This final chapter is a toolkit for anyone who may be contemplating starting or joining a restorative/transformative data science project. Perhaps you are a data activist or a journalist, or maybe you are an urban planner or a librarian, a digital humanities scholar or an academic, the head of a nonprofit or a member of a community group or a designer. Or somebody else entirely. My hope is that these pages will offer both reflection and practical guidance.

As I sat down to map the contours of this toolkit, I realized again and again that all of the ideas I thought I had were actually things that activists had told me or showed me or taught me. One of the most humbling and inspiring aspects of writing this whole book has been the continual realization of the depth and the breadth of what our partners have to teach the rest of us who aspire toward transformative social change. Feminicide data activists center care, memory, and justice without sacrificing rigor. They don’t imagine data as a “solution” but rather see data as one tactic in a larger, networked movement of social and political actors. They stay close to the communities and families impacted by feminicide, in some cases providing direct healing and support. They are highly creative in acquiring information from a deeply biased and unjust information ecosystem. They develop ways to circulate feminicide data for diverse impacts, ranging from policy reform to narrative change to mass mobilizations.

This toolkit is a first step toward drawing out some of these lessons and speculating on how these may be useful to others using data in the service of restoration and transformation, healing and liberation. While much research produced in the Global North about the Global South ends up inaccessible behind paywalls, this toolkit, which is included in a book published in a free, open-access format, is an attempt to counteract that dynamic and contribute knowledge back to grassroots communities, activists, journalists, academics, and others.

The questions and activities in the toolkit are drawn from themes that surfaced in our work on feminicide, but they are purposely written to be broadly applicable. My hope is that these examples, questions, and activities will be helpful to anyone using data-driven methods for monitoring, auditing, and inquiry, and especially projects related to structural inequality. I am confident that at least some of the many lessons learned from counting feminicide will be helpful for other efforts working to restore rights and to transform systems. These might include projects that document forms of violence other than feminicide—for example, the already existing efforts to document police killings of Black Americans, LGBTQIA+ hate crimes, or the murders of Indigenous land defenders. Yet there are also counterdata efforts occurring that are related not only to physical violence but to other forms of economic violence or structural inequality. Recently there has been a remarkable growth, for example, in nonprofit and activist groups that count and monitor evictions in the United States. Here the rows of data represent cases of eviction rather than cases of feminicide, but the intent is similar: first, to use quantification to provide direct services and legal aid to impacted people. And second, to clarify connections between eviction and settler colonial dispossession, eviction and anti-Black racism, eviction and health equity, eviction and state violence. Here there is great resonance with the feminicide data activists’ examination of power and use of data to reframe and remake personal problems into structural patterns. To inspire connections to work in other domains, I have included a list of restorative/transformative data science examples in the toolkit.

That said, because the toolkit arose in the context of feminicide data activism, it is highly likely that not all questions in the toolkit apply to all restorative/transformative data science projects in all domains. I encourage people to use what is useful and, if you are moved to do so, contribute comments, questions, and critiques to the evolving open toolkit located at  .

Glossary

Coliberation: This is the idea that all of us are harmed by systems of unequal power and that we, working together, can free ourselves of its multiple burdens—material, psychic, spiritual, and intergenerational. There is a well-known quote from Aboriginal activists in Queensland, Australia, that best represents this idea: “If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”1

Counterdata: Data that are produced by civil society groups or individuals in order to challenge unequal power. Counterdata is not (only) about countering missing data or inadequate official data from institutions but is also used to challenge state bias and inaction, to galvanize media and public attention, to reframe political debates, to work toward policy change, and to help heal wounded communities. Counterdata production, like data activism more broadly, is a citizenship practice. It is an informatic form of enacting democratic dissent, prompting protest and insisting on political engagement. But not all activist data is counterdata: Indigenous scholars and data activists emphasize that their work is about sovereignty and not about countering the settler state.

Data activism: The use of data and software to pursue collective action and exercise political agency. Producing counterdata and engaging in restorative/transformative data science are specific ways—but far from the only ways—of engaging in data activism.

Data epistemologies: Theories and approaches to knowing things about the world with data. Mainstream data epistemologies are heavily positivist—seeking to use data to find universal truths over a consideration of context. This results in hegemonic data science. Many scholars and activists have highlighted how mainstream data epistemologies replicate violent and extractive and colonial modes of knowledge generation. Emerging alternative data epistemologies include data feminism, feminist data refusal, emancipatory data science, environmental data justice, decolonial AI, Indigenous data sovereignty, and queer data (see the next section for a short guide).

Discordant data: An idea from Helena Suárez Val that describes the fact that official data and counterdata often deliberately do not coincide; they are discordant because they intentionally use different definitions, measurements, and classification strategies.2

Emotional labor: Producing and working with data related to social inequality almost always involves being witness to trauma and violence, whether the data are about feminicide or evictions or environmental harms. The psychic and emotional burdens of this witnessing work should not be overlooked, particularly for survivors who may have firsthand experience of such violence. Projects engaging in restorative/transformative data science can develop strategies for self- and team care and/or they may choose to “flip the script” and take an assets-based approach to producing data, where the focus is on mapping communities’ strengths and joys, not their deficits and traumas.

