ARTS1092: Working With Data
Week 3: Data Infrastructures: Classification and Organisation
Dr Andrew Brooks
[email protected]
I would like to give my respect to the Bedegal and Wangal peoples, the traditional custodians of the land I live and work, today, whose
sovereignty was never ceded to the British Crown. I wish to pay my respects to the Elders past, present, and future. I acknowledge that this
site has long been a place of teaching, learning, sharing, and creativity. Always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.
Recap
• Raw data is an oxymoron; all data is cooked at its source.
• Data is always shaped by:
• the criteria used to generate it
• the context in which it was gathered, collected, and collated
• the person/people/organisation doing the data collection, organisation, and analysis
• All knowledge is situated; knowledge is produced by specific people in specific
circumstances – cultural, historical, geographical, and political.
A history of making up the world
The history of data is the history of making up the world
Clockwise from top: Claudius Ptolemy's world map (100-178 A.D.); Muhammad al-Idrisi’s circular world map (1154); Heinrich Bünting’s
Clover Leaf Map (1581); Google earth (21st Century)
Top: Google Earth’s incomplete mapping of the
Kibera (Kenya’s largest slum);
Bottom: The community mapping project Map
Kibera’s own mapping of the area
The history of data is the history of making people up
Joseph Wright of Derby, An
Experiment on a Bird in the
Air Pump (1768)
Rembrandt, The Anatomy
Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp
(1632)
Carolus Linnaeus, ‘Regnum Animale’ (Taxonomy of the Animal Kingdom) from Systema Naturae (1735)
Image from Maurice Sendak’s children’s book ‘Where the Wild Things Are’
Carolus Linnaeus’ Taxonomy of the Animal Kingdom broke homo-sapiens into racial sub-categories (Europaeus, Americanus,
Asiaticus, Africanus) and which also included the category monstrous. While this category may have had origins in notions of
mythical savagery, in Linnaeus’ system it was used as racialised category to describe some colonised peoples who lived in remote
regions and who had been dismissed as ‘primitive’.
Linnaeus’ Taxonomy of the Animal
Kingdom not only attempted to
classify homo-sapiens but also
organized them into a racial hierarchy.
His system appealed to such things as:
skin colour and other phenotypical
markers, medival understandings of
medical temperament (the four
humours), posture, behaviours,
manner of clothing, form of
government. It translated these
decidedly non-scientific categories
into a ‘universal’ system that order
humans in terms of biological
advancement. Classification plays a
key role in the production of race and
racism.
Image: Archie Moore, Blood Fraction,
The Commercial, Sydney (2015)
European colonial empires from 1492 to 2008. Source: Asuros
A ledger and register of slaves showing how much they were bought and sold for in 1851.
The production of race and racial hierarchies
The classification of people – in terms of race, sex, and sexuality – all have their roots in this era. Data and an
appeal to empirical evidence and scientific method was used to advance and justify racist ideology and the
production of racial hierarchies. Here we can see how data is: 1) rhetorical rather than factual; 2)entangled
with power and ideology.
‘The white race possesses all motivating forces and talents in itself, therefore we must examine it somewhat
more closely.’ – Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798).
‘In the hot countries the human being matures earlier in all ways but does not reach the perfection of the
temperate zones. Humanity exists in its greatest perfection in the white race.’ – Immanuel Kant, Anthropology
from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798).
Christoph Meiners claimed that Black people felt less pain and less emotion than the more ‘advanced’ races.
He wrote that ‘the Negro has no human, barely any animal feeling’. – The Outline of History of Mankind
(1785)
Top: A racist illustration by H.
Strickland Constable (1899)
that puts forward the idea of
a racial hierarchy.
Bottom: Google’s Photos app
tags Black people as ‘gorillas’
in 2015.
The history of data is the history of making people up
Demystifying ‘history’ and its relationship to knowledge production
Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes that ‘the critique of Western history argues that history is a modernist project
which has developed alongside imperial beliefs about the Other.’ She tells us that History shapes the
production of knowledge and importantly reminds us that History is not neutral but is constructed and
assembled around a set of interconnected ideas, which she summarises in the following way:
1. The idea that history is a totalizing discourse
2. The idea that there is a universal history
3. The idea that history is one large chronology
4. The idea that history is about development
5. The idea that history is about a self-actualizing human subject
6. The idea that history can be told in one coherent narrative
7. The idea that history as a discipline is innocent
8. The idea that history is constructed around binary categories
9. The idea that history is patriarchal
— Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonising Methodologies, pp. 30-31.
Classification
What is classification?
