“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 just makes you ask what the contexts are under which this visualisation or data set or analysis is being performed. And the ultimate goal is, again, not that we can’t trust it, but that we know more about what it is telling us precisely, like asking what’s included in the data. What were the missing data in your data set? Can our model be productively applied? And in what contexts?”

FEED magazine interviewed Data Feminism co-author Lauren Klein about the deceptive nature of data and how numbers aren’t neutral. Read the whole piece here.