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Quantifying the Self, Reproducing White Sovereignty:Data, Narrative & Critical Lifelogging
Elizabeth Rodrigues, University of Michigan1 May 2015, Critical Ethnic Studies Association
Accessibility Copy: http://tiny.cc/t0fmxx
A tale of two lifeloggers
● white● male● middle class● tracking sleep, work,
eating● goal: be healthier &
make more money
● person of color● female● precariously middle
class● tracking lives lost to
violence● goal: end violence
against people of color
Guess who?Benjamin Franklin, ~1780s
Quantified Selfers, ~2007-
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, ~1890s
Lauren Chief Elk & Lauren Madison, ~2012-
Race & data“Hoffman combined crime statistics with a well-crafted white supremacist narrative to shape the reading of black criminality while trying to minimize the appearance of doing so.”
Khalil Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness
Defining dataThe human understanding, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater degree of order and equality in things than it really finds; and although many things in nature be sui generis and most irregular, will yet invent parallels and conjugates and relatives, where no such thing is.
The foundations of experience (our sole resource) have hitherto failed completely or have been very weak; nor has a store and collection of particular facts, capable of informing the mind or in any way satisfactory, been either sought after or amassed.
Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620)
=/= information
=/= statistics
Data = narrative?Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it - an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit this data to analysis - it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present in its eyes.Pierre Simon La Place, Essay on Probabilities
The future of search won’t need to listen to what you ask for in order to know exactly what you mean. Searches and results will appear before a consumer even knows he or she needs it. It will simplify everyday life by taking over the minutiae that were previously taking up time and energy.Vicki Nowicki reporting from Local Data Summit 2015
Life as data, life as narrative
Source: census.gov
“the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection”
Franklin’s self-tracking
templates
“self knowledge through numbers”
Image & text: Shannon Conners http://blogs.sas.com/content/jmp/2015/03/19/final-reflections-on-my-discovery-2014-project/
I have now collected enough free-living data in my own n=1 study to quantify what works for me to lose weight and maintain in a healthy range for me -- an understanding that largely eluded me up to this point in my life. Not surprisingly, I have converged on the same deficit strategy commonly employed in weight loss studies that treat people like caged rats, closely quantifying their intake and activity to prove that negative calorie balance is the critical factor that causes weight loss. I'm truly grateful that I didn't need to live in a cage to learn what I have over the past few years. In many ways, learning what I have from my data has helped set me free.
Self-tracking as reproduction of white sovereignty
● Represents self as singular narrative● Produces exceptional, invulnerable body● Elides relationality● Imagines only individual agency as effective to
solve potentially systemic problems
Wells-Barnett: A Red Record
“While I was thus carrying on the work of my newspaper, happy in the thought that our influence was helpful and that I was doing the work I loved and had proved that I could make a living out of it, there came the lynching in Memphis which changed the course of my whole life.”
Crusade for Justice: Autobiography of Ida B. Wells
Save Wiyabi ProjectSource:https://missingsisters.crowdmap.com/
Creators/coordinators:Lauren Chief ElkLaura Madisoncited with persmission
Toward a critical lifelogging
“Imagine, workers doing all sorts of labor engaging with their data traces in ways that make their work safer and their efforts better recognized. Rather than seeking to perfect measures and standards of that work through statistical working-over, can we envision workers taking their own data to management to improve working conditions? I want Quantified Self to be a messy space, one where users willingly choose the aspects of their lives they are proudest of, and most troubled by, and allow them to track, and engage with their narratives over time on their own terms.
I wonder if we can ever reach a point where sensor technology and data-mining can be accessible and successful, flexible enough to be genuinely empowering, allowing users to control their own narratives. Is it improbable to dream of a feminist data future?”
--Amelia Abreu, “Quantify Everything”
