counter data/m_ss_ng d_t_ 

data activism from the Hull House Project to contemporary femicide research

Bátorfy Attila

critical data studies

danah boyd - Kate Crawford: Critical Questions for Big Data, 2012

• who has the right to collect data?
• who has the right to ask essential questions for data collection?
• who has the right to interpret, analyze, publish the data?
• who decides for what purposes the government or the corporate sector uses the data?
• does the citizen have the right to know what their data is used for?

counterdata
the totality of participatory data collection and interpretation practices that often, but not always, complement, refine, or reject the governmental, corporate, or scientific social narratives arising from state and corporate data collections. 

missing data

the totality of data that "does not exist but should" (Onuoha 2016), or that exists but for various reasons is not made available to social control by states, corporations, or science.

the production of missing data can be counter-evidence

data justice

collection of data on people

• until the second half of the 19th century it was evident that this data was collected by the state through the appointment of necessary apparatus/expert personnel
• the purpose of censuses from antiquity to the 18th century: property assessment, tax collection, military service
• from the 17th century onwards, smaller data collections (John Graunt, Jean Talon) are supplemented with various health, ethnic, religious data + their mathematical analysis
• 18th century: political arithmetic vs. statistics
• 19th century: the first large, national modern censuses (in Prussia as early as 1719!)
• anthropometry, social physics, positivism, measuring and producing "the average person" (Quételet), eugenics (Galton), normality
• Balzac: "the whole of French society was reorganized according to the expectations of statisticians" The Country Priest, 1838

Preludes of challenging scientific/political narratives:

• Valentine Seaman (1798)
• John Snow (1854)
• Florence Nightingale (1858)

Florence Kelley, Jane Addams and the Hull House Project, 1895

• 1889: Founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr
• Inhabited by immigrants arriving from Europe
• In 1964-65, a large part of the complex was demolished due to the construction of the University of Illinois Chicago

• A "New Woman" feminist movement's stronghold
• The Hull House is led by a "community of university women"
• Free learning and cultural opportunities, lectures, concerts, discussions for immigrant residents (Weber, DuBois, Dewey are among the speakers)
• 3R: residence, research, reform
• Hull House research project: sociological research of the residential community and its neighborhood
• 1891–1899: Florence Kelley, "research director, organizer"
• Methodology: involving the community in question development, data collection, interpretation
• 1895: "Hull House Maps and Papers" - the articles were partly written by Addams and Kelley, but mostly by the residents who became "researchers". Maps: Kelley
• Impact: Chicago School of Sociology, mapping social issues (ethnicity, religion, wealth)

Hull House wage map

WEB DuBois and the American Negroes, 1900

• 1868–1963
• born into a "free black" family
• sociologist, civil rights activist
• Fisk, Berlin University, Harvard
• The first African American to receive a doctorate
• "The American Negroes", 1900
• The Soul of Black Folk, 1903

• 1900: Paris World Exposition
• The American Negroes exhibition, but not in the United States pavilion
• Alongside DuBois, librarian Daniel Murray, lawyer-politician Thomas Calloway
• Background: the American census did collect data on African Americans, but in reports and atlases they mostly appeared as "slaves." A reaction to the racism of the 1889 Paris exhibition.
• Congress supported the exhibition with $15,000. 
• Goal: to present to the European audience the contributions of African Americans to the economy and culture of the United States through statistical data and representations
• The exhibition was also ignored by the American press and the official bulletin

Jahn Ferenc and the "Sociography of Kispest Exhibit", 1937

• 1902–1945, Jewish family, doctor
• As a doctor, by the late 1920s, he worked in today's South Pest (Kispest, Peszszentlőrinc, Pesterzsébet, Csepel, and Kőbánya).
• 1929: Joins the Hungarian Social Democratic Party in Kispest
• 1931: Member of the illegal Communist Party of Hungary
• 1936: Member of the Kispest representative body
• 1940: Arrested and tortured for illegal communist activities
• 1943: Excluded by the Medical Chamber
• 1944: Deported to Dachau
• 1945: Dies in the concentration camp

• Alongside his medical career, he also dealt with sociology of labor
• In 1937, he organizes the Sociography of Kispest exhibition
• Partly official data, partly his own collection
• Originally, it was supposed to be visible between April 18 and 25, 1937
• Interior Minister Kálmán Darányi bans it within 3 days
• The reason: incitement against the state, subversion, undermining public trust
  communist agitation
• 150, mostly with pictures, operating with statistical charts
  showcase about the state of development of Kispest, the material, health, and housing conditions of the workers and peasants
• People are suffering in Kispest, while officially there are no poor people in Hungary
• The material of the exhibition lost
• Other exhibition: Institute for Countryside and Folk Research

Mimi Onuoha: The Library of Missing Datasets, 2016

2.0: POC

3.0: private

Catherine D'Ignazio: Data Feminicide, 2019-

• data feminicide/femicide: both missing data and counterdata
  the official state/criminal statistics data collection on violence against women, which often results in death, is methodologically negligent, incomplete, and shows significantly fewer registered cases than the actual numbers of violence
• states and criminal statistics often intentionally underreport violence against women even in democratic countries
• counterdata: participatory data collections with the help of civilians and activists, which offer a counter-narrative to the official data disclosures, raise awareness of the severity of the problem, and engage in policy activities

counterdata vs. counterdata

civil activism vs. pseudo-civil activism