Hegemonic data science: Mainstream data science that works to concentrate wealth and power; to accelerate racial capitalism, perpetuate patriarchy, and sustain settler colonialism; and to exacerbate environmental excesses and social inequality.

Information ecosystem: a dynamic constellation of actors that includes infrastructure, tools, technology, producers, consumers, curators, and sharers of information about a particular topic. The metaphor of the ecosystem is designed to capture the dynamic nature of information – it moves and flows across scales and sites and actors as it is produced, curated, transformed and used.

Intersectionality: The idea from Black feminism that systems of power compound and combine and cannot be understood in isolation. For example, a single-axis analysis that looks only at patriarchy will miss the ways in which patriarchy intersects with white supremacy, with settler colonialism, with ableism, and so on. Intersectionality comes from theorizing the experiences of Black women in the US, and substantial contributions to it have been made by the Combahee River Collective, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Patricia Hill Collins, among many others.

Memory work: Practitioners of restorative/transformative data science understand that producing and circulating counterdata is a way to assemble and care for stories from the past in order to develop new visions for the present and future.

Missing data: Data that are neglected by institutions, despite political demands that such data should be collected and made available. Missing data may include data that are entirely absent but also data that are sparse, neglected, poorly collected and maintained, purposefully removed, difficult to access, infrequently updated, contested, and/or underreported.

Official data: Data that are produced by the state, international governing bodies, and/or other mainstream institutions such as large corporations or professional associations.

Power: The current configuration of structural privilege and structural oppression, in which some groups experience unearned advantages—because various systems have been designed by people like them and work for people like them—and other groups experience systematic and violent disadvantages—because those same systems were not designed by them or with people like them in mind.3 Specific systems of privilege and oppression include but are not limited to the following:

• Ableism: The systemic privileging of ability that results in the oppression of disabled people based upon real or perceived impairments. It “others” disabilities, chronic illnesses, and neurological or mental illness.4

• Cisheteropatriarchy: (Synonymous with patriarchy in this book.) The social and political system that elevates cisgender, heterosexual men and oppresses those with minoritized gender identities (women, trans, travesti, nonbinary, two-spirit people, and more) and minoritized sexual orientations (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and more).

• Colonialism: Refers to some combination of territorial, cultural, linguistic, political, and/or economic invasion and subsequent domination of one group of people by another group of people.5

• Economic violence: Economic policies and practices that systematically deprive groups of people of their human rights to life, food, clothing, housing, and medical care. This might be through exclusion from labor markets, underwaged or unwaged work, exclusion from education, privatization of public goods, and more. Neoliberal policies result in economic violence, and so do colonialism, patriarchy, and the other systems of power referenced here.

• Extractivism: Positions land, air, water—and increasingly also data and digital information—as free resources to be mined, wasted, privatized, and profited from.6 Often results in economic violence.

• Neoliberalism: Refers to economic policy that favors free-market capitalism and tends to oppose government regulation that intervenes in markets. Approaches include privatization of public goods, deregulation, and restriction of public spending. Neoliberalism strengthens corporate power, extracts private profit from public resources, externalizes private costs (such as environmental harms) to the public sector, removes social protections for the most vulnerable, and undermines representative democracy by creating a vicious cycle of super rich oligarchs who manipulate the political machinery, doubling down on neoliberal policy to get super-richer. Neoliberalism produces economic violence.

• Patriarchy: See cisheteropatriarchy.

• Racial capitalism: The idea from Cedric Robinson that capitalism is founded upon racial stratification. In other words, capitalism and racism are inextricable: free markets are founded upon unfree labor that arises from slavery, colonization, economic violence, and extractivism. This system is historic and ongoing.

• Settler colonialism: A form of historic and ongoing colonization in which outsiders come to land/air/water/subterranean earth inhabited by Indigenous peoples, dispossess them of that land, and then insist—through institutions, laws, culture, and violence—that settlers are sovereign over the stolen land.7

• White supremacy: A historically based, institutionally perpetrated system of exploitation of continents, nations, and peoples of color by white peoples and nations of the European continent, for the purpose of maintaining and defending a system of wealth, power and privilege.8

Restorative/transformative data science: An approach to working with systematic information that seeks, first, to heal communities from the violence and trauma produced by structural inequality and, second, to envision and work toward a world in which such violence has been eliminated. Restoration involves the use of data for restoring life, living, and vitality to the individuals, families, communities, and larger publics harmed by unequal systems of power. It also seeks the restoration of rights—the right to live a life free from violence, for example, or the right to adequate housing, or the right to ancestral homelands. Transformation involves the use of data to dismantle and shift the structural conditions that produced the violence in the first place. It is both visionary and preventative.

Triangulation: Using multiple sources of information about the same event or phenomenon to cross-reference and verify details. This is often necessary when official data are suspect or sparse or when there is not a single authoritative source of information in the information ecosystem.

What Is Your Data Epistemology?

Practitioners of restorative/transformative data science mobilize alternate epistemologies of data that challenge the extractive and violent regimes of hegemonic data science. In the last decade, the number of alternate data epistemologies has multiplied. Each one offers at the very least some foundational texts and principles, or else some flagship projects that can serve as models to follow. Some also offer supportive communities, and others, like the global movement for Indigenous data sovereignty, have robust theoretical foundations, thriving communities, and policy and governance frameworks.

