Data Feminism and the Archive

As data are increasingly mobilized in the service of governments and corporations, their unequal conditions of production, asymmetrical methods of application, and unequal effects on both individuals and groups have become increasingly difficult for data scientists, digital humanists, and others who rely on data in their work to ignore. How can scholars, librarians, and archivists intervene?

Drawing from Klein’s recent book, Data Feminism (MIT Press), co-authored with Catherine D’Ignazio, this talk will present an approach to doing data science with archival materials that is informed by the past several decades of intersectional feminist activism and critical thought. The talk will show how challenges to the male/female binary can challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems; how an emphasis on emotion can expand our ideas about effective data communication; and how the concept of “invisible labor” can expose the significant human efforts required of our automated systems, as well as of our scholarship and library work. Taken together, these examples will demonstrate how feminist thinking can be operationalized into more ethical and equitable data practices in the archive and beyond.

Speaker biography:

Lauren Klein is an associate professor in the departments of English and Quantitative Theory & Methods at Emory University, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab. Before moving to Emory, she taught in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. Klein works at the intersection of digital humanities, data science, and early American literature, with a research focus on issues of gender and race. She has designed platforms for exploring the contents of historical newspapers, modeled the invisible labor of women abolitionists, and recreated forgotten visualization schemes with fabric and addressable LEDs. 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. Her current project, Data by Design: An Interactive History of Data Visualization, 1786-1900, was recently funded by an NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication.

Programme (times in BST):

16:00: Lecture starts

16:35: Q&A

17:00: Event Close

This event will take place online. Joining details will be sent to attendees a few days before the event.

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Image reference: Colossus electronic digital computer, The National Archives, FO 850/234

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