Data Are Made, Not Found
Organized by the Berkeley Center for New Media. Co-sponsored by Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation and the School of Information
A History & Theory of New Media lecture presented with the Digital Humanities program, as the keynote lecture of the Digital Humanities Fair and the closing lecture of BCNM's 20th anniversary year.
The heady conversations around AI often obscure the data infrastructure that these new technologies depend on. Those making sophisticated generative AI models gobble up data in every crack and crevice in which data can be found. But those data were produced for a purpose in a particular context. And those data take on different meaning in relationship to other data. And behind the scenes, those data are scrubbed and cleaned so that they can shine in the model. So how can we understand the politics and practices of making data? And how can we understand how the extraction of data leads to new kinds of data degradation?
In this talk, danah will explore the ecology that has emerged to gobble up data by looking at what kinds of practices and cultural formations are rearranged to make this possible. This talk will weave through different data-rich contexts, including the US Census, social media, search engines, and AI to help us collectively see data in a new light.
Speaker
danah boyd is a partner researcher at Microsoft Research and a distinguished visiting professor at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on the intersection of technology and society, with an eye to how structural inequities shape and are shaped by technologies. She is currently conducting a multi-year ethnographic study of the US census to understand how data are made legitimate. Her previous studies have focused on media manipulation, algorithmic bias, privacy practices, social media, and teen culture. Her monograph It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens has received widespread praise. She founded the research institute Data & Society, where she currently serves as an advisor. She is also a trustee of the Computer History Museum, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and on the advisory board of Electronic Privacy Information Center. She received a bachelor's degree in computer science from Brown University, a master's degree from the MIT Media Lab, and a Ph.D in information from the University of California, Berkeley.
Contact
If you have questions about this event, please contact Raphael Cohen at [email protected] or (510) 495-3505.
Accessibility
If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting, CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about mobility access in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Raphael Cohen at [email protected] or (510) 495-3505 with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7–10 days in advance of the event.