#GAReads | This Designer Is Fighting Back Against Bad Data–With Feminism
photo credit: Dean Hochman [CC BY 2.0], via Flickr
"This Designer Is Fighting Back Against Bad Data–With Feminism":
The walls at the Soho20 gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn, are covered in multicolored Post-it Notes, the kind you might find stuck to glass meeting room walls at a design firm or coworking space. But these notes are for a different kind of brainstorm.
“Intersectionality,” declares one in all caps. “Men Explain Things to Me– Solnit,” another one reads, referencing a 2008 essay by the writer Rebecca Solnit. “Is there a feminist programming language?” asks another. “Buffy 4eva,” reads an orange Post-it Note, next to a blue note that proclaims, “Transwomen are women.”
These are all ideas for the themes and pieces of content that will inform the “Feminist Data Set”: a project to collect data about intersectional feminism in a feminist way. Most data is scraped from existing networks and websites or collected by surveilling people as they move through digital and physical space–as such, it reflects the biases these existing systems have. The Feminist Data Set, on the other hand, aspires to a more equitable goal: collaborative, ethical data collection.