42 GENIUS INTERVIEW Lauren Klein
for making arguments for effecting change, for calling attention to large-scale problems, and then on the other hand, for tremendous harm in terms of identification of outliers in terms of persecution. How can we make sure that people understand the power they hold in their hands? FEED: Are data and facts the same thing? Is it possible to have data, but no facts? LAUREN KLEIN: Data is always produced by people. Even sensor data is registered by a sensor that was created and parameterised by a person or team. Data doesn’t come from nowhere. There’s no such thing as raw data. So you’re never dealing with facts. You’re dealing with human-produced information. And yet, this doesn’t make it not valuable. It doesn’t mean that we’re descending into relativism, where you can’t trust anything or learn anything from anything. There’s a famous feminist philosopher, called Donna Haraway, who talks about the “god trick”. This is the belief that when looking at data, you’re seeing everything from up in the heavens, in an omniscient godlike view. This is particularly true when you look at a map of the world or a large-
DATA IS TRULY A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD
FEED: Do you find that data is then often just a tool for maximising power? LAUREN KLEIN: William Playfair is an interesting case in this. He was around during most of the 18th century, and the reason why he saw the need for data visualisation was the American Revolution, which began in Massachusetts. Things were so chaotic and he thought, “I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future and I want to be able to control the narrative. I want to be able to create this picture of what is happening right now”. He was particularly interested in import and export data between England and elsewhere in the world. This desire to control the narrative came out of political instability. He wanted to preserve what he called “a picture of the past”. FEED: What are the challenges we’re facing today around how data is used? LAUREN KLEIN: One is in the hype around Big Data. We tend to prioritise large data sets instead of small data sets. We believe bigger data sets will tell us more and will provide more accurate information than smaller data sets. But that is not always true. Again, it’s not binary – you can have big and small. Both tell you something, but neither tells you everything.
The second thing is we tend to think that collecting more data will solve the problem. Here’s a problem, let’s collect some data on it and then we’ll get closer to a solution. But in some cases, that is actually not the best thing to do. In the book, we call this the paradox of exposure. Immigration is a good example of this. DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) is a US programme that was started under the Obama administration. They said: “Kids of undocumented immigrants deserve all the protections that the US can offer. Come register yourself. You can get a driver ’s licence, qualify for student loans – we’ll protect you.” Literally the exact same information, in other hands, can do tremendous harm. Now ICE, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, can show up at your door, using that nice, comprehensive list of undocumented immigrants to go after them. Data is truly a double-edged sword. And given that power, on the one hand
SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME Elizabeth Palmer Peabody was a 19th- century American educator and founder of the first US kindergarten. One of her innovations was to create non-linear visualisations – mural charts – of history using shape and colour. Pictured right is an LED- enabled fabric reconstruction. Learn more at shapeofhistory.net
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