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Digital Humanities and Data Justice: Lessons from Intersectional Feminism

Presented by Lauren Klein, Associate Professor of English, Quantitative Theory & Methods and Director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Emory University

As data are increasingly mobilized in the service of governments and corporations, their unequal conditions of production, asymmetrical methods of application, and unequal effects on both individuals and groups have become increasingly difficult for data scientists, digital humanists, and others who rely on data in their work to ignore. How can the digital humanities intervene?

Drawing from Klein’s recent book, Data Feminism (MIT Press), co-authored with Catherine D’Ignazio, this talk will present an approach to data justice—a field that considers how the collection, analysis, and use of data relate to issues of social justice—that is informed by the past several decades of intersectional feminist activism and critical thought. This talk will show how challenges to the male/female binary can challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems; how an emphasis on emotion can expand our ideas about effective data visualization; and how the concept of “invisible labor” can expose the significant human efforts required of our automated systems, as well as of our digital humanities work. Taken together, these examples will demonstrate how feminist thinking can be operationalized into more ethical and equitable data practices in the digital humanities and beyond.