Thinking about data
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So these days i have to write a proposal, and it involves data, infrastructures, imagination and such wonderful things. And as I was reading an article about criminological data models, govern-mentality, and biopolitics i came across this fellow Ian Hacking who wrote a few books on how statistical probability came to be in the 17th century, how the science of prediction and probability shaped categorizations of people into this and into that, and how those categories that did not exist before the statistical analysis came to become social realities. Also, that probability can allow you to predict occurences within a population according to a set of probabilities but alas at the scale of the individual things are totally random! (Hacking is a canadian and a fellow at the College de France - the only anglo accepted thus far - same schools as foucault and levi-strauss)
Why do I care and why am I sending this to the list. well, it has to do about access to data and who is creating the categories we come to live by and believe, what it means when government rationalization comes in the form of statistics discussing populations, and that only the government and wealthy organizations have access to the means to those rationalizations. So I listened to a CBC ideas interview with Ian Hacking here - http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/science/#episode4. Brilliant! He discusses taming chance, statistical thinking, normativity, wanting to be normal and adapting to categories which make up people and shape a type of social reality. Access to data i think is about enabling more than a few to question, assess and shape reality. Andrew Pickering was also interviewed in this episode, and he brought up Deleuze and Guattari's concept of nomad science vs royal science. The latter a science that continues to support the known and accepted ways of doing things the former a more distributed form of science out of the academe. I think web 2.0, open access, open source, open data are about nomad science - which i will explore a little more. Finally, I then listened to a Brian Wynne (http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/science/#episode10) who discussed how science and technology are beyond the realm of politics. He discusses in his works The Public Value of Science and how some sciences are imagined, delusions, and provocation - its publics - basically how it is constructed in the public mind. Bref, I am trying to get at the idea that data help us form a picture of reality, and the more of us that get the opportunity to play with them, learn about them, value them, the more pictures we may create that may invert, contest and change about what we are currently being told, we are not told, what is silenced or worse just plain ingnored, how we are shaped, we want to shape and some new social realities we may want to aim for. Also, the entire CBC lecture series on How to Think about Science is just plain great - http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/science/ Happy new year! t -- Tracey P. Lauriault 613-234-2805 https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault |
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tracey, i assume you'll put this up on our dear, neglected datalibre.ca?
On Jan 2, 2009, at 1:36 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault wrote: So these days i have to write a proposal, and it involves data, infrastructures, imagination and such wonderful things. And as I was reading an article about criminological data models, govern-mentality, and biopolitics i came across this fellow Ian Hacking who wrote a few books on how statistical probability came to be in the 17th century, how the science of prediction and probability shaped categorizations of people into this and into that, and how those categories that did not exist before the statistical analysis came to become social realities. Also, that probability can allow you to predict occurences within a population according to a set of probabilities but alas at the scale of the individual things are totally random! (Hacking is a canadian and a fellow at the College de France - the only anglo accepted thus far - same schools as foucault and levi-strauss) ------------------------------- ------------------------------- |
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I will!
On Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 9:22 AM, Hugh McGuire <[hidden email]> wrote:
-- Tracey P. Lauriault 613-234-2805 https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault |
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