nonprofit Project Include, which uses data-based, practical solutions and recommendations to give everyone a fair chance to succeed. At reddit, she was the first major social platform CEO to ban revenge porn, unauthorized nude photos, and cross-platform harassment, with other social media sites quickly following suit. Ellen has written and spoken extensively, including in The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, Recode, and WIRED. Her book “Reset” recounts her long-time advocacy of diversity and inclusion and her own experiences with discrimination.

Yang Hong works as Shoshin Insights, an in(ter)dependent data and machine learning consultancy with a justice-centered approach for societal issues. She’s worked on the global refugee crisis, hearing aids, data poverty, climate justice, tech equity, and more. As a community builder, she has tended to gardens such as Work On Climate, Activist Teahouse, and South Park Commons. Yang is a creative apprentice to lifelong practices of tea and collective liberation.

McKensie Mack (pronouns: they/them) is a trilingual anti-oppression consultant, researcher, facilitator, and the founder & CEO of MMG. MMG is a global social justice organization that specializes in organizational change management through a lens of data equity; helping people transform culture, practices, and policies at the intersection of race, gender, class, disability, and LGBTQ+ identity. Their clients are currently based all over the world in the U.S., the UK, France, South Africa, Nigeria, Germany, Spain, and Peru. McKensie is the former inaugural Executive Director of Art+Feminism, one of the largest gender equity focused projects on Wikipedia.

Arthur Gwagwa (@arthurgwagwa) is a researcher at Utrecht University’s Ethics Institute in the Department of Philosophy.

Deb Raji (@rajiinio) is a fellow at Mozilla and works closely with the Algorithmic Justice League.

"Becoming Data" is co-produced by Data & Society and Public Books.

Data & Society’s new report, The Unseen Teen: The Challenges of Building Healthy Tech for Young People investigates how social platform companies think about and design for young people and their health and digital well-being. Based on a multi-year, qualitative research project interviewing social media and social gaming company workers in a variety of roles, we learned that many companies struggle to imagine and design for the breadth of their users, especially minors. Instead by focusing on averages, and limited quantitative metrics, tech companies miss the nuance in differential impacts that has real consequences for real people. We discuss the report, our recommendations, and the real world implications of our findings on those entrusted to help companies think about the well-being of their youngest users.

Speaker Bios

Amanda Lenhart studies how technology affects human lives, with a special focus on families and children. A quantitative and qualitative researcher, Amanda is the Health + Data Research Lead at the Data & Society Research Institute. Over decades, she has examined how adolescents and their families use and think about technology, how young adults consume news, how harassment has thrived in online spaces, and how automation will impact workers. Most recently, as deputy director of the Better Life Lab at New America, Amanda focused on the ways technology affects workers’ jobs and lives, as well as the family-supportive policies that enable balance between the personal and the professional. She began her career at the Pew Research Center, studying how teens and families use social and mobile technologies.

Charlotte Willner is the Founding Executive Director of the Trust & Safety Professional Association (TSPA) and the Trust & Safety Foundation after fourteen years of working in trust and safety operations. She began her career at Facebook, where she led international user support, then built out their first safety operations team. She went on to build and lead Pinterest's trust and safety operations team, overseeing online safety, law enforcement response, and intellectual property matters. She holds a degree in English from Bowdoin College and is delighted to show you that this is, in fact, what you can do with an English degree.

Aden Van Noppen is the Founder and Executive Director of Mobius, an unconventional collective of technologists, scientists, activists, and spiritual teachers working together to create a world in which technology brings out the best in humanity. She was a Senior Advisor to the U.S. Chief Technology Officer in the Obama White House Office, where she developed the led programs that leverage tech as a tool for social and economic justice. After that, she spent a year as a Resident Fellow at Harvard Divinity School focusing on the intersection of tech, ethics and spirituality and was an affiliate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Aden was also part of the founding leadership team of The Sanctuaries, the first interfaith arts community in the country. Her work has been featured in the New Yorker, The New York Times, WIRED, and elsewhere.

Shaka McGlotten (@shakaz23) is a professor of anthropology and media studies at Purchase College, SUNY and 2020-2021 Faculty Fellow at Data & Society.

Chris Ramsaroop (@j4mw) is an organizer with Justice for Migrant Workers and a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto.

"Becoming Data" is co-produced by Data & Society and Public Books.

Mimi Onuoha (@thistimeitsmimi) is a media artist who makes work about what it means for the world to take the form of data.

Lam Thuy Vo (@lamthuyvo) is a reporter who digs into data to examine how systems and policies affect individuals. She is an incoming Data Journalist-in-Residence at the Craig Newmark School of Journalism.

"Becoming Data" is co-produced by Data & Society and Public Books.

She speaks with academics, artists, activists, and journalists to explore these questions and more. 

Speaker Bios

Amanda Lenhart (Host)
Amanda Lenhart studies how technology affects human lives, with a special focus on families and children. A quantitative and qualitative researcher, Amanda is the Health + Data Research Lead at the Data & Society Research Institute. Over decades, she has examined how adolescents and their families use and think about technology, how young adults consume news, how harassment has thrived in online spaces, and how automation will impact workers. Most recently, as deputy director of the Better Life Lab at New America, Amanda focused on the ways technology affects workers’ jobs and lives, as well as the family-supportive policies that enable balance between the personal and the professional. She began her career at the Pew Research Center, studying how teens and families use social and mobile technologies.

Amanda specializes in translating rigorous research for a broad national audience. Dedicated to public communication, she has testified before congressional subcommittees and the Federal Trade Commission. Amanda’s work has been featured in numerous national publications and broadcasts, including the PBS Newshour and NPR’s All Things Considered.

Imogen Parker (Co-Host)
Imogen is Head of Policy at the Ada Lovelace Institute, where she is responsible for creating social change through developments to policy, law, regulation and public service delivery. She is a Policy Fellow at Cambridge University’s Centre for Science and Policy.

Her career has been at the intersection of social justice, technology and research. In her previous role as Head of the Nuffield Foundation’s programmes on Justice, Rights and Digital Society she worked in collaboration with the founding partner organisations to create the Institute. Prior to that she was acting Head of Policy Research for Citizens and Democracy at Citizens Advice, Research Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and worked with Baroness Kidron to create the children’s digital rights charity 5Rights.

Ranjit Singh (Panelist)
Ranjit Singh has a doctorate in Science and Technology Studies (STS) from Cornell University. His research lies at the intersection of data infrastructures, global development, and public policy. He uses methods of interview-based qualitative sociology and multi-sited ethnography in his research. He examines the everyday experiences of people subject to data-driven practices and follows the mutual shaping of their lives and their data records. His dissertation research on Aadhaar, the national biometrics-based identification infrastructure of India, advances the public understanding of the affordances and limits of biometrics-based data infrastructures in practically achieving inclusive development and reshaping the nature of Indian citizenship.

