TY - GEN
T1 - The politics of measurement and action
AU - Pine, Kathleen H.
AU - Liboiron, Max
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Copyright 2015 ACM.
PY - 2015/4/18
Y1 - 2015/4/18
N2 - Contemporary decisions about the management of populations, public services, security, and the environment are increasingly made through knowledge gleaned from 'big data' and its attendant infrastructures and algorithms. Though often described as 'raw,' this data is produced by techniques of measurement that are imbued with judgments and values that dictate what is counted and what is not, what is considered the best unit of measurement, and how different things are grouped together and "made" into a measureable entity. In this paper, we analyze these politics of measurement and how they relate to action through two case studies involving high stake public health measurements where experts intentionally leverage measurement to change definitions of harm and health. That is, they use measurement for activism. The case studies offer a framework for thinking about of how the politics of measurement are present in user interfaces. It is usually assumed that the human element has been scrubbed from the database and that significant political and subjective interventions come from the analysis or use of data after the fact. Instead, we argue that human-computer interactions start before the data reaches the computer because various measurement interfaces are the invisible premise of data and databases, and these measurements are political.
AB - Contemporary decisions about the management of populations, public services, security, and the environment are increasingly made through knowledge gleaned from 'big data' and its attendant infrastructures and algorithms. Though often described as 'raw,' this data is produced by techniques of measurement that are imbued with judgments and values that dictate what is counted and what is not, what is considered the best unit of measurement, and how different things are grouped together and "made" into a measureable entity. In this paper, we analyze these politics of measurement and how they relate to action through two case studies involving high stake public health measurements where experts intentionally leverage measurement to change definitions of harm and health. That is, they use measurement for activism. The case studies offer a framework for thinking about of how the politics of measurement are present in user interfaces. It is usually assumed that the human element has been scrubbed from the database and that significant political and subjective interventions come from the analysis or use of data after the fact. Instead, we argue that human-computer interactions start before the data reaches the computer because various measurement interfaces are the invisible premise of data and databases, and these measurements are political.
KW - Data
KW - Evaluation
KW - Measurement
KW - Politics
KW - Quantification
KW - Science and technology studies
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84951102169&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84951102169&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2702123.2702298
DO - 10.1145/2702123.2702298
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84951102169
T3 - Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings
SP - 3147
EP - 3156
BT - CHI 2015 - Proceedings of the 33rd Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 33rd Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2015
Y2 - 18 April 2015 through 23 April 2015
ER -