Critical Journal

Each week (from week 2-5) you are required to produce a short (500 word) critical response to the weekly readings. You must engage with a concept or idea in the reading and make a connection to an example, text, data rendering, or issue that you have come across in your own independent research. This might include: analysis of a data rendering or visualisation, a consideration of how data relates to a current event. Must provide 4 entries of approx. 500 words each. Please do not give your responses in bullet point form but rather as critical writing that reflects on the readings and your own research.

**Week 2 topic:
Option 1 (‘Anatomy of an AI’): Discuss why a situated approach to the study of data is important. You can draw on Crawford and Jolers analysis of the Amazon Echo to explain the idea of situated analysis. Alternatively, you might choose to focus on an object (a technology, an app, a social media platform, a bureaucratic system, a shipping label on a package from Amazon, etc.) that involves data collection and consider how that data is collected (what processes and materials might you need to consider to analyse the object)?

** Week 3 topic :
In the weekly reading, DIgnazio and Klein write: what gets counted counts. Explain this statement by analysing a classification system that you have encountered in your daily lives. How is the classification system constructed? What is the history of this system? Linda Tuwihai Smith observes that history is also about power and notes that knowledge systems (which are underpinned by classification systems) play a significant role in the othering of some people. How does the classification system you analysed relate to power (this could be institutional, governmental, economic, social, or some combination)?

*** Week 4 topic:
Find an example of a data visualisation that uses icons and symbols to communicate sensitive or complex issues. This could be something you find in a newspaper, a magazine, online, or in the additional readings list or the lecture slides, etc.

Analyse the icons used in the visualisation and consider how they generate meaning on different levels. What meanings are generated by the basic visual properties of the icon (shapes, colours, etc)? What emotions and values are communicated and why? And how does the icon carry culturally produced meaning, ideologies and mythologies? You might want to draw on the section of the reading titled Semiotics for Data Storytelling to aid in your analysis.

*** Week 5 topic :
In exhibit tab, the Gomeroi legal scholar and poet Alison Whittaker works with a small data set in the WA Coroners findings on the death in custody of the Yamatji woman Ms Dhu in 2014. Whittaker renders the data as a poem by first performing a quantitative analysis of the data and then ranking the forty-nine most common three-word phrases found in the Coroners report. What does this treatment of the data show us? How does Whittakers poem make a political critique of the legal system? (note: you might want to read Whittakers short Guardian article ‘Dragged like a dead kangaroo’: why language matters for deaths in custody which you can also find in the additional reading list to help you develop your response).

Last Completed Projects