He has published his research in venues such as the Journal of South Asian Studies and the ACM CHI Conference; he has presented his work at conferences including CSCW, 4S, AAA, and ECSAS. Beyond the dissertation, he has focused on two additional infrastructures: (1) the National Register of Citizens in Assam, India—an effort to differentiate citizens from illegal immigrants. (2) US Credit Scoring—the efforts of low-income individuals to improve their creditworthiness within the lending industry. In all these projects, his research is oriented towards understanding how data is increasingly used to imagine and develop new digital solutions for democratizing inclusion. He was also involved in developing the Digital Due Process Clinic, a clinical program at Cornell University, to study and support individuals in their struggles to secure fair representation in data infrastructures.

Amy Lauren Fairchild (Panelist)
Amy Lauren Fairchild is a historian who works at the intersection of history, public health ethics, and public health policy and politics. Her work helped establish public health ethics—which is concerned with the well-being of populations—as fundamentally distinct from either bioethics or human rights. Whether exploring the tension between privacy and surveillance, immigration and border control, or paternalism and liberty, Fairchild assesses the social, political, and ethical factors that shape not only the potential and limits of the state to intervene for the common good but also what counts as evidence.

Fairchild has written two books: Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force and Searching Eyes: Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America (with Ronald Bayer and James Colgrove). In addition, she has published in leading journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs, the American Journal of Public Health, Science, and the JAMA. The National Endowment for the Humanities funds her current book project: a social history of fear and panic.

A graduate of the Plan II Honors Program at the University of Texas at Austin, Fairchild received her MPH and PhD from Columbia University. She was on the faculty at Columbia for 22 years in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health. At Columbia, she served as Assistant Director for Academic Affairs in the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health, Chair of the Department of Sociomedical Sciences, and Director of the Foundations module and Integration of Science and Practice in the MPH Core Curriculum. She continues to serve as Co-Director, with Ronald Bayer, of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Bioethics at Columbia’s Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health. Fairchild also served on the faculty at Texas A&M University. There, she was Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the School of Public Health and Associate Vice President for Faculty and Academic Affairs at the Health Science Center.

Fairchild feels extraordinarily honored to serve as Dean of the College of Public Health at The Ohio State University. Any university with the chutzpah to have a poison nut for a mascot is the kind of place she wants to stay.

To understand these transformations, this book brings together contributions by scholars from multiple disciplines to wrestle with the question of how digital technologies shape, reshape, and affect fundamental questions about democracy and democratic theory. As expectations have whiplashed—from Twitter optimism in the wake of the Arab Spring to Facebook pessimism in the wake of the 2016 US election—the time is ripe for a more sober and long-term assessment. How should we take stock of digital technologies and their promise and peril for reshaping democratic societies and institutions? To answer, this volume broaches the most pressing technological changes and issues facing democracy as a philosophy and an institution.

Speaker Bios

Robyn Caplan | @robyncaplan
Robyn Caplan is a Researcher at Data & Society, and a PhD Candidate at Rutgers University (ABD, advisor Philip M. Napoli) in the School of Communication and Information Studies. She conducts research on issues related to platform governance and content standards. Her most recent work investigates the extent to which organizational dynamics at major platform companies impacts the development and enforcement of policy geared towards limiting disinformation and hate speech, and the impact of regulation, industry coordination, and advocacy can play in changing platform policies.

Her work has been published in journals such as First Monday, Big Data & Society, and Feminist Media Studies. She has had editorials featured in The New York Times, and her work has been featured by NBC News THINK and Al Jazeera. She has conducted research on a variety of issues regarding data-centric technological development in society, including government data policies, media manipulation, and the use of data in policing.

Lucy Bernholz | @p2173
Lucy Bernholz is a Senior Research Scholar at Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society and Director of the Digital Civil Society Lab. She has been a Visiting Scholar at The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and a Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, the Hybrid Reality Institute, and the New America Foundation. She is the author of numerous articles and books, including the annual Blueprint Series on Philanthropy and the Social Economy, the 2010 publication Disrupting Philanthropy, and her 2004 book Creating Philanthropic Capital Markets: The Deliberate Evolution. She is a co-editor of Philanthropy in Democratic Societies (2016, Chicago University Press) and of the forthcoming volume Digital Technology and Democratic Theory. She writes extensively on philanthropy, technology, and policy on her award winning blog, philanthropy2173.com.

She studied history and has a B.A. from Yale University, where she played field hockey and captained the lacrosse team, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Rob Reich | @robreich
Rob Reich is professor of political science and, by courtesy, professor of philosophy at the Graduate School of Education, at Stanford University. He is the director of the Center for Ethics in Society and co-director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (publisher of the Stanford Social Innovation Review), both at Stanford University. He is the author most recently of Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better (Princeton University Press, 2018) and Philanthropy in Democratic Societies: History, Institutions, Values (edited with Chiara Cordelli and Lucy Bernholz, University of Chicago Press, 2016). He is also the author of several books on education: Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Education (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and Education, Justice, and Democracy (edited with Danielle Allen, University of Chicago Press, 2013). His current work focuses on ethics, public policy, and technology, and he serves as associate director of the Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence initiative at Stanford. Rob is the recipient of multiple teaching awards, including the Walter J. Gores award, Stanford’s highest honor for teaching. Reich was a sixth grade teacher at Rusk Elementary School in Houston, Texas before attending graduate school. He is a board member of the magazine Boston Review, of Giving Tuesday, and at the Spencer Foundation. More details at his personal webpage: http://robreich.stanford.edu

Seeta Peña Gangadharan
Dr Seeta Peña Gangadharan is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her work focuses on inclusion, exclusion, and marginalization, as well as questions around democracy, social justice, and technological governance. She currently co-leads two projects: Our Data Bodies, which examines the impact of data collection and data-driven technologies on members of marginalized communities in the United States, and Justice, Equity, and Technology, which explores the impacts of data-driven technologies and infrastructures on European civil society. She is also a visiting scholar in the School of Media Studies at The New School, Affiliated Fellow of Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, and Affiliate Fellow of Data & Society Research Institute.

Before joining the Department in 2015, Seeta was Senior Research Fellow at New America’s Open Technology Institute, addressing policies and practices related to digital inclusion, privacy, and “big data.” Before OTI, she was a Postdoctoral Associate in Law and MacArthur Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. She received her PhD from Stanford University and holds an MSc from the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Seeta’s research has been supported by grants from Digital Trust Foundation, Institute of Museum and Library Services, Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, and U.S. Department of Commerce’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program.

Archon Fung | @Arfung
Archon Fung is the Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. His research explores policies, practices, and institutional designs that deepen the quality of democratic governance. He focuses upon public participation, deliberation, and transparency. He co-directs the Transparency Policy Project and leads democratic governance programs of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Kennedy School. His books include Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency (Cambridge University Press, with Mary Graham and David Weil) and Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy (Princeton University Press). He has authored five books, four edited collections, and over fifty articles appearing in professional journals. He received two S.B.s — in philosophy and physics — and his Ph.D. in political science from MIT.