Bowker and Star (2000, pp.10-11) offer the following definition:
A classification is a spatial, temporal, or spatio-temporal segmentation of the world. A "classification
system" is a set of boxes (metaphorical or literal) into which things can be put to then do some kind
of work—bureaucratic or knowledge production. In an abstract, ideal sense, a classification system
exhibits the following properties:
1. There are consistent, unique classificatory principles in operation.
2. The categories are mutually exclusive.
3. The system is complete.
They go on to note that ‘No real-world working classification system that we have looked at meets
these "simple" requirements and we doubt that any ever could’ (p. 11).
What is the function of classification?
• Classification allows us to understand objects in relation
to each other.
• Classification is a way of ordering the world; classification
is a way of producing order.
• Classification allows for shared knowledge to be
developed.
• Classification is essential for any working infrastructure,
including data and information infrastructures.
Classification as infrastructure
• ‘Good, usable systems disappear almost by definition. The easier they are to use, the
harder they are to see. As well, most of the time, the bigger they are, the harder they
are to see’ (Bowker and Star, 2000, p. 33).
• Infrastructure has a tendency to disappear (except when breaking down) (Bowker and
Star, p. 34).
• ‘…once a system is in place, it becomes naturalized as “the way things are.” This means
we don’t question how our classification systems are constructed, what values or
judgments might be encoded into them, or why they were thought up in the first place’
(D’Ignazio and Klein, 2020, p. 104).
Interrogating the way things are / analysing classification
‘the ways things are’: an example
Two official Australian Government forms. The top only offers a gender binary option while the bottom
form includes a poorly worded third category.
Facebook login page allowing users to select preferred pronouns and define their gender.
‘the relationship between Facebook’s software and its users is deeply structured by the gender binary
while simultaneously productive of non-binary possibilities. The binary exists and does not exist at
the same time… The programmatic possibility of stretching outside of the binary has always been
materialized in the code, but... the binary continues to dominate and regulate 10 years later, and it is
Facebook’s business model that influences this binary-driven design strategy’ (Bivens, 2017, pp. 881-
882).
Bivens reminds that we must expand our analysis of how gender binaries are upheld from simply
language to the language of code: ‘By extending queer theory to the realm of software, the power of
Facebook’s code can be interrogated as yet another structural arena through which social life is
regulated’ (Bivens, pp. 881).
Analysing classification
Bowker and Star argue that the analysis of classification systems
requires an infrastructural inversion. We must ‘learn to look
closely at technologies and arrangements that, by design and by
habit, tend to fade into the woodwork (sometimes literally!)’
(Bowker and Star, 2000, pp. 34).
The offer 4 methodological themes for infrastructural inversion:
1. Ubiquity
2. Materiality and Texture
3. Indeterminacy of the Past
4. Practical Politics
Data and power
Abraham Bosse’s frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’s book Leviathan (1651) which
argues for a social contract and articulates the power of an absolute sovereign
ruler (one who has the power to enable life or death) who enforces the social
contract.
‘the act of collecting and recording data about
people is not new at all. From the registers of the
dead that were published by church officials in the
early modern era to the counts of Indigenous
populations that appeared in colonial accounts of
the Americas, data collection has long been
employed as a technique of consolidating
knowledge about the people whose data are
collected, and therefore consolidating power over
their lives’ (D’Ignazio and Klein, 2020, p. 12).
Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. The time-sheet /
punch-card is a form of data collection that surveils
workers in a bid to maximise exploitation and
productivity.
Organising Data: The Database
A database is a structured collection of data.
‘While a database is now commonly understood as a computerized record keeping system, it is
essentially a structured collection of data in the tradition of 'data containers' such as a book, a library,
an archive, or Wunderkammer. Every 'container' of information ultimately constitutes a dataspace and
information architecture of its own, even though its characteristics are quite different from the virtual,
dynamic dataspace’ (Paul, 2006).
Let's consider of some different forms that house information.
• Books / eBooks / PDF scans of books
• Libraries and Museums
• Archives
How do they change or structure the way we access that information?
L: Domenico Remps, Cabinet of Curiosities, 1690s;
R: State Library of NSW
‘The medium is the message.’
– Marshall McLuhan
The first UK paperback edition
of McLuhan’s book (1967)
included a typo on the cover,
which McLuhan chose to leave
as it proved his point!
What does a database look like?
Top: a table is a type of
database.
Bottom: Google Books is a
much more complex
database – one that is
constantly expanding.
Rendering Infrastructural Inversions
Images from Andrew Norman Wilson’s Scan Ops (2012) project which examines the systems,
people, and processes behind Google Books.
Andrew Norman Wilson, Workers Leaving the Googleplex (2011)