Many of these data epistemologies come from theorizing directly from the experiences and histories of specific groups and the data harms that they have experienced. For example, Data for Black Lives aims to use data “to create concrete and measurable change in the lives of Black people.” Data epistemologies are not interchangeable ethical checklists: moving forward with a particular epistemology carries responsibilities for who your work serves, who you are committed to being in dialogue with, and who you are accountable to. If you seek to mobilize an epistemology that comes from theorizing experiences that you have never had (e.g., you are in a cisgender heterosexual team who wishes to draw from a queer data perspective) then you will need to think carefully about how you can do that without causing harm and without engaging in appropriation. In some cases, the best answer may be to step aside and make space for a group who does have that lived experience to lead the project and your team can get them coffee. That’s a joke—but only a half-joke! The real issue is thinking carefully about how you can support and center leadership by people who have the knowledge and cultural grounding that comes from lived experience.

For example, one troubling thing I have witnessed recently is grants being given to settler people who propose to draw from Indigenous data sovereignty and work with Indigenous communities in a participatory way. These projects receive funding without having established partnerships with tribes or nations or Indigenous-led groups, so at no point in the project has an Indigenous person or community weighed in on the validity and utility of the idea. This sets up the structural conditions for harm to occur because once funding has been secured, the settler person is most accountable to the settler funder and has to retroactively find a community partner amenable to an idea created in a settler vacuum.

To seek an appropriate data epistemology for your project, you may want to reflect on your own positionality as well as the community that you want to serve and be accountable to with your data project. See the data epistemology activity in the ‘Getting Started’ section ahead for a starting point for this kind of reflection. And ahead is a list of data epistemologies that showcases those approaches with which I am most familiar and have been participating in, reading about, or following online.

Data Epistemologies

Data for Black Lives

A movement of activists, organizers, and mathematicians based mainly in the US that aims to use data “to create concrete and measurable change in the lives of Black people.” It is organized into regional hubs. See in particular https://d4bl.org/ and their 2021 report on Data Capitalism and Algorithmic Racism.

⇒ Especially relevant for: Projects by/with Black Americans, projects in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, projects seeking a regional community.

Decolonial approaches

• Tierra Común—A global community of scholars and activists working to decolonize data. See https://www.tierracomun.net/, the scholarship of Paola Ricaurte, and the book The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism.

• Ubuntu ethics for AI—Scholars and technologists such as Sabelo Mhlambi and Serena Dokuaa Oduro have advanced the idea of incorporating Ubuntu philosophy into AI systems and AI policy. See Mhlambi’s paper From Rationality to Relationality: Ubuntu as an Ethical and Human Rights Framework for Artificial Intelligence Governance. 

• AI Decolonial Manyfesto—A collaborative statement by two dozen scholars across computer science, social sciences, humanities, and human rights, to challenge the “Western-centric biases” being baked into AI. See https://manyfesto.ai/.

⇒ Especially relevant for: Projects focused on colonialism, imperialism, and dispossession, projects from the Global South, projects seeking South-South community, and projects mobilizing non-Western ethics.

The Design Justice Network

A network of practitioners with an important set of principles grounded in intersectional feminism, which is focused on using design to support social justice. While the Design Justice Network is focused more on design, the principles have great relevance and applicability to undertaking data science projects in community. See https://designjustice.org/ and the book Design Justice by Sasha Costanza-Chock.

⇒ Especially relevant for: Projects coming out of design disciplines, projects drawing from intersectionality, projects using participatory methods, and projects seeking to connect with a robust community of practice.

Emancipatory data science

Developed by professor Thema Monroe-White, emancipatory data science draws from emancipation theory, critical race theory, and critical quantitative theory (see #QuantCrit ahead), to theorize how to use data science in the service of “uplift and empowerment.” Monroe-White outlines three functions emancipatory data science can undertake: diagnosis and critique (of data harms), viable futures (related to more equitable data practices and policies), and transformation (of the data science community itself). See the paper “Emancipatory Data Science: A Liberatory Framework for Mitigating Data Harms and Fostering Social Transformation.”

⇒ Especially relevant for: Abolitionist projects, projects drawing from critical race theory, and projects seeking to describe data harms for minoritized people.

Environmental data justice (EDJ)

An emerging approach that joins environmental justice (elaborated in the 1990s by scholar Robert Bullard and principles adopted at the First People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit) with data justice and critical data studies. Environmental data justice  develops ways of working with environmental data, using participatory methods, in the service of community self-determination. To learn more, see the EDJ working group of the Environmental Data Governance Initiative (https://envirodatagov.org/environmental-data-justice/), projects by the Technoscience Research Unit (https://technoscienceunit.org), and the work of Lourdes Vera, Sara Wylie, and colleagues.

⇒ Especially relevant for: Projects using environmental data, projects drawing from environmental racism and environmental justice (EJ) principles, and people seeking to be in community with activist-scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds.

Feminist approaches

Publications, programs, and emerging networks that mobilize feminist theory and activism to work with data and AI have been proliferating in recent years.

• Data feminism—Discussed in the next section.

