Counter‐mapping data science

Abstract

Key MessagesCounter-mapping offers a useful theoretical framework and practical methods for developing grassroots data science not focused on profit.Counter-mapping is inherently a situated combination of ideas and practices for developing and realizing alternative social relations and worlds.Counter-mapping requires careful sensitivity to each situation and associated power relations, especially by the map-maker(s) themselves.Counter-mapping is a combination of critical ideas and practices for social change that offers a productive and promising approach for grassroots data science initiatives. Current information technologies collect, store, and analyze data with new degrees of size, speed, heterogeneity, and detail. While much work utilizing data science technologies is dedicated to generating profit or to national security, some data science projects explicitly attempt to facilitate new social relations, though with inconsistent results and consequences. This paper reviews counter-mapping's particular combination of theory and practice as a potential point of reference for such initiatives. Counter-mapping takes the tools of institutional map-making at government agencies and corporations and applies them in situated, bottom-up ways. Moreover, counter-mapping's multiple theoretical approaches and polyglot practices offer a variety of inspirations and avenues for future work in identifying and realizing alternative, ideally better, possibilities. This paper defines counter-mapping; outlines its multiple theorizations; briefly describes three relevant case studies, The Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute, Mapping Police Violence, and the Counter-Cartographies Collective; and concludes with a few hard-learned considerations from counter-mapping that are directly pertinent for data-oriented projects focused on change.

Numbers will not save us: Agonistic data practices

“…Statactivists might resist statistics used to describe their communities or dispute the evaluative criteria of institutions that they perceive as discriminatory, or they might draw on data themselves to create publicity around an issue or to put forward political demands. Scholars from critical GIS (geographic information systems) describe a similar, datacentric form of activism in counter-cartography, the work of producing alternative maps that privilege the geographic knowledge of indigenous and minoritized groups (Dalton and Stallmann 2018). These approaches turn on the contextuality of data, on repurposing state-produced data about people and land and reusing them "in situated, bottom-up ways" (93).…”

FirstLife: Combining Social Networking and VGI to Create an Urban Coordination and Collaboration Platform

“…Hazen and Harris [26] define it as "any effort that fundamentally questions the assumptions or biases of cartographic conventions, that challenges predominant power effects of mapping, or that engages in mapping in ways that upset power relations." Counter mapping practices make a large use of non-digital tools, however the possibility to collect and analyze data and to make maps through electronic applications has been explored [27]. A recent project of counter-mapping is the Anti-Eviction mapping project set in Los Angeles [28].…”

What difference do data make? Data management and social change

“…Scholars from critical GIS (geographic information systems) similarly call such acts of resistance to institutional and commercial data sets “counter-data actions” (Dalton and Thatcher, 2014, n.p.). The concept of counter-data draws from longstanding work in critical GIS to create alternative cartographies that privilege the geographic knowledge of individuals, such as indigenous groups or LGBTQ communities, often left out of mainstream political discourse, science, industry and technological practice (Dalton and Stallmann, 2018; Gieseking, 2018).…”

“…Simultaneously, a growing set of literature examines social and activist movements that organise in response to data collection by corporations and the state (Milan and Van der Velden, 2016; Liboiron, 2015; Currie et al , 2016; Bruno et al , 2014; Dalton and Stallmann, 2018; Dalton and Thatcher, 2014; Gieseking, 2018). In some cases, these political activists achieve some agency by avoiding data capture through the use of encryption devices or by designing alternative, non-commercial and collectively owned platforms.…”