#Synthesis 6
This article lays the foundation for the scholarly material which will prove useful in the presentation of my final project for DCS 204 Data Cultures. Throughout the module, we have been presented with several concepts and methodologies when it comes to the general perceptions and preconceptions about data, its nature, its manipulation, and its flaws. Several concepts we learned about focused on the considerations we must take when working with data, even before the inception of said work. All in all, we have encountered material which has helped us sharpen the way we look at data analysis.
For my project, I have chosen to apply those good practices in the investigation concerning the demographics of the donors to Bates College.
What is the most common demographic among the donors?
What does that tell us about the microcosm of Bates College back in the 1850s? How is this related to the silenced voices related to the Bates community? In my project, I will attempt to answer these questions while also addressing those which come up as a corollary of this discussion. Hence, the way I present and communicate my ideas are important and, for this reason, I will implement Yau’s suggestions about “Design with a Purpose”. This theoretical framework will ensure that the voices of historically oppressed groups are put forward and not further suppressed. I will now proceed to enumerate other class materials which will prove helpful in my project.
One of the first concepts we learned about in class was that of racial capitalism. In his presentation, Kelley traces the origins of racial capitalism back to feudalism, racialism and nationalism which existed in Europe well before the dawn of any kind of other social economic system. He goes on to describe racial capitalism as the process of deriving social and economic value from the racial identity of another person based on a White-favored hierarchization of race and ethnicity. Said hierarchization was used to justify the various social disparities among social groups and especially to uphold the marginalization and exploitation of non-Whites. This takes the form of social ostracization, slavery, and racism. In this light, how is racial capitalism reflected in the data we studied and, more specifically, in the demographics of Bates’ donors? This is a correlation which, I believed, deserves due consideration.
Another concept we talked about in class was that of design justice, from an article by Costanza-Chock. Most design processes today reproduce the inequalities and disparities we see in society. Design justice invites us to rethink said design processes, and to center people who are normally marginalized by design. The application of this principle consists in the examination of data in a fashion which aims at empowering underrepresented groups with the active acknowledgement that capitalism is inextricably tied to racial and gender dimensions. This is, to me, the most relevant tool in analyzing the data in my project, mostly because of the nature of its nature. The data about the donors and about the inception of Bates has been recorded by White and privileged people and they have chosen to only keep their fellow White and privileged contributors in the history of Bates College. Design justice becomes crucial in dismantling this ideology since we want to restitute their weight and impact to the communities which have been silenced for centuries, in this case, the Lewiston-Auburn community.