On December 4, 2014, the algorithm that allocates kidneys for transplant in the United States was replaced, following more than a decade of debate and planning. The development process was highly transparent and participatory, faced hard ethical questions explicitly, and incorporated elements of simulation and auditing that scholars often recommend. Scientist and researcher David Robinson describes how this story played out — including a twist ending — and will draw out four broader lessons to inform the design of participation strategies for other high stakes algorithms. The talk is hosted by Data & Society Senior Researcher, Alex Rosenblat.

“In this well-grounded, heretical attack on the fictions that uphold the online advertising ecosystem, Subprime Attention Crisis destroys the illusion that programmatic ads are effective and financially sound. One can only hope that this book will be used to pop the bubble that benefits so few.” — danah boyd, author of It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, founder of Data & Society, and Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research

Ryan McCarthy reports and edits stories for ProPublica’s Electionland, focusing on voting rights, election security and misinformation.

Cristina López G. conducts qualitative research on political disinformation and antagonistic amplification. She was born and raised in El Salvador, where she received an undergraduate law degree from Escuela Superior de Economía y Negocios (ESEN) and led a non-profit that promotes youth participation in politics and activism. She’s been a weekly op-ed columnist for a main Salvadoran newspaper since 2010. She moved to Washington, DC in 2012 to pursue a Masters in public policy from Georgetown University. After completing her degree, Cristina joined Media Matters for America as a researcher of Hispanic and Spanish-language media, focused on media coverage of immigration policies. She eventually became the organization’s deputy director for extremism, leading its research into extremism and disinformation that proliferate on tech platforms. She’s fluent in Spanish and memes.

Angèle Christin is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. She studies how algorithms and analytics transform professional values, expertise, and work practices. Her book, Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms (Princeton University Press, 2020) focuses on the case of web journalism, analyzing the growing importance of audience data in web newsrooms in the U.S. and France. Drawing on ethnographic methods, Angèle shows how American and French journalists make sense of traffic numbers in different ways, which in turn has distinct effects on the production of news in the two countries. Angèle is currently a Visiting Researcher with the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England. She is an affiliate at Data & Society Research Institute.

danah boyd is the founder and president of Data & Society and a partner researcher at Microsoft Research. Her research is focused on making certain that society has a nuanced understanding of the relationship between technology and society, especially as issues of inequity and bias emerge. She is the author of It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, and has authored or co-authored numerous books, articles, and essays. She is a trustee of the National Museum of the American Indian, a director of the Social Science Research Council, and a director of Crisis Text Line. She has been recognized by numerous organizations, including receiving the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer/Barlow Award and being selected as a 2011 Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. Originally trained in computer science before retraining under anthropologists, danah has a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information.

Founded in 1959 by some of the nation’s leading social scientists―“the best and the brightest, fatally brilliant, Icaruses with wings of feathers and wax, flying to the sun”―Simulmatics proposed to predict and manipulate the future by way of the computer simulation of human behavior. In summers, with their wives and children in tow, the company’s scientists met on the beach in Long Island under a geodesic, honeycombed dome, where they built a “People Machine” that aimed to model everything from buying a dishwasher to counterinsurgency to casting a vote. Deploying their “People Machine” from New York, Washington, Cambridge, and even Saigon, Simulmatics’ clients included the John F. Kennedy presidential campaign, the New York Times, the Department of Defense, and others: Simulmatics had a hand in everything from political races to the Vietnam War to the Johnson administration’s ill-fated attempt to predict race riots. The scientists of Simulmatics believed they had invented “the A-bomb of the social sciences.” They did not predict that it would take decades to detonate, like a long-buried grenade. But, in the early years of the twenty-first century, that bomb did detonate, creating a world in which corporations collect data and model behavior and target messages about the most ordinary of decisions, leaving people all over the world, long before the global pandemic, crushed by feelings of helplessness. This history has a past; If Then is its cautionary tale.

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History and Affiliate Professor of Law at Harvard University. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker, and host of the podcast, The Last Archive. Her many books include These Truths: A History of the United States(2018),an international bestseller and was named one of Time magazine’s top ten non-fiction books of the decade. (A recent essay considers responses to the book.) Her latest book, IF THEN: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, is available on September 15, 2020.

danah boyd is founder and president of Data & Society, a partner researcher at Microsoft Research, and a visiting professor at New York University. Her research is focused on making certain that society has a nuanced understanding of the relationship between technology and society, especially as issues of inequity and bias emerge. More on boyd here.

Audience Q&A follows the discussion.

Speaker Bios:

Alexander Macgillivray, aka “amac,” is curious about many things including law, policy, government, decision making, the Internet, algorithms, social justice, access to information, and the intersection of all of those. He was United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer for the last two plus years of the Obama Administration. He was Twitter‘s General Counsel, and head of Corporate Development, Public Policy, Communications, and Trust & Safety. Before that he was Deputy General Counsel at Google and created the Product Counsel team. He has served on the board of the Campaign for the Female Education (CAMFED) USA, was one of the early Berkman Klein Center folks, was certified as a First Grade Teacher by the State of New Jersey. He is proud to be a board member at Data & Society, Creative Commons, and Alloy.us, and an advisor to the Mozilla Tech Policy Fellows, and part of the founding team of the Trust & Safety Professional Association. https://www.bricoleur.org/

Nicole Wong develops tech international privacy, content, and regulatory strategies. She previously served as Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer in the Obama Administration, focused on internet, privacy, and innovation policy. Prior to her time in government, Nicole was Google’s Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, and Twitter’s Legal Director for Products. She frequently speaks on issues related to law and technology, including five appearances before the U.S. Congress. Nicole chairs the board of Friends of Global Voices, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting citizen and online media projects globally, and sits on the boards of WITNESS, an organization supporting the use of video to advance human rights; the Mozilla Foundation, which promotes the open internet; and The Markup, a non-profit investigative news organization covering technology. Nicole currently serves as co-chair of the Digital Freedom Forum. More info here: about.me/nwong.

Robyn Caplan is a Researcher at Data & Society, researching issues related to platform governance and content standards. Her most recent work investigates the extent to which organizational dynamics at major platform companies impacts the development and enforcement of policy geared towards limiting disinformation and hate speech, and the impact of regulation, industry coordination, and advocacy can play in changing platform policies. Her work has been published in journals such as First Monday, Big Data & Society, and Feminist Media Studies. She has had editorials featured in The New York Times, and her work has been featured by NBC News THINK and Al Jazeera. She has conducted research on a variety of issues regarding data-centric technological development on society, including government data policies, media manipulation, and the use of data in policing.

Feminist Data Futures and Relational Infrastructures | Anita Say Chan
Data & Society Fellow Anita Say Chan shares her work on data justice networks and research collectives in the global Americas, exploring their shared genealogies with feminist data methods developed at the turn of the century.

The Depth of the Data | Dan Bouk
Data isn’t simple, thin, or objective. Data has depth, that can and must be read deeply. Data & Society Fellow Dan Bouk demonstrates such reading in this talk with democracy’s data, the data produced by the U.S. census.

Data & Society’s Director of Research Sareeta Amrute moderates the discussion and audience Q&A. Learn more about our fellows work, wide-ranging interdisciplinary connections, and a few of the provocative questions that have emerged this year.

