Let’s just stop thinking data is perfect. It’s not. Data is primarily human-made. “Data-driven” doesn’t mean “unmistakably true,” and it never did. <img src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/550de105e4b05c49fa2bba03/1532010974837-QDSJJW41PSOXSMJSU43U/1_izLAcAs9dhmSmYGg2MRdlg.jpeg" alt="1_izLAcAs9dhmSmYGg2MRdlg.jpeg" />

The data collectors put their faith in the algorithms, and the programmers put their faith in the data. At no point in this process is there any understanding, or wisdom. There’s not even domain knowledge. Data science is the universal answer, no matter the question.

Of the 17 apps that The Times saw sending precise location data, just three on iOS and one on Android told users in a prompt during the permission process that the information could be used for advertising

Building multilingual capabilities into Ocular, for example, allowed us to change the shape of early modern OCR by bringing multilingual documents to the center of automatic transcription rather than imposing an anachronistic, monolingual concept of textuality onto the early modern period. Manually altering our language data similarly allowed the system to be attuned to the unique orthographic qualities of the books in our corpus.

Yet the Goodreads classics depart from these school-sanctioned lists in two particularly striking ways. First, the Goodreads classics are considerably less diverse in terms of the race and ethnicity of their authors. Race is extremely complex and difficult to reduce to data, especially because racial categories differ across different societies.

his sort of scraping is a commonplace technique that supports research in the public interest, among other beneficial uses,” Crocker said. “As the court recognized, access to publicly available websites is not access ‘without authorization’ under the CFAA, nor does sending a cease and desist letter make such access unauthorized.”

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But getting to know your data can reveal crucial gaps, bias, misinformation, or overlooked details in your story

We find ourselves needing models for gender that can accommodate much more nuance than our current standards

The amount of dialogue, by age-range, is completely opposite for women versus men.

That which we ignore reveals more than what we give our attention to. It’s in these things that we find cultural and colloquial hints of what is deemed important.

It turned out that the young woman was indeed pregnant. Pole’s model informed Target before the teenager informed her family. By analyzing the purchase dates of approximately twenty-five common products, such as unscented lotion and large bags of cotton balls, the model found a set of purchase patterns that were highly correlated with pregnancy status and expected due date.

. The historical distance just isn’t that great. And the ghosts of slavery are still very much visible today.

The ambitious aim of the site was to assemble and reference all surviving information about every trans-Atlantic slave voyage - whether that info came from a document or a secondary source. If anyone—within the academy or not—needs to know about any voyage in the 350 years of Atlantic slave trading, then our intention has always been that they would find it in our databases

This database compiles information about more than 36,000 voyages that forcibly transported enslaved Africans across the Atlantic between 1514 and 1866

Data is the evidence of terror, and the idea of data as fundamental and objective information, as Fogel and Engerman found,47 obscures rather than reveals the scene of the crime. Black digital practice offers a corrective.