Paper given at the Conference of the Digital Methods Winter School, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, 14 January 2016, with Jonathan Gray and Carolin Gerlitz.

1. Jonathan Gray, Carolin Gerlitz and Liliana Bounegru
Digital Methods Winter School 2016
University of Amsterdam
TOWARDS A LITERACY FOR DATA
INFRASTRUCTURES

2. 1. Rethinking Data Literacy
2. De- and Re-Assembling Data
Infrastructures
3. Data-Infrastructures and their Publics
4. Data-infrastructural Turn?
FOUR
PARTS

3. 1. Rethinking Data Literacy
2. De- and Re-Assembling Data
Infrastructures
3. Data-Infrastructures and their Publics
4. Data-infrastructural Turn?
1.

4. EVERYBODY LOVES
DATA LITERACY
● Data literacy as “the most important new
skill of the 21st century”.
● It will “help solve world's biggest
challenges”.
● The “road to the future” is paved with it.
● UN report calls for “global data literacy”.
● G8: data literacy will help to “unlock the
value of open data”.

5. DATA LITERACIES FOCUSING ON
DATASETS AS A RESOURCE
● Current conceptions of data literacy
emphasize “competencies of an
extractive and transformative industry”
(Letouzé et al., 2015)?
● Focus on “information as a resource”
(Braman, 2009: 12-15).
● Do they emphasise “auditorial” or
“entrepreneurial” modes of action
(Ruppert, 2012, Birchall, 2015)?

6. FROM DATASETS
TO DATA INFRASTRUCTURES?
● Socio-technical systems implicated in the
creation, processing and distribution of
data.
● Relations of heterogeneous
socio-technical components, rather than
“things” (Star & Ruhleder, 1996)
● Between methodological inscription and
multivalence?

7. 1. Rethinking Data Literacy
2. De- and Re-Assembling Data
Infrastructures
3. Data-Infrastructures and their Publics
4. Data-infrastructural Turn?
2.

8. DE- ASSEMBLING DATA
INFRASTRUCTUREs
● Much data results from grammars of action
(Agre 1994).
● Such pre-structured actions are subject to
“Interpretative flexibility” (van Dijck 2013)
and cross-platform syndication.
● Grammars lead to dynamic & “lively metrics”
(Gerlitz & Rieder 2015).
● Data come with methodological inscriptions.
● Assembly of data & tools leads to “cascades
of inscriptions” (Ruppert et al. 2013).

9. ALIGNMENT & MAL-ALIGNMENT
● How to re-assemble data
infrastructures in imaginative ways?
● Data & methods do not come with
fixed in-build purposes but need to
be aligned with the research
objective.
● Lure objects to pose their own
problems (Lury & Wakeford 2012).
● “Interface methods” embrace
productive capacities of alignment
and mal-alignment (Gerlitz & Marres
2015).

10. 1. Rethinking Data Literacy
2. De- and Re-Assembling Data
Infrastructures
3. Data-Infrastructures and their Publics
4. Data-infrastructural Turn?
3.

11. DATA HAVE PUBLICS
● Data have publics with specific
objectives, needs & skills (Ruppert
2015).
● Emerge in relation to data
infrastructures.
● Operate within the tension between
inscription and multi-valence of data
infrastructures.
● Require specific methodological
alignment.
● Mal-alignment as opportunity for
intervention.
● Journalism, activism and social research

12. 1. Interface methods as (mal)alignment between methods and publics

13. 2. Statactivism as repurposing data infrastructures for social reform

14. 3. Data journalism as redefining the fields of possibility of calculative
infrastructures

15. 1. Rethinking Data Literacy
2. De- and Re-Assembling Data
Infrastructures
3. Data-Infrastructures and their Publics
4. Data-infrastructural Turn?
4.

16. CONCEPTUAL VOCABULARY
● An expansion of the concept of
data literacy to go beyond
competencies in reading and
working with datasets.
● Accounting for wider data
infrastructures which create the
socio-technical conditions for the
creation, extraction and analysis of
data.
● Vocabulary and tactics to respond
to inscriptions and biases of data
infrastructures.

17. REMAKING DATA
INFRASTRUCTURES
● Re-envisioning and re-configuring
data infrastructures through
methodological inventiveness and
“infrastructural imagination”
(Bowker 2014).
● Tactics for re-aligning them with
the interests and concerns of
different publics.

18. “DATA WORLDS”
● Data infrastructures articulate and
project social worlds – or “data
worlds” – which afford their own
ways of knowing and possibilities
for action.
● Data literacies should aim to
cultivate the capacities for
re-thinking, re-configuring,
re-aligning, and re-imagining these
data worlds, not just inhabiting
them or harvesting their fruits.

19. CONSEQUENCES OF A DATA
INFRASTRUCTURAL TURN?
● New sites of political contestation
and societal controversy.
Broadening publics who seek to
shape data infrastructures?
● Alternatives to “platformisation”?
Other ways of organising relations
of people, methods, and machines?