• The Design Justice Network—Discussed earlier in this list. Grounded in intersectional feminist principles.

• Feminist Data Manifest-NO—A collaborative statement from scholars across numerous disciplines that “refuses harmful data regimes and commits to new data futures” (https://www.manifestno.com).

• Data Feminism Network—A learning community focused on equitable and feminist approaches to data. They run reading groups and produce events (https://www.datafeminismnetwork.org).

• Spanish language networks include Feminismo de Datos (https://www.facebook.com/FeminismoDeDatos), La Red Mexicana de Feminismo de Datos (https://www.redmexicanadefeminismodedatos.org) and La Red Latinoamericana de Feminismo de Datos (in formation, see https://www.datagenero.org/).

• <A+> Alliance—A global, multidisciplinary, feminist coalition of academics, activists, and technologists working to use artificial intelligence and IT to accelerate gender equality (https://aplusalliance.org).

• Data Feminism Program—By Data-Pop Alliance. Draws from data feminism to undertake international development projects (https://datapopalliance.org/program_data_feminism).

⇒ Especially relevant for: Projects focused on cisheteropatriarchy, projects focused on gender and intersectionality, projects by/with women, queer, and/or trans people, projects using participatory methods, and projects that use qualitative and creative methods with data (art, storytelling, etc).

Indigenous data sovereignty

If you are looking to put data in service of Indigenous nations and people, the global Indigenous data sovereignty movement has produced excellent scholarship, practical guidelines, and policy:

• Foundational texts include Indigenous Statistics and the edited volume Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Toward an Agenda.

• Many Indigenous data sovereignty regional and global networks exist to link practitioners and scholars. For a list, see https://indigenousdatalab.org/networks/.

• The First Nations Information Governance Center developed the ownership, control, access, and possession (OCAP) principles. See https://fnigc.ca/ocap-training/.

• Indigenous data sovereignty scholars have added the collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, and ethics (CARE) principles to the FAIR principles for open science.

• Indigenous data sovereignty research labs include the Data Warriors Lab and the Collaboratory for Indigenous Data Governance.

⇒ Especially relevant for: Projects by/with Indigenous people, projects focused on sovereignty, projects about dispossession and land rights, projects drawing from Indigenous worldviews, and projects that use oral history and storytelling methods.

#QuantCrit

Also known as quantitative criticalism and quantitative critical race theory, this is an approach developed in education, ethnic studies, and the social sciences that aspires to unite critical race theory with quantitative methods. Principles include the centrality of racism and oppression, the acknowledgment that numbers are not neutral, the idea that community voice is central, and the affirmation that statistical analysis can play a role in struggles for social justice. For a starting point, see the handy resource guide assembled by chemistry professor and educator Paulette Vincent-Ruz, available at https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/pvincentruz/quantcrit-resources/.

⇒ Especially relevant for: Projects from education, social work, and the social sciences, projects using quantitative and statistical methods, projects drawing from critical race theory, and projects seeking a robust academic conversation.

Queer data

Recent publications aim to show how data may be used (or refused) to center the lives and well-being of queer, trans, nonbinary, and LGB+ people. See the essay “Counting the Countless” by Os Keyes on radical data science, the book Queer Data by Kevin Guyan, and the volume titled Queer Data Studies, edited by Patrick Keilty. And make sure to read Dean Spade and Rori Rohlfs’s powerful critique of “gay numbers” and the ways in which counting the LGBTQ+ population can perpetuate white supremacy.

⇒ Especially relevant for: Projects by/with LGBTQ+ people, projects focused on gender and sexuality, projects engaging theories and practices of refusal, and projects engaging queer theory.

Principles of Data Feminism

Data feminism is one epistemology of data, and the one that comprises the conceptual backbone of this book. In Data Feminism, Lauren Klein and I outlined what a feminist approach to data science might look like—an alternate data epistemology to challenge the standard operating procedures of hegemonic data science. We draw from intersectional feminist theory, activism, and writing to outline seven principles for working with data in a feminist way. I offer these principles here in the hopes that they will be a useful part of your toolkit, just as they have guided my own research and writing throughout this book. But I offer them with the acknowledgment that these are far from the only principles that you could use in your own data-driven work. The frameworks emerging from other data epistemologies might be more relevant and useful, depending on who you are, where you are located (geographically, socially, and spiritually), and what your project is about.

1. Examine power. Data feminism begins by analyzing how power operates in the world.

2. Challenge power. Data feminism commits to challenging unequal power structures and working toward justice.

3. Elevate emotion and embodiment. Data feminism teaches us to value multiple forms of knowledge, including the knowledge that comes from people as living, feeling bodies in the world.

4. Rethink binaries and hierarchies. Data feminism requires us to challenge the gender binary, along with other systems of counting and classification that perpetuate oppression.

5. Embrace pluralism. Data feminism insists that the most complete knowledge comes from synthesizing multiple perspectives, with priority given to local, Indigenous, and experiential ways of knowing.

6. Consider context. Data feminism asserts that data are not neutral or objective. They are the products of unequal social relations, and this context is essential for conducting accurate, ethical analysis.

7. Make labor visible. The work of data science, like all work in the world, is the work of many hands. Data feminism makes this labor visible so that it can be recognized and valued.

