Lindsay Poirier | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (original) (raw)

Papers by Lindsay Poirier

Data Science Journal, 2023

The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology

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For more than two decades, anthropologists have wrestled with new digital technologies and their ... more For more than two decades, anthropologists have wrestled with new digital technologies and their impacts on how their data are collected, managed, and ultimately presented. Anthropological Data in the Digital Age compiles a range of academics in anthropology and the information sciences, archivists, and librarians to offer in-depth discussions of the issues raised by digital scholarship. The volume covers the technical aspects of data management—retrieval, metadata, dissemination, presentation, and preservation—while at once engaging with case studies written by cultural anthropologists and archaeologists returning from the field to grapple with the implications of producing data digitally. Concluding with thoughts on the new considerations and ethics of digital data, Anthropological Data in the Digital Age is a multi-faceted meditation on anthropological practice in a technologically mediated world.

XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students, 2017

How data collection and reporting standards have shaped what we know and do not know about water ... more How data collection and reporting standards have shaped what we know and do not know about water contamination in Hoosick Falls, NY.

2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

This paper attends specifically to what I call "disclosure datasets"tabular datasets produced in ... more This paper attends specifically to what I call "disclosure datasets"tabular datasets produced in accordance with laws requiring various kinds of disclosure. For the purposes of this paper, the most significant defining feature of disclosure datasets is that they aggregate information produced and reported by the same institutions they are meant to hold accountable. Through a series of case studies of disclosure datasets in the United States, I specifically draw attention to two concerns with disclosure datasets: First, for disclosure datasets, there is often political and social mobilization around the definitions that determine reporting thresholds, which in turn implicates what observations end up in the dataset. Changes in reporting thresholds can be traced along changes in political party power as the aims to promote accountability through mandated disclosure often get pitted against the aims to reduce regulatory burden. Second, for disclosure datasets, the observational unitwhat is ultimately being counted in the data-is often not a person, institution, or action but instead a form that the reporting institution is required by law to fill out. Forms infrastructure the information that ends up in the dataset in notable ways. This work contributes to recent calls to promote the transparency and accountability of data science work through improved inquiry into and documentation of the social lineages of source datasets. The analysis of disclosure datasets presented in this paper poses important questions regarding what ultimately gets documented in the data, along with the representativeness and usefulness of these accountability mechanisms. CCS CONCEPTS • Theory of computation → Data provenance; Incomplete, inconsistent, and uncertain databases; • Information systems → Data dictionaries.

Proceedings of the 2017 ACM on Web Science Conference, 2017

This paper examines how legacies of thinking about ontology, logic, and how best to approach know... more This paper examines how legacies of thinking about ontology, logic, and how best to approach knowledge representation have become interwoven in the architecture of the technologies that enable a Semantic Web. As a cultural anthropologist, I approach this study with qualitative historical and ethnographic methodologies, positioning the community of researchers that have been involved in the design and implementation of Semantic Web protocols and technologies as my primary field site. Two concepts from Science and Technology Studies are introduced - thought styles and design logics. The paper demonstrates how diverse thinking about how to approach knowledge representation on the Web is rooted in debates that emerged in artificial intelligence in the 1970s and 1980s. It then goes on to discuss how the diverse approaches to Web semantics that emerged from these legacies have cultural and political implications. The paper concludes with a call for further research that positions Web arch...

The SAGE Handbook of Web History, 2019

In this chapter the editors interview Dr. Deborah Winslow about her work at the National Science ... more In this chapter the editors interview Dr. Deborah Winslow about her work at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the evolution of data management plans (DMPs) in Anthropology and the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). She outlines what the NSF expects to see in a DMP and what not to include. The conversation moves into how anthropologists collaborate with “adjacent disciplines” and how the ideas and terms for data, and the expectations of data change. She emphasizes thinking about the kind of data you will collect and what you plan to do with those data later, in terms of requirements for sharing and ultimately archiving them. The conversation ends with a discussion about student research and formulating appropriate research questions.

All datasets emerge from and are enmeshed in power-laden semiotic systems. While emerging data et... more All datasets emerge from and are enmeshed in power-laden semiotic systems. While emerging data ethics curriculum is supporting data science students in identifying data biases and their consequences, critical attention to the cultural histories and vested interests animating data semantics is needed to elucidate the assumptions and political commitments on which data rest, along with the externalities they produce. In this article, I introduce three modes of reading that can be engaged when studying datasets—a denotative reading (extrapolating the literal meaning of values in a dataset), a connotative reading (tracing the socio-political provenance of data semantics), and a deconstructive reading (seeking what gets Othered through data semantics and structure). I then outline how I have taught students to engage these methods when analyzing three datasets in Data and Society—a course designed to cultivate student competency in politically aware data analysis and interpretation. I sh...

