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