Restorative/Transformative Data Science Examples

What does a restorative/transformative data science project look like? Across my research into feminicide data activism practices and my participation in various communities of practice, I have made some basic and preliminary observations about characteristics that many restorative/transformative data science projects share.

A reformative/transformative data science project:

• has a theory of power and a theory of change;

• intentionally uses a data epistemology that focuses on liberatory goals (e.g., healing, liberation, emancipation, sovereignty, refusal, self-determination)

• can be done with minimal computing resources and basic data literacy skills;

• can be done with small, medium, or big data;

• can be done without an advanced degree from a fancy institution;

• often (but not always) produces or uses counterdata;

• engages in ethical, long-term relations of care with the communities most impacted;

• engages in pluralistic and culturally appropriate conceptions of rigor and truth; and

• holds the responsibility of caring for the data and the people and the stories and the relations assembled in the database

All the grassroots feminicide monitoring projects I have discussed in this book are examples of restorative/transformative data science (indeed, they are the motivation for theorizing the concept in the first place). Examples from other domains abound. Ahead are projects across domains ranging from housing to health to the environment to civic engagement. Each one does not necessarily share all of the characteristics listed previously, but each has something to offer in terms of epistemology, thematic focus, community engagement, research methods, or outputs. I offer these as models to serve as inspiration for your own projects.

Housing

Anti-eviction Mapping Project, https://antievictionmap.com/

This activist-academic project defines evictions more broadly than the legal definitions and uses their discordant data to advocate for a more structural framing of the root causes of eviction in specific areas. They acquire official eviction data from court records and other eviction data from surveys and collaborations with housing clinics. They have produced maps of evictions, landlord monitoring tools, murals, oral histories, and a book called Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance.

The Secret Bias Hidden in Mortgage-Approval Algorithms, https://themarkup.org/denied/2021/08/25/the-secret-bias-hidden-in-mortgage-approval-algorithms

The result of a year-long investigation by the Markup, this data journalism story demonstrates systemic racial bias in home mortgage loan approvals in the US. The journalists used publicly available official data triangulated with academic research studies, but there are still key missing data hindering a comprehensive analysis—notably credit scores—which the mortgage industry has successfully lobbied to keep secret.

Land Use

The Detroit Geographic Expedition and Institute, https://medium.com/nightingale/gwendolyn-warren-and-the-detroit-geographic-expedition-and-institute-df9ee10e6ad2

The Detroit Geographic Expedition and Institute (DGEI) was a collaboration between Black young adults in Detroit led by Gwendolyn Warren and white academic geographers that lasted from 1968 to 1971. The group worked together to produce data about aspects of the urban environment related to children and education, and produced numerous maps from that work, including the widely circulated map Where Commuters Run Over Black Children on the Pointes-Downtown Track. The DGEI collected many other types of counterdata and published them in reports with analysis and recommendations.

Waorani territorial mapping / Mapeo Territorial Waorani, https://waoresist.amazonfrontlines.org/explore/

The Waorani people’s lands are in the upper part of the Amazon River in Ecuador. Threatened by oil companies, the Waorani began a process of mapping their knowledge of and relation to the land in order to “defend our way of life and protect our future from threats like oil exploitation, mining impacts and invasions.”9 They use a participatory process that involves training different groups to use GPS devices, produces large paper maps that can be discussed and annotated in community, and finally leads to publication of the resulting maps on the open-source platform Mapeo. Some maps are public, others are not, and “everything included on the map is the cultural property of the Waorani.”

Land Grab Universities, https://www.landgrabu.org/

High Country News produced an original report and unique database documenting how land grant universities across the US were funded with expropriated Indigenous land via the 1862 Morrill Act. Data sources included land patent records, congressional documents, historical bulletins, historical maps, and more. Many data needed manual entry, and the database took months to assemble. It is publicly available for download and research.

Health

Mapping Police Violence, https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/

Run by advocacy organization Campaign Zero, this project has tracked and mapped fatal police violence—and its systemic racial injustice—in the US since 2013. Similar to feminicide data activists, the project relies on media reports as a primary source and triangulates those with official data and other counterdata sources. The database is open and publicly available.

“Lost Mothers”, https://www.propublica.org/article/lost-mothers-maternal-health-died-childbirth-pregnancy

Data on maternal mortality in the US have been characterized as “an unreliable mess” by Scientific American.10 In 2016, ProPublica set out to identify every single mother or parent who died from pregnancy-related causes in the US (estimated to be between seven hundred and nine hundred people). They used social media, crowdfunding sites where funds had been set up for families left behind, public records, and obituaries. The journalists discuss how their crowdsourcing approach ended up overrepresenting the stories of dominant groups—the white, educated women who were more likely to respond to their call for stories—and underrepresented Black women in particular. Adriana Gallardo wrote about these methods in “How We Collected Nearly 5,000 Stories of Maternal Harm.” This is an important reminder of the limitations of counterdata tactics and the ways in which they may reproduce the matrix of domination.