In Distributed Blackness, Brock asks where Blackness manifests in the ideology of Western technoculture. Using critical technocultural discourse analysis (Brock, 2018), Afro-optimism, and libidinal economic theory, this talk employs Black Twitter as an exemplar of Black cyberculture: digital practice and artifacts informed by a Black aesthetic.

Technoculture is the American mythos (Dinerstein, 2006) and ideology; a belief system powering the coercive, political, and carceral relations between culture and technology. Once enslaved, historically disenfranchised, never deemed literate, Blackness is understood as the object of Western technical and civilizational practices. This critical intervention for internet research and science and technology studies (STS) reorients Western technoculture’s practices of “race-as- technology” (Chun 2009) to visualize Blackness as technological subjects rather than as “things.” Hence, Black technoculture.

Technoculture is the American mythos (Dinerstein, 2006) and ideology; a belief system powering the coercive, political, and carceral relations between culture and technology. Once enslaved, historically disenfranchised, never deemed literate, Blackness is understood as the object of Western technical and civilizational practices. This critical intervention for internet research and science and technology studies (STS) reorients Western technoculture’s practices of “race-as- technology” (Chun 2009) to visualize Blackness as technological subjects rather than as “things.” Hence, Black technoculture.

About the Speakers 
Catherine D’Ignazio (she/her) is a hacker mama, scholar, and artist/designer who focuses on feminist technology, data literacy and civic engagement. She has run women’s health hackathons, designed global news recommendation systems, created talking and tweeting water quality sculptures, and led walking data visualizations to envision the future of sea level rise. Her book from MIT Press, Data Feminism, co-authored with Lauren Klein, charts a course for more ethical and empowering data science practices. D’Ignazio is an assistant professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT where she is the Director of the Data + Feminism Lab. More information about Catherine can be found on her website at www.kanarinka.com. 

Lauren F. Klein (she/her) is a scholar and teacher whose work crosses the fields of data science, digital humanities, and early American literature. She has designed platforms for exploring the contents of historical newspapers, recreated forgotten visualization schemes with fabric and addressable LEDs, and, with her students, cooked meals from early American recipes—and then visualized the results. In 2017, she was named one of the “rising stars in digital humanities” by Inside Higher Ed. She is the author of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and, with Catherine D’Ignazio, Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020). With Matthew K. Gold, she edits Debates in the Digital Humanities, a hybrid print-digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge. Klein is an Associate Professor of English and Quantitative Theory & Methods at Emory University, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab. More information can be found on her website: lklein.com. 

About Databites 

Data & Society’s “Databites” speaker series presents timely conversations about the purpose and power of technology, bridging our interdisciplinary research with broader public conversations about the societal implications of data and automation. 

 

In this conversation with Data & Society’s Events Producer Rigoberto Lara Guzmán, Sasha shares her experience as a design researcher and a practitioner, highlights helpful Design Justice Network best practices, and explores how we might apply the principles of design justice to COVID-19 responses.

This talk was recorded on Wednesday, April 29, 2020.

About the Speaker and Host

Sasha Costanza-Chock (pronouns: they/them or she/her) is a scholar, designer, and media-maker, and currently Associate Professor of Civic Media at MIT. They are a Faculty Associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, Faculty Affiliate with the MIT Open Documentary Lab, and creator of the MIT Codesign Studio(codesign.mit.edu). Their work focuses on social movements, transformative media organizing, and design justice. Sasha’s new book, Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need was published by MIT Press in March 2020. Sasha is a board member of Allied Media Projects and a Steering Committee member of the Design Justice Network.

Rigoberto Lara Guzmán (pronouns: they/them or he/him) is a xicanx producer, artist, and community technologist. His work attends to the interaction of humans, objects, and the lived environment to explore coded knowledge systems and emergent ecologies. He designs experiences that facilitate situated learning and is currently unsettling socio-technical worlds at Data & Society.

About Databites

Data & Society’s “Databites” speaker series presents timely conversations about the purpose and power of technology, bridging our interdisciplinary research with broader public conversations about the societal implications of data and automation

About the Speakers

Chancey Fleet is a Brooklyn-based accessibility advocate, coordinates technology education programs at the New York Public Library’s Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library. Chancey was recognized as a 2017 Library Journal Mover and Shaker. She writes and presents to disability rights groups, policy-makers, and professionals about the intersections of disability and technology. During her fellowship, she plans to advance public understanding of and explore best practices for visual interpreter services as well as other technologies for accessibility whose implications resonate with the broader global conversations about digital equity, data ethics, and privacy. She proudly serves as the Vice President of the National Federation of the Blind of New York.

Taeyoon Choi is an artist, educator, and activist based in New York and Seoul. His art practice involves performance, electronics, drawings, and installations that form the basis for storytelling in public spaces. He co-founded the School for Poetic Computation where he continues to organize sessions and teach classes.

Resources

• Rooted in Rights
• Guide: Hosting Accessible Online Meetings
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
• Blind Inclusivity Resources
• How to Build a Phone Tree
• Giving Voice by Meryl Alper
• Y Combinator: I’m a Software Engineer Going Blind -- How Should I Prepare?
• Consentful Tech Project
• NYC Accessibility and Inclusive Design Meetup Group
• COVID-19 is reshaping the future of work for people with disabilities by Shane Kanady

Taeyoon's recommendations:

• Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway
• You Can Learn Something From The People Of Wuhan by Tricia Wang
• Resisting the Racist Game on ArtAsiaPacific
• "How to Deal with Racism" by Taeyoon Choi on I Weigh
• Earth, "Saewol, COVID-19 and the lack of mourning" 세월호와 코로나19, 애도의 부재

Chancey's recommendations:

• Her Twitter thread on alt-text
• Crip Camp on Netflix

About the Speaker

Yeshimabeit Milner is the founder & executive director of Data for Black Lives. She has worked since she was 17 behind the scenes as a movement builder, technologist, and data scientist on a number of campaigns. She started Data for Black Lives because for too long she straddled the worlds of data and organizing and was determined to break down the silos to harness the power of data to make change in the lives of Black people. In two years, Data for Black Lives has raised over $2 million, hosted two sold out conferences at the MIT Media Lab and has changed the conversation around big data and technology across the U.S. and globally.

As the founder of Data for Black Lives, her work has received much acclaim. Yeshimabeit is an Echoing Green Black Male Achievement Fellow, an Ashoka Fellow, and joins the founders of Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street in the distinguished inaugural class of Roddenberry Foundation Fellows and most recently, was named one of Forbes 30 Under 30.

Part coming-of-age-story, part portrait of an already-bygone era, Anna Wiener’s memoir of working in Silicon Valley is a rare first-person glimpse into high-flying, reckless startup culture at a time of unchecked ambition, unregulated surveillance, wild fortune, and accelerating political power. Anna deftly charts the tech industry’s shift from self-appointed world savior to democracy-endangering liability, alongside a personal narrative of aspiration, ambivalence, and disillusionment.

Unsparing and incisive, Uncanny Valley is a cautionary tale, and a revelatory interrogation of a world reckoning with consequences its unwitting designers are only beginning to understand.

