Redressing Colonial Knowledge Systems through Restorative Data Justice

Zoom link: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/96704643377?pwd=Cxb9Sfnvexm4iuLsu53RtjfQ6xa61G.1

While “data” is often understood today in computational terms, as information coded and organized for interpretation with digital tools and algorithms, the term has a long history dating back to at least the seventeenth century. In its earliest uses, data was defined as a “given” and a basis for decision-making—and thus power. A study of colonial knowledge systems offers numerous examples of the link between power and data regimes. Revealing the integral role of data in the building and maintenance of empires, this talk takes up several methodological questions: How do we handle colonial data, both data generated by colonial administrations and data we recreate from fragmentary sources to address the absences in the historical record born from conquest? And how do we ensure that our own research does not replicate imperial extractive colonial data practices? This talk will present “restorative data justice” as a theoretical framework, building on the work of Alexandra Ortolja-Baird, Julianne Nyhan, Alex Gil, Roopika Risam, and Adeline Koh, among others whose work seeks to ameliorate some of colonialism’s violences by highlighting and addressing archival silences.

This talk is part of Critical Data Lab, a collaborative convergence network with UCLA scholars to explore critical and creative applications within sociocultural data centric research, and Digital Humanities 201 Introduction to Digital Humanities and Project Management.

Critical Data Lab is convened by Cindy Nguyen and with support from UCLA DataX, Institute for Digital Research and Education, and Office of Advanced Research Computing.

Speaker Bio: As a multidisciplinary data scientist and historian with over nine years of experience in academia (UCLA and Claremont Colleges) and consultancy, Dr. Ashley Sanders specializes in leveraging advanced statistics, machine learning, data visualization, and dashboarding to transform data into compelling stories and actionable insights. Her latest publication, Visualizing History's Fragments: A Computational Approach to Humanistic Research (Palgrave, 2024) combines a methodological guide with an extended case study to show how digital research methods can be used to explore how ethnicity, gender, and kinship shaped early modern Algerian society and politics. 

Zoom link: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/96704643377?pwd=Cxb9Sfnvexm4iuLsu53RtjfQ6xa61G.1