COVID Black, https://covidblack.org/

An organization founded during the COVID-19 pandemic out of a national campaign for people to call and demand that US state and federal agencies collect and publish racial data. Founded by historian and digital humanities scholar Kim Gallon, COVID Black not only gathers and publishes Black health data, but also does trainings and produces data stories, visualizations, and other public interpretations to combat racial health inequities (and also to push back against the relentless, racialized deficit narratives depicted by the mainstream media). They state on their website, “Data is more than facts and statistics. Black health data represents life.”

The Qanuippitaa? National Inuit Health Survey, https://nationalinuithealthsurvey.ca

Qanuippitaa? National Inuit Health Survey (QNIHS) is an ongoing longitudinal survey of the health and well-being of the Inuit—the Indigenous peoples of the Arctic. It is Inuit-owned and Inuit-determined, and works in partnership with four major Inuit land claims organizations to ensure that the survey, data collection, data analysis, and research outputs are owned by Inuit people and informed by Inuit knowledge, values, and worldview.

Environment

The Global Atlas of Environmental Justice, https://ejatlas.org/

Initiated in 2012 by a team of researchers at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, in Spain, the Environmental Justice Atlas undertakes systematic collection of global ecological conflicts in partnership with activists, civil society organizations, and social movements. They source conflicts from media reports, crowdsourcing, and local partnerships with impacted communities. The project has developed its own typology of ecological conflict and publishes its data openly.

Environmental Data & Governance Initiative, https://envirodatagov.org/

Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) is a research collaborative that was formed in 2016 in the US as the Trump administration threatened to take open federal environmental datasets offline (a notable example of intentionally producing missing data). The group started organizing “data rescues” where they downloaded and archived federal datasets on university and civil society servers. Now EDGI monitors US government action (and inaction) related to environmental information, organizes campaigns, and educates communities who want to use data to lobby the government. They have also led the development of environmental data justice principles (see the data epistemology section).

Land and Environmental Defenders Campaign, https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/environmental-activists/

An advocacy campaign, open dataset, and series of reports undertaken by Global Witness to record the unjust deaths of people—largely Indigenous people—killed while defending their land and environments. Similar to feminicide data activists, Global Witness sources cases from social media, news reports, and trusted local partners and networks. They have a strict information verification methodology to determine if a case should be included in their database. They outline that their numbers are “only a partial picture” because of the difficulty of obtaining comprehensive information about these cases.

Transportation

Assaults on ride-hail drivers, https://themarkup.org/newsletter/hello-world/tracking-tens-of-thousands-of-assaults-on-ride-hail-drivers

Since 2021, the Markup has been monitoring assaults and carjackings on Uber and Lyft drivers, some of which end in fatalities. Reporter Dara Kerr sourced hundreds of these assaults from phone calls, police reports, public information requests, and local news articles. The data are published in an open, searchable database. Affected individuals and labor organizations are using these numbers to call for more gig worker safety protocols and protections.

The DTP Map / Карта ДТП, https://dtp-stat.ru

An activist map and ongoing monitoring effort in Russia that combines official government data on traffic accidents with weather, streets, participant types, and more, as a way of instigating civic engagement and social change to reduce accidents. Here the activists are not producing their own counterdata but rather reframing official data as a way of building a public sense of urgency around traffic fatalities. Yet the activists have mixed feelings about the veracity of the official data, as described in a case study by Dmitry Muravyov, “Doubt To Be Certain: Epistemological Ambiguity of Data in the Case of Grassroots Mapping of Traffic Accidents in Russia.”

Arts and Culture

National Monument Audit, https://monumentlab.com/audit

A study by the arts-based nonprofit Monument Lab found that the monument landscape in the US is overwhelmingly white and male and elevates themes of war and conquest. There is no authority in the US that keeps records on monuments, so to undertake the national audit, they assembled records from dozens of federal, state, local, tribal, and institutional sources, many of which have different criteria and definitions of “monument.” They held participatory analysis sessions to develop their analytical categories and themes. The data can be explored in their interface on the project’s website.

Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy, https://www.splcenter.org/whose-heritage

Since 2015, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has maintained a database and map of Confederate-related monuments and place names. They periodically reaudit the list to monitor removals, relocations and renamings. For example, following George Floyd’s murder, the SPLC found that almost one hundred Confederate symbols were removed, relocated, or renamed. They publish reports as well as a community action guide that allows users of the map to take direct action by providing instructions on how to build a campaign to remove monuments and/or rename streets.

Book Censorship Database, https://www.everylibraryinstitute.org/book_censorship_database_magnusson

A project by Dr. Tasslyn Magnusson in partnership with EveryLibrary Institute and EveryLibrary to monitor book bans and book challenges across the US since 2021. The open spreadsheet is organized by school districts, books challenged/banned in school districts, public libraries, and books banned/challenged in school libraries. Data are sourced from news reports, online forums, and social media.

Abortion Onscreen Database, https://www.ansirh.org/research/abortion/pop-culture

The Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) organization compiles and publishes an open database of all film and television depictions available to viewers in the United States that discuss abortion, from 2016 to the present. ANSIRH publishes annual reports on media portrayals of abortion, and the database has been used in a range of media studies.

Civic Engagement

Feminindex, https://winguweb.org/en/caso-impacto/feminindex/

A civic media project by Ecofeminita and Wingu that documented and visualized[CSD3]  where political candidates in Argentina stood on gender and LGBTQ+ issues, including reproductive rights, femicide, care work, and trans rights. The first version was released in 2017, with subsequent versions in 2019 and 2021. Data on politicians’ views were collected through media reports, candidates’ public statements, and policy documents and through surveys administered by the organization.