This event is moderated by Data & Society’s Director of Creative Strategy, Sam Hinds. It was recorded at Data & Society on January 22, 2020. 

Dr. McNealy traces these conflicts to our perception of data as a singular piece of property. A better metaphor for data, she contends, would be that of a networked representation or observation in an ecosystem. Dr. McNealy argues that we require an ecological approach for understanding this era of emergent technology and data — both for creating adequate policy, and for protecting the vulnerable.

This event is moderated by Data & Society Director of Research Sareeta Amrute.

For more information about this talk and future events, visit datasociety.net.

This talk was recorded on January 8, 2020. 

This event is moderated by Data & Society founder danah boyd.

Recorded on December 4, 2019.

About the Speaker

Dr. Joe Mulhall is Senior Researcher at HOPE not hate, the UK’s largest anti-fascism and anti-racism organisation. He is a historian of postwar and contemporary fascism and completed his PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London. He sits on the Board of the UK Government funded Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. He has published extensively, both academically and journalistically, and appears regularly in the international news media and gives talks around the world about his research. He has two forthcoming academic books with Routledge in 2020 including The Alt-Right: Fascism for the 21st Century.

For more information, visit datasociety.net.

This event was hosted by Data & Society Faculty Fellow Anita Say Chan.

Charlton McIlwain is Vice Provost of Faculty Engagement & Development at New York University, and Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU’s Steinhardt School. Dr. McIlwain’s scholarly work focuses on the intersections of race, digital media, and racial justice activism. He is also the Founder of the Center for Critical Race & Digital Studies, and in addition to "Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, From the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter" (Oxford University Press), he is the co-author of the award-winning book, "Race Appeal: How Political Candidates Invoke Race In U.S. Political Campaigns."

Cynthia Conti-Cook is a staff attorney at the New York City’s Legal Aid Society, Special Litigation Unit, where she oversees the Cop Accountability Project and Database, leads impact litigation and law reform projects on issues involving policing, data collection, risk assessment instruments, and the criminal justice system generally. She has presented as a panelist and trainer at many national, New York state, and New York City venues on topics of police misconduct, technology in the criminal justice system, and risk assessment instruments.

Jessie Daniels, PhD is a Professor at Hunter College (Sociology) and at The Graduate Center, CUNY (Africana Studies, Critical Social Psychology, and Sociology). She earned her PhD from the University of Texas-Austin and held a Charles Phelps Taft postdoctoral fellowship at University of Cincinnati. Her main area of interest is in race and digital media technologies; she is an internationally recognized expert on Internet manifestations of racism. Daniels is the author or editor of five books and has bylines at The New York Times, DAME, The Establishment, Entropy, and a regular column at Huffington Post.

Her recent paper, "Advancing Racial Literacy in Tech," co-authored with 2018-19 Fellow Mutale Nkonde and 2017-18 Fellow Darakhshan Mir, can be found at http://www.racialliteracy.tech.

Jasmine E. McNealy is an assistant professor of telecommunication at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. She studies information, communication, and technology with a view toward influencing law and policy. Her research focuses on privacy, online media, communities, and culture.

Hidden beneath the surface of the web, lost in our wrong-headed debates about AI, a new menace is looming. This book unveils how services delivered by companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Uber can only function smoothly thanks to the judgment and experience of a vast, invisible human labor force. These people doing “ghost work” make the internet seem smart. They perform high-tech piecework: flagging X-rated content, proofreading, designing engine parts, and much more. An estimated 8 percent of Americans have worked at least once in this “ghost economy,” and that number is growing. They usually earn less than legal minimums for traditional work, they have no health benefits, and they can be fired at any time for any reason, or none.

There are no labor laws to govern this kind of work, and these latter-day assembly lines draw in—and all too often overwork and underpay—a surprisingly diverse range of workers: harried young mothers, professionals forced into early retirement, recent grads who can’t get a toehold on the traditional employment ladder, and minorities shut out of the jobs they want. Gray and Suri also show how ghost workers, employers, and society at large can ensure that this new kind of work creates opportunity—rather than misery—for those who do it.

Amara.org co-founder Dean Jansen joins Mary in a conversation moderated by Data & Society’s Director of Research Sareeta Amrute.

Among the many insults to democracy and democratic institutions imposed by this coup des gens, Zuboff counts the unauthorized expropriation of private human experience; the hijack of the division of learning in society; the structural independence from people; the top-down imposition of the hive collective; the rise of instrumentarian power and radical indifference that together sustain its extractive logic; the construction, ownership, and operation of the means of behavior modification that is Big Other; the abrogation of the natural right to the future tense and the natural right to sanctuary; the degradation of the self-determining individual as the crucible of democratic life; and the insistence on psychic numbing as the answer to its illegitimate quid pro quo.

This event is hosted by Data & Society’s AI on the Ground Research Lead Madeleine Clare Elish.

Crucially, Mina reveals how, in parts of the world where public dissent is downright dangerous, memes can belie contentious political opinions that would incur drastic consequences if expressed outright. She finds that the “silly” stuff of meme culture—the photo remixes, the selfies, the YouTube songs, and the pun-tastic hashtags—are fundamentally intertwined with how we find and affirm one another, direct attention to human rights and social justice issues, build narratives, and make culture.

Joining her in conversation is Data & Society Founder and President danah boyd.

Hyman’s latest book "Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary" tracks the transformation of an ethos that favored long-term investment in work (and workers) to one promoting short-term returns. A series of deliberate decisions preceded the digital revolution, setting off the collapse of the postwar institutions that insulated us from volatility including big unions, big corporations, and powerful regulators.

Through the experiences of those on the inside–consultants and executives, temps and office workers, line workers and migrant laborers–Temp shows how the American Dream was unmade.

Rojas and Schneider both focus on the financial challenges facing precarious low-wage workers–including “gig” workers–and how these workers might need different benefits than have traditionally been provided, like retirement. Nopper offers insight into the world of credit scoring and data, analyzing how fintech “innovation” intersects with race, class, and gender wealth gaps. Nguyen is an organizer who works to bridge research and practice, expanding understanding of technological systems’ impact on work. Together, they discuss questions such as:

How will current and projected income volatility in the gig economy change available workplace benefits?
What role could fintech play on the future of work? Can workers be a part of shaping that future?
What data will low-income working families need to share in order to have access to capital–and will it be worth it?

Dr. Carmen Rojas is the Co-Founder and CEO of The Workers Lab, an organization that invests in experiments and innovation to build power for working people in the 21st century. For more than 20 years, Carmen has worked with foundations, financial institutions, and non-profits to improve the lives of working people across the United States. Carmen currently sits on the boards of the Marguerite Casey Foundation, Neighborhood Funders Group, General Service Foundation, JOLT, Certification Associates, and on the Advisory Boards of Fund Good Jobs and Floodgate Academy. Carmen holds a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley and was a Fulbright Scholar in 2007.

