It’s fairly common in public discourse for somebody to announce, “I brought data to this discussion,” thus casting their very own conclusions as empirical and rational. It’s less common to ask: Where did the info come from? How was it collected? Why is there data about some things but not others?
MIT Associate Professor Catherine D’Ignazio SM ’14 does ask those sorts of questions. A scholar with a far-reaching portfolio of labor, she has a powerful interest in applying data to social issues — often to assist the disempowered gain access to numbers, and to assist provide a fuller picture of civic problems we try to deal with.
“If we would like an informed citizenry to take part in our democracy with data and data-driven arguments, we should always take into consideration how we design our data infrastructures to support that,” says D’Ignazio.
Take, for instance, the issue of feminicide, the killing of ladies in consequence of gender-based violence. Activists throughout Latin America began tabulating cases about it and constructing databases that were often more thorough than official state records. D’Ignazio has observed the difficulty and, with colleagues, co-designed AI tools with human rights defenders to support their monitoring work.
In turn, D’Ignazio’s 2024 book on the topic, “Counting Feminicide,” chronicled the complete process and has helped bring the difficulty to a brand new audience. Where there was once an information void, now there are substantial databases helping people recognize the truth of the issue on multiple continents, because of progressive residents. The book outlines how grassroots data science and citizen data activism are generally rising types of civic participation.
“After we discuss innovation, I feel: Innovation for whom? And by whom? For me those are key questions,” says D’Ignazio, a school member in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning and director of MIT’s Data and Feminism Lab. For her research and teaching, D’Ignazio was awarded tenure earlier this 12 months.
Out of the grassroots
D’Ignazio has long cultivated an interest in data science, digital design, and global matters. She received her BA in diplomacy from Tufts University, then became a software developer within the private sector. Returning to her studies, she earned an MFA from the Maine College of Art, after which an MS from the MIT Media Lab, which helped her synthesize her mental outlook.
“The Media Lab for me was the place where I used to be in a position to converge all those interests I had been interested by,” D’Ignazio says. “How can we have now more creative applications of software and databases? How can we have now more socially just applications of AI? And the way can we organize our technology and resources for a more participatory and equitable future for all of us?”
To make certain, D’Ignazio didn’t spend all her time on the Media Lab examining database issues. In 2014 and 2018 she co-organized a feminist hackathon called “Make the Breast Pump Not Suck,” by which lots of of participants developed progressive technologies and policies to deal with postpartum health and infant feeding. Still, much of her work has focused on data architecture, data visualization, and the evaluation of the connection between data production and society.
D’Ignazio began her teaching profession as a lecturer within the Digital + Media graduate program at Rhode Island School of Design, then became an assistant professor of knowledge visualization and civic media in Emerson College’s journalism department. She joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor in 2020.
D’Ignazio’s first book, “Data Feminism,” co-authored with Lauren Klein of Emory University and published in 2020, took a wide-ranging take a look at some ways that on a regular basis data reflects the civic society that it emerges from. The reported rates of sexual assault on college campuses, for example, could possibly be deceptive since the institutions with the bottom rates could be those with probably the most problematic reporting climates for survivors.
D’Ignazio’s global outlook — she has lived in France, Argentina, and Uruguay, amongst other places — has helped her understand the regional and national politics behind these issues, in addition to the challenges citizen watchdogs can face when it comes to data collection. Nobody should think such projects are easy.
“A lot grassroots labor goes into the production of knowledge,” D’Ignazio says. “One thing that’s really interesting is the massive amount of labor it takes on the a part of grassroots or citizen science groups to truly make data useful. And oftentimes that’s due to institutional data structures which are really lacking.”
Letting students thrive
Overall, the difficulty of who participates in data science is, as D’Ignazio and Klein have written, “the elephant within the server room.” As an associate professor, D’Ignazio works to encourage all students to think openly about data science and its social underpinnings. In turn, she also draws inspiration from productive students.
“A part of the enjoyment and privilege of being a professor is you’ve got students who take you in directions you wouldn’t have gone in yourself,” D’Ignazio says.
Certainly one of D’Ignazio’s graduate students in the intervening time, Wonyoung So, has been digging into housing data issues. It’s fairly easy for property owners to access details about tenants, but less so the opposite way around; this makes it hard to search out out if landlords have abnormally high eviction rates, for instance.
“There are all of those technologies that allow landlords to get almost each piece of knowledge about tenants, but there are so few technologies allowing tenants to know anything about landlords,” D’Ignazio explains. The supply of knowledge “often finally ends up reproducing asymmetries that exist already on the planet.” Furthermore, even where housing data is published by jurisdictions, she notes, “it’s incredibly fragmented, and published poorly and in a different way, from place to position. There are massive inequities even in open data.”
In this fashion housing looks as if one more area where recent ideas and higher data structures may be developed. It just isn’t a subject she would have focused on by herself, but D’Ignazio also views herself as a facilitator of progressive work by others. There’s much progress to be made in the appliance of knowledge science to society, often by developing recent tools for people to make use of.
“I’m all for interested by how information and technology can challenge structural inequalities,” D’Ignazio says. “The query is: How can we design technologies that help communities construct power?”