First Nations Information Governance Centre, https://fnigc.ca

First Nations Information Governance Centre (FNIGC) is a nonprofit organization leading the establishment of Indigenous data sovereignty for all members of the Assembly of First Nations in Canada. They undertake a variety of ongoing First Nations population surveys, run trainings and capacity-building sessions for tribal partners, and develop data governance strategy aligned with the goals of sovereignty and self-determination.

How to Use This Toolkit

Although there are many ways the toolkit could be used, here are three possibilities:

1. Strategic project planning and visioning - Use the toolkit at the beginning of a project to undertake planning sessions, establish a shared vision for the project, who it is serving, and how to sustain it through the different stages of work. In this model, the project team would take the time to go through the questions and activities in this restorative/transformative data science toolkit, as individuals and as a group, align around their answers at each stage, and incorporate them into their plan and their vision (and their budget!).

2. Equity pauses and recalibrations - I learned about the idea of equity pauses from Jenn Roberts, who runs VersedEd and the Colored Girls Liberation Lab. This is the idea of regularly stepping back from the intense day-to-day work, say, of researching and recording counterdata, and pausing to evaluate your process and whether you are meeting your equity goals. In this model, teams would take a short period of time to engage with the questions at one stage of work, discuss their answers, and surface shifts and recalibrations to make in data practices to better meet their goals. These equity pauses could happen at regular, scheduled intervals—for example, at one meeting a month.

3. Ethics crisis moments - There may be moments in a restorative/transformative data science project that provoke an equity pause that the team did not foresee. A community may come forward and express that they have been harmed. An individual’s information may have been made public in a traumatizing way. You or your team may have included a story or a case or some information without permission. These are moments where a more profound recalibration—of data practices and of relationships—becomes necessary. This toolkit could aid in that recalibration by providing a structured set of ethical questions and activities for the team to use to draw out their analysis of what happened, how to redress it in the short term, and how to prevent such harm in the longer term.

Getting Started

To get started, I suggest teams first do Start-up Activity 1: What is your data epistemology? to reflect on who they are, who they serve, and who they are accountable to with their data work. This will help you understand which emerging alternative data epistemologies may match with your team’s backgrounds, relations, goals and values. It will also help you begin to reflect on and refine your theory of change for your work. Start-up Activity 2: Map the information ecosystem guides your group to create a map of the information ecosystem for your topic of interest. Understanding the information ecosystem will be invaluable as you begin to think about how your group can mitigate biases, address missing data, build coalitions, and use data and information for healing and liberation. The information ecosystem map that you make during this activity is referenced in a number of later activities, so it is handy to keep around as a guide for your project. 

Start-up Activity 1: What is your data epistemology?

Time required: 60–75 minutes

Materials: Pens and paper/sticky notes

Preactivity homework: Review the list of data epistemologies provided in this toolkit (or other data epistemologies you may be considering).

Activity: Choosing an appropriate data epistemology involves locating yourself and your team and your organization/institution in relation to the topic. These questions can serve as a starting point and are designed to be answered as a group. For each question, take five minutes to quietly freewrite answers, and then ten to fifteen minutes to share responses with the group.

1. Who are you (individually and as a team and as an organization) in relation to the topic? Do you bring lived experience of the topic? How and why were you brought to the topic?

2. Who are you producing data for? Which communities or publics do you serve, or aspire to serve, by doing this work?

3. Who are you accountable to? Which communities or publics should have a direct say in influencing the course of the project?

4. Final discussion (15 minutes): Review your responses in relation to the list of data epistemologies in this toolkit. Which one or ones are best aligned with your team’s responses?

Start-up Activity 2: Map the Information Ecosystem

Time required: 2½ - 3 hours

Participants: 5+. Can be done with fewer than 5 people but it will take more time. If you are able, try to recruit participants with lived experience, legal experience, data experience and movement experience.  

Materials: Computers with Internet access, multi-colored sticky notes, 6 large posterboards or papers

Preactivity homework: Organizers and team members should determine the geographic scale of interest and the time period of interest for the project and write it into a concise mission statement in this form: “We are mapping the information ecosystem for TOPIC in PLACE from START TIME to END TIME”.

Activity set-up

1. Write out your mission statement (see preactivity homework) on a blackboard, whiteboard, or big paper posted for everyone to see.

2. Choose one color of sticky notes which will represent “missing data” and one color that will represent “bias” and communicate those to the participants.

Activity:

1. 15 mins: Introductions – participants go around the room and say their name, pronouns and one personal or professional reason they are in the room today.

2. 10 mins: Organizers read the mission statement and outline the purpose of gathering today. Divide participants into groups and give each group a large surface to work on (posterboard or wall) and sticky notes.

3. 60 mins: Group work

   • Group 1 – Legal inventory: Place a sticky note on your surface for each law relevant to your topic. Note the year it was passed and whether it is a municipal/state/federal/tribal law on the sticky note. Include laws that relate to 1) definitions of the phenomenon and 2) government or official monitoring of the phenomenon and 3) public disclosure of information about it. As you examine each law, place a “bias” sticky note if you see a source of bias.