Rachel Schneider is the Omidyar Network Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program and co-author of The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty. Rachel’s research has been featured in the nation’s top publications, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and many others. Though she began her career as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch & Co., Rachel credits her commitment to the potential for innovative finance to solve major social problems from her days as a VISTA Volunteer (now AmeriCorps). She holds a J.D./M.B.A. from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. from UC Berkeley.

Tamara K. Nopper has a PhD in Sociology and her teaching and research focuses on the intersection of economic, racial, and gender inequality, with a particular emphasis on entrepreneurship, banking, globalization, urban development, and money and surveillance. Her publications have examined immigrant entrepreneurship, minority business development, the globalization of ethnic banking, and Asian American communities. Her current work looks at Korean immigrant entrepreneurship and post-Civil Rights era minority politics.

In "Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures for a Public Right to Hear," Mike Ananny offers a new way to think about freedom of the press in a time when media systems are in fundamental flux. Seeing press freedom as essential for democratic self-governance, Ananny explores what publics need, what kind of free press they should demand, and how today’s press freedom emerges from intertwined collections of humans and machines. His book proposes what robust, self-governing publics need to demand of technologists and journalists alike.

Tarleton Gillespie’s "Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media" investigates how social media platforms police what we post online—and the way these decisions shape public discourse, cultural production, and the fabric of society. Gillespie provides an overview of current social media practices and explains the underlying rationales for how, when, and why “content moderators” censor or promote user-posted content. The book then flips the way we think about moderation, to argue that content moderation is not ancillary to what platforms do, it is essential, definitional, constitutional. And given that, the very fact of moderation should change how we understand what platforms are.

Mike Ananny is an associate professor of communication and journalism in the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California (USC), a faculty affiliate with USC’s Science, Technology, and Society initiative, and a 2018-19 Berggruen Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Tarleton Gillespie is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research New England and an affiliated associate professor at Cornell University. He co-founded the blog Culture Digitally. His previous book is the award-winning "Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture."

Kate Klonick is an assistant professor at law at St. John’s University Law School and an affiliate at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, Data & Society, and New America. Her work on networked technologies’ effect on the areas of social norm enforcement, torts, property, intellectual property, artificial intelligence, robotics, freedom of expression, and governance has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Maryland Law Review, New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, The Guardian and numerous other publications.

One in three American workers is now a freelancer. This “gig economy”―one that provides neither the guarantee of steady hours nor benefits―emerged out of the digital era and has revolutionized the way we do business. High-profile tech start-ups such as Uber and Airbnb are constantly making headlines for the “disruption” they cause to the industries they overturn.

But “disruption” introduces new challenges to employees and job-seekers who seek to navigate platform policies, ensure workplace safety, and hedge against instability. Join us for a timely discussion on the quest to find meaningful, well-paid work as technology increasingly destabilizes and transforms the future of labor.

Sarah Kessler is a journalist based in New York City. She is the author of Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work and an editor at Quartz. Previously, she covered the gig economy as a senior writer at Fast Company and managed startup coverage at Mashable. Her reporting has been cited by The Washington Post, New York Magazine, and NPR.

The Future of Labor research initiative at Data & Society seeks to better understand emergent disruptions in the labor force as a result of data-centric technological development, with a special focus on structural inequalities. Its team recently released the report Beyond Disruption: How Tech Shapes Labor Across Domestic Work & Ridehailing–as featured in the New York Times, NPR All Things Considered, and The Nation.

Future Perfect is a gathering at Data & Society that brings together individuals from a variety of world-building disciplines (from art and fiction to architecture and science) to explore the uses, abuses, and paradoxes of speculative futures.

Tamara K. Nopper has a PhD in Sociology and her teaching and research focuses on the intersection of economic, racial, and gender inequality, with a particular emphasis on entrepreneurship, banking, globalization, urban development, and money and surveillance. Her publications have examined immigrant entrepreneurship, minority business development, the globalization of ethnic banking, and Asian American communities. Her current work looks at Korean immigrant entrepreneurship and post-Civil Rights era minority politics.

Through an analysis of textual and media searches as well as extensive research on paid online advertising, Noble exposes a culture of racism and sexism in the way discoverability is created online. As search engines and their related companies grow in importance—operating as a source for email, a major vehicle for primary and secondary school learning, and beyond—understanding and reversing these disquieting trends and discriminatory practices is of utmost importance.

Dr. Emma Briant has spent over a decade researching SCL and Cambridge Analytica. She drew on substantial contacts she developed in her work on defense propaganda (Propaganda and Counter-terrorism: Strategies for Global Change, Manchester University Press, 2015) to research an upcoming book, What’s Wrong with the Democrats? Media Bias, Inequality, and the Rise of Donald Trump (co-authored with George Washington University professor Robert M. Entman) and academic publications on the EU referendum.

In this talk, Briant discusses her analysis of the company’s activities in each of these areas, how she gained such unique access to key executives who worked on the campaigns, as well as the implications of the key evidence she recently submitted to several public inquiries in the UK.

When we agonize over the fake news phenomenon, though, we are not talking about these kinds of fabricated stories. What we are really focusing on is why we have been suddenly inundated by false information—purposefully deployed—that spreads so quickly and persuades so effectively. This is a different conception of fake news, and it presents a question about how information operates at scale in the internet era.

In this Databite talk, Nabiha Syed explores how existing First Amendment theories fail to adequately explain our digital information economy, and how that theoretical incoherence leaves users and social media platforms ill-equipped to deal with “fake news” and other “bad” speech online. Nabiha also offers several factors to be considered in any systemic theory that can help move us beyond the troubled status quo.

The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhuman choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values.

This talk was presented for the event Future Perfect. In a moment when the future increasingly feels like a foregone conclusion, Future Perfect brought actors from a variety of world-building disciplines (from art and fiction, to law and science) together to explore the uses, abuses, and paradoxes of speculative futures. Curated by Data & Society artist-in-residence Ingrid Burrington, Future Perfect was an experimental one-day, invitation-only conference originating from insights of the institute’s regular Speculative Fiction Reading Group.

Joanna Radin is Assistant Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at Yale where she teaches feminist and indigenous STS and the history of biomedicine and anthropology. Before receiving her PhD in History and Sociology of Science at UPenn she studied science communication at Cornell and worked as a risk communication specialist. She is the author of Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood, (University of Chicago Press, 2017) and a co-editor of Cyropolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World (MIT Press, 2017). Radin is currently writing a book about science fiction, subjectivity, and biomedicine.

This talk was presented for the event Future Perfect. In a moment when the future increasingly feels like a foregone conclusion, Future Perfect brought actors from a variety of world-building disciplines (from art and fiction, to law and science) together to explore the uses, abuses, and paradoxes of speculative futures. Curated by Data & Society artist-in-residence Ingrid Burrington, Future Perfect was an experimental one-day, invitation-only conference originating from insights of the institute’s regular Speculative Fiction Reading Group.

Ruha Benjamin is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, author of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford University Press), and 2016-17 fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. Her work examines the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine with a particular focus on the relationship between innovation and inequity. She earned her PhD in Sociology from UC Berkeley, completed fellowships at UCLA’s Institute for Genetics and Society and Harvard’s Science, Technology, and Society Program, and has received grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, and California Institute for Regenerative Medicine among others. Her work is published in numerous journals including Science, Technology, and Human Values; Ethnicity & Health; and Annals of the American Academy of Social and Political Science.