Big Data & Society, 2016

In this paper, we describe how critical data designers have created projects that ‘push back’ aga... more In this paper, we describe how critical data designers have created projects that ‘push back’ against the eclipse of environmental problems by dominant orders: the pioneering pollution database Scorecard, released by the US NGO Environmental Defense Fund in 1997; the US Environmental Protection Agency’s EnviroAtlas that brings together numerous data sets and provides tools for valuing ecosystem services; and the Houston Clean Air Network’s maps of real-time ozone levels in Houston. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews, we analyse how critical data designers turn scientific data and findings into claims and visualisations that are meaningful in contemporary political terms. The skills of critical data designers cross scales and domains; they must identify problems calling for public consideration, and then locate, access, link, and create visualisations of data relevant to the problem. We conclude by describing hazards ahead in work to leverage Big Data to understand a...

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Collaborative Anthropology Today

This chapter points out different ways involvement with collaborative projects share form, shape,... more This chapter points out different ways involvement with collaborative projects share form, shape, or style, and may be imagined as nested within each other, like matryoshka dolls. It deals with the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE), the digital infrastructure that support new collaborative projects in anthropology. It also cites the long-standing collaboration of The Asthma Files (TAF), which is an experimental ethnographic research project that eventually led to the conceptualization and development of PECE. The chapter mentions the Digital Practices in History and Ethnography Interest Group (DPHE-IG) that was organized within the Research Data Alliance (RDA), a global collaboration of individuals and institutions working to make data more easily and openly shareable. It emphasizes how the collaborative form is the experimental form analyzed by Hans-Jorg Rheinberger as essential to a modern scientific style.

Anthropological Data in the Digital Age

Science & Technology Studies

In this article, we describe how our work at a particular nexus of STS, ethnography, and critical... more In this article, we describe how our work at a particular nexus of STS, ethnography, and critical theory—informed by experimental sensibilities in both the arts and sciences—transformed as we built and learned to use collaborative workflows and supporting digital infrastructure. Responding to the call of this special issue to be “ethnographic about ethnography,” we describe what we have learned about our own methods and collaborative practices through building digital infrastructure to support them. Supporting and accounting for how experimental ethnographic projects move—through different points in a research workflow, with many switchbacks, with project designs constantly changing as the research develops—was a key challenge. Addressing it depended on understanding creative data practices and analytic workflows, redesigning and building technological infrastructure, and constant attention to collaboration ethics. We refer to this as the need for doubletakes on method. We focus on ...

XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students

Data Science Journal

Addressing the most pressing contemporary social, environmental, and technological challenges wil... more Addressing the most pressing contemporary social, environmental, and technological challenges will require integrating insights and sharing data across disciplines, geographies, and cultures. Strengthening international data sharing networks will not only demand advancing technical, legal, and logistical infrastructure for publishing data in open, accessible formats; it will also require recognizing, respecting, and learning to work across diverse data cultures. This essay introduces a heuristic for pursuing richer characterizations of the "data cultures" at play in international, interdisciplinary data sharing. The heuristic prompts cultural analysts to query the contexts of data sharing for a particular discipline, institution, geography, or project at seven scales-the meta, macro, meso, micro, techno, data, and nano. The essay articulates examples of the diverse cultural forces acting upon and interacting with researchers in different communities at each scale. The heuristic we introduce in this essay aims to elicit from researchers the beliefs, values, practices, incentives, and restrictions that impact how they think about and approach data sharing-not in an effort to iron out differences between disciplines, but instead to showcase and affirm the diversity of traditions and modes of analysis that have shaped how data gets collected, organized, and interpreted in diverse settings.

Background This article explores the results of a three-year ethnographic study of how semiotic i... more Background This article explores the results of a three-year ethnographic study of how semiotic infrastructures-or digital standards and frameworks such as taxonomies, schemas, and ontologies that encode the meaning of data-are designed. Analysis It examines debates over best practices in semiotic infrastructure design, such as how much complexity adopted languages should characterize versus how restrictive they should be. It also discusses political and pragmatic considerations that impact what and how information is represented in an information system. Conclusion and implications This article suggests that all databased representations are forms of data power, and that examining semiotic infrastructure design provides insight into how culturally informed conceptions of difference structure how we access knowledge about our social and material worlds.