   • Group 2 – Official data producers inventory: Place a sticky note on your surface for each agency or group that produces official information about the topic of interest. Around it, place another sticky note for each relevant dataset that the agency produces. Note on the sticky note whether that data set is open or closed, aggregated or disaggregated. If the dataset is open, download it and examine it. As you examine each agency and dataset, place a “bias” sticky note if you see a source of bias and a “missing data” sticky note if you see missing datasets, rows, features or variables.

   • Group 3 – Counterdata producers inventory: Place a sticky note on your surface for each agency or group that produces counterdata or activist data about the topic of interest. Note on the sticky note what sector they are from, e.g. activism, journalism, nonprofit, academia, government, etc. Around it, place another sticky note for each dataset that that group produces. Note on the sticky note whether that data set is open or closed, aggregated or disaggregated. If the dataset is open, download it and examine it. As you examine each group and dataset, place a “bias” sticky note if you see a source of bias and a “missing data” sticky note if you see missing datasets, rows, features or variables.

   • Group 4 – Data users inventory: Place a sticky note on your surface for each agency or group that uses data (official data or counterdata) about the topic of interest. Note on the sticky note what sector they are from, e.g. government, activism, journalism, nonprofit, academia, etc. As you examine each data user, place a “bias” sticky note if you see a source of bias.

   • Group 5 – Larger landscape inventory: Place a sticky note on your surface for other actors in this information ecosystem that are influencing policy, advocacy and public conversation. They may not produce or use data, but they are individuals, organizations, government agencies and/or social movements that are doing agenda-setting on the topic. As you examine each individual or group, place a “bias” sticky note if you see a source of bias.

4. Stretch break! (5 minutes)

5. Discussion & reflection (60 minutes):

• 30 min: Each group shares back their results (5 mins per group)

• 20 min: Large group power analysis. Facilitators move participants through the following questions:

  • What data remain missing from this mapping? What data should exist (according to your group or to other advocacy groups) but do not exist in either official or counterdata efforts? Why?

  • What are the biases in this information ecosystem? What are their root causes? Can the biases and inequalities be mitigated informatically?

• 10 min: Close out and designate participants who can help document the work.

Post-activity documentation: Consider creating a large visual map synthesizing groups’ work which can be posted in your team’s space (digital or physical space).

Once you have done the two start-up activities, your team is ready to pick and choose from the rest of this toolkit to see which of the activities and discussions might be relevant for your project. Throughout this book, I have described the different workflow stages of a restorative/transformative data science project: resolving, researching, recording, and refusing and using data. These stages are derived from our team’s interviews with grassroots data activists working to challenge feminicide, predominantly from Latin America. These stages form a four-stage process model, and I offer that model here in the hopes that it may be useful to other practitioners working on restorative/transformative data science projects.

Different ethical concerns and questions arise at each stage of work in a restorative/transformative data science project. For example, during the resolving stage of a project, data practitioners are developing their analysis of the problem, their theory of change for how and why counting and data analysis might be useful, and their data epistemology. Here it is important to think about your own positionality in relation to the phenomenon, who the beneficiaries of a project may be, and how to work collectively, in networks. In contrast, during the research stage of a project, it is important to reflect on the systemic biases in the information ecosystem, creative ways to source information, and how your project will handle missing data about minorities and subgroups. The rest of the toolkit is structured around activities to do and questions to ask during these four stages of a restorative/transformative data science project.

As you will see ahead, each discussion or activity is mapped to the data feminism principle that it aligns with. This is my attempt to demonstrate how one’s data epistemology can translate into concrete matters of discussion and action for people working with data. Following the publication of Data Feminism, many people have asked Lauren and I for practical guidance on how to use the data feminism principles—to move them from general guidelines into something applicable in specific contexts. This mapping is an attempt to do that, as well as a way of inviting scholars and activists to do this kind of mapping work for other data epistemologies.

Resolving is the stage of a restorative/transformative data science project in which an individual or group seeks to address a problem of structural inequality and determines how and why counting and registering data will be an effective method to do so.

Researching is the stage of a restorative/transformative data science project in which an individual or group seeks and finds data observations and related information to add to their database. This can include sourcing existing datasets, discovery and detection of new observations, triangulation of information across sources, and ongoing research to add information to existing observations.

Recording is the stage of a restorative/transformative data science project that involves extracting unstructured data from various sources into structured datasets (text documents, spreadsheets, and/or databases); classifying cases according to diverse typologies; and managing data—including ethics, access, and governance of the database.

Refusing and using data is the stage of a restorative/transformative data science project in which individuals and groups circulate data in order to push specific actors toward thinking, feeling, or acting differently. The goals of these data actions and circulations may include to repair, to remember, to reframe, to reform, and/or to revolt.

A Living Toolkit

This is a first step toward a toolkit for restorative/transformative data science. I welcome feedback and dialogue. Given that many of the examples I provide are from the US, I would especially love to learn about restorative and transformative data science projects outside of the US context. Please post all comments, questions, and critiques online to the evolving open toolkit located at https://mitpressonpubpub.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/restorative-data-toolkit.