Eric Horvitz is a technical fellow and director at Microsoft Research. His interests span theoretical and practical challenges in AI and he has made contributions in machine learning, perception, decision making, and human-computer interaction. More information and publications are available at http://erichorvitz.com.

Marie Hicks is an assistant professor of history of technology at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, Illinois. Her work focuses on how gender and sexuality bring hidden technological dynamics to light, and how women’s experiences change the core narrative of the history of computing. Hicks’s book, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing is available from MIT Press (2017). For more information, see programmedinequality.com. Hicks received her MA and Ph.D. from Duke University and her BA from Harvard University. Before entering academia, she worked as a UNIX systems administrator.

The talk was moderated by Jessica Feldman from New York University’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, and hosted by Robyn Caplan from Data & Society Research Institute.

In the early 2000s, a group of scientists from outside mainstream biology proposed that they would make living things behave like computers. They would treat DNA like command code; they would make cells behave with Boolean logic; and ultimately they would make life programmable. They called their field synthetic biology. Since its inception, synthetic biology has influenced the practice biological research, current understanding of biological systems, and the biotech economy— by 2019 the global synthetic biology market is projected to be worth $13.4 billion.

ABOUT THE SERIES

The Biotech Futures Talk + Lab Series explores the implications of and ways in which biology is becoming a data science. Each talk is paired with a 3-4 hour lab workshop at Genspace for Data & Society and Genspace community members to demonstrate how these themes become realized in the lab.

Christina Agapakis is creative director of Ginkgo Bioworks, a biological design company growing cultured products for partners across many industries. Her work brings together biologists, engineers, designers, artists, and social scientists to explore the future of biotechnology. During her PhD at Harvard, she worked on producing hydrogen fuel in bacteria and making photosynthetic animals. She has taught designers at the Art Center College of Design and biomolecular engineers at UCLA, and she once made cheese using bacteria from the human body.

In the early 2000s, a group of scientists from outside mainstream biology proposed that they would make living things behave like computers. They would treat DNA like command code; they would make cells behave with Boolean logic; and ultimately they would make life programmable. They called their field synthetic biology. Since its inception, synthetic biology has influenced the practice biological research, current understanding of biological systems, and the biotech economy— by 2019 the global synthetic biology market is projected to be worth $13.4 billion.

Tom Knight spent most of his career teaching computer science and electrical engineering at MIT, before playing the major role in creating the engineering discipline of synthetic biology. In 1996 he seeded interest in the field at DARPA, and built a molecular biology laboratory in the MIT computer science department. He developed important standards for engineering biological systems, specifically Biobricks, the first standard assembly technique for functional DNA components, and in establishing the MIT Registry of Standard Biological Parts.

He was one of four founders of IGEM, an international competition between undergraduate teams to design and build biological systems, now hosting 300 teams across the globe. In 2008, he co-founded Ginkgo Bioworks, where he remains a full time researcher. His interests include minimal organisms, origins of life, and predictive models of biological systems. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a director of the IGEM Foundation, and member of the International Committee on the Taxonamy of the Mollicutes.

Alice E. Marwick is Director of the McGannon Communication Research Center and Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. She is also a fellow at Data & Society. Her work examines the legal, political, and social implications of popular social media technologies. She is the author of Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in the Social Media Age which examines how people seek online status through attention and visibility. She has written for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Wired, and The Guardian, as well as many academic publications. Alice has a PhD from the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University.

Zara Rahman is a feminist and information activist who has worked in over twenty countries in the field of information accessibility and data use among civil society. She is Research Lead at the engine room, a non-profit organization supporting the use of technology and data in advocacy. She is a fellow at Data & Society where her research looks at the role of people who bridge gaps between activists and technologists and facilitate more responsible and effective use of data and technology in activism.

Related links:
Best Practices for Conducting Risky Research

In the first large scale empirical analysis of this operation, Jennifer’s research reveals how to identify the secretive authors of these posts, the posts written by them, and their content. She and her team estimate that the government fabricates and posts about 448 million social media comments a year. In contrast to prior claims, her research shows that the Chinese regime’s strategy is to avoid arguing with skeptics of the party and the government, and to not even discuss controversial issues. Her work infers that the goal of this massive secretive operation is instead to regularly distract the public and change the subject, as most of the these posts involve cheerleading for China, the revolutionary history of the Communist Party, or other symbols of the regime. She will discuss how these results fit with what is known about the Chinese censorship program, and suggest how they may change our broader theoretical understanding of “common knowledge” and information control in authoritarian regimes.

Jennifer Pan is an Assistant Professor of Communication, Assistant Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and of Sociology at Stanford University. Her research focuses on the politics of authoritarian (non-democratic) countries in the digital age. How autocrats constrain collective action through online censorship, propaganda, and responsiveness. How information proliferation influences the ability of authoritarian regimes to collect reliable information. How public preferences are arranged and formed. She combines experimental and computational methods with large-scale datasets on political activity in China and other authoritarian regimes to examine these questions. Her work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and Science. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University’s Department of Government in 2015. She graduated from Princeton University, summa cum laude, in 2004, and until 2009, she was a consultant at McKinsey & Company based in New York and Beijing.

Jeff is an Assistant Professor at the Medical University of South Carolina and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, a founder and the Chief Scientist of Cloudera, an angel investor with his wife Halle Tecco at Techammer, and a board member of CIOX Health and Sage Bionetworks. Jeff was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Accel Partners immediately prior to founding Cloudera. Before Accel, he conceived, built, and led the Data team at Facebook. Before joining Facebook, Jeff was a quantitative analyst on Wall Street. Jeff earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics from Harvard University.

JASON BOBE

Jason Bobe is Associate Professor and Director of the Sharing Lab at Icahn Institute at Mount Sinai. For the past 10 years, Jason has been at the forefront of innovative data sharing practices in health research. His work on the Personal Genome Project at Harvard, and now three other countries, pioneered new approaches for creating well-consented public data, cell lines and other open resources. These efforts led to important changes in the governance of identifiable health data and also led to the development of valuable new products, such as NIST’s standardized human genome reference materials (e.g. NIST RM 8392), now used for calibrating clinical laboratory equipment worldwide.

More recently, he co-founded Open Humans, a platform that facilitates participant-centered data sharing between individuals and the health research community. At the Sharing Lab, he attempts to produce health research studies that people actually want to join and works on improving our understanding of how to make great, impactful studies capable of engaging the general public and achieving social good. He is alsothe leader of the Resilience Project, an effort leveraging open science approaches to identify and learn how some people are able avoid disease despite having serious risk factors. Last year, he was selected to be in the inaugural class of Mozilla Open Science Fellows. He is also co-founder of two nonprofits: Open Humans Foundation and DIYbio.org.

SOPHIE ZAAIJER

Dr. Sophie Zaaijer is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Erlich’s lab at the New York Genome Center and Columbia University. Sophie is from the Netherlands, where she did her undergraduate in Music (viola) and Food Technology. For her Masters, she studied Medical Biotechnology at Wageningen University and went to Harvard Medical School to finish her thesis work in Monica Colaiacovo’s lab. She next went on to do a PhD in Molecular Biology and Genetics in Julie Cooper’s lab at Cancer Research UK, London (now the Crick Institute) and at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda. Sophie focuses on genome technology and the growing impact of genomics on our daily lives.

MODERATOR:

HEATHER DEWEY-HAGBORG

Heather Dewey-Hagborg is a transdisciplinary artist and educator who is interested in art as research and critical practice. Her controversial biopolitical art practice includes Stranger Visions in which she created portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material (hair, cigarette butts, chewed up gum) collected in public places.

Heather has shown work internationally at events and venues including the World Economic Forum, Shenzhen Urbanism and Architecture Biennale, the New Museum, and PS1 MOMA. Her work has been widely discussed in the media, from the New York Times and the BBC to TED and Wired.
She is an Assistant Professor of Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a 2016 Creative Capital award grantee in the area of Emerging Fields.

INTRODUCTION:

DANIEL GRUSHKIN

Daniel Grushkin is founder of the Biodesign Challenge, an international university competition that asks students to envision future applications of biotech. He is co-founder and Cultural Programs Director of Genspace, a nonprofit community laboratory dedicated to promoting citizen science and access to biotechnology. Fast Company ranked Genspace fourth among the top 10 most innovative education companies in the world.

Daniel is a Fellow at Data & Society. From 2013-2014, he was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars where he researched synthetic biology. He was an Emerging Leader in Biosecurity at the UPMC Center of Health Security in 2014. As a journalist, he has reported on the intersection of biotechnology, culture, and business for publications including Bloomberg Businessweek, Fast Company, Scientific American and Popular Science.

• how and why recent innovations such as maker culture, personalised learning and data-driven education are subsumed within more restrictive institutional ‘logics’;
• the tensions of ‘bring your own device’ and other permissive digital learning practices
• how alternative and resistant forms of technology use by students tend to mitigate against educational engagement and/or learning gains;
• the ways in which digital technologies enhance (rather than disrupt) existing forms of advantage and privilege amongst groups of students;
• how the distributed nature of technology leadership and innovation throughout schools tends to restrict widespread institutional change and reform;
• the ambiguous role that digital technologies play in teachers’ work and the labor of teaching;
• the often surprising ways that technology seems to take hold throughout schools – echoing broader imperatives of accountability, surveillance and control.

The talk provides plenty of scope to consider how technology use in schools might be ‘otherwise’, and alternate agendas to be pursued by educators, policymakers, technology developers and other stakeholders in the ed-tech space.

The current student privacy regulatory regime does not address the issues raised by modern information technology and data-driven decision-making in education. This presentation highlights key issues of the student privacy debate, proposed reforms, and emerging legal and ethical issues, as well as implications of data-driven education environments and decision-making that extend far beyond school settings.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this talk explores how mainstream self-tracking technologies – in their design, marketing, and use – increasingly part ways with the ethos of intensive self-attention found within the Quantified Self (QS) community, serving as digital compasses to guide consumers through the confounding, tempting, and sometimes toxic landscape of everyday choice making and lifestyle management (for instance, by regulating the micro-rhythms of their bites, steps, sips, and breaths). By offering them a way to fulfill the cultural demand for self-management while delegating the often tedious, sometimes existentially taxing labor involved in meeting that demand, such devices at once exemplify and short-circuit ideals of individual agency and responsibility.

In the story of self-tracking technology and its increasing automation, a certain ambivalence over the terms of contemporary selfhood comes to the fore. Are there any connections to be drawn between this ambivalence and broader debates over governmental and corporate surveillance, data privacy, and the possibility for resistance?

In this talk, Schneier will take a retrospective look back at what we’ have learned from past attempts to secure these systems. He will also push us forward to consider seriously what technologies, laws, regulations, economic incentives, and social norms we will need to secure them in the future.

Cathy will also share her concerns around how these models are trained, optimized, and operated at scale in ways that she deems to be arbitrary and statistically unsound and can lead to pernicious feedback loops that reinforce and magnify inequality in our society, rather than rooting it out. She will also suggest solutions and possibilities for building mathematical models that could lead to greater fairness and less harm and suffering.

This talk will explore the assumption that nearly every project using data must make: that the data are representative of reality in the world. We will explore how, contrary to the standard assumption, statistical patterns in raw data tend to be quite different than patterns in the world. Statistical patterns in data reflect how the data was collected rather than changes in the real-world phenomena data purport to represent.

Using analysis of killings in Iraq, homicides committed by police in the US, killings in the conflict in Syria, and homicides in Colombia, we will contrast patterns in raw data with data in estimated total patterns of violence. The talk will show how biases in raw data can be corrected through estimation, and explain why it matters in these countries, and more generally.

Recorded on 3/24/2016.

Mark and Paula will explore these tensions and discuss how this new digital infrastructure 1) facilitates and constrains the flow of data and people, 2) conceals and constructs identity and status, and 3) affects refugees’ fundamental rights to privacy, data protection, and asylum.

One of the first, and worst, examples of this was the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa. In its response to the escalating crisis, the humanitarian community sought out significant amounts of sensitive mobile data, epidemiological data models, and digital engagement tools, without understanding the impact it would have on the response effort. Whether that’s considered humanitarian innovation or disaster experimentation, there’s little question that it raises a significant number of legal, ethical, and practical questions.

This talk will focus on the intersection of the public interest, the law, and the digital approaches that are increasingly defining the way that we invest public resources and provide public services. We’ll talk about the Ebola case, the trends in public sector digitization, and what that means for the practical and legal protections of vulnerable groups.

Recorded on 6/11/2015

If not as pervasive and structurally central as search and recommendation, trending has emerged as an increasingly common feature of such interfaces and seems to be growing in cultural importance. It represents a fundamentally different logic for how to algorithmically navigate social media: besides identifying and highlighting what might be relevant to “you” specifically, trending algorithms identify what is popular with “us” more broadly.

But while the techniques may be new, the instinct is not: what today might be identified as “trending” is the latest instantiation of the instinct to map public attention and interest, be it surveys and polling, audience metrics, market research, forecasting, and trendspotting. Understanding the calculations and motivations behind the production of these “calculated publics,” in this historical context, helps highlight how these algorithms are relevant to our collective efforts to know and be known.

Rather than discuss the effect of trending algorithms, I want to ask what it means that they have become a meaningful element of public culture. Algorithms, particularly those involved in the movement of culture, are both mechanisms of distribution and valuation, part of the process by which knowledge institutions circulate and evaluate information, the process by which new media industries provide and sort culture. This essay examines the way these algorithmic techniques themselves become cultural objects, get taken up in our thinking about culture and the public to which it is addressed, and get contested both for what they do and what they reveal. We should ask not just how algorithms shape culture, but how they become culture.

Recorded on 2/25/2016