EVENT: Black Beyond Data Reading Group

Black Beyond Data seeks to “create an open resource for scholars to combat racial injustice through digital humanities,” and meets during the last Friday of each month at 12:00noon Eastern Time (4:00pm UTC), via zoom. Register for the zoom link and to join the conversations. From the website:

The Black Beyond Data Reading Group is focused on exploring ideas around community-based data analytics (CBDA), a collaborative approach to data that involves community members in the collection, management, and analysis of data in their communities. The goal of CBDA is to increase knowledge and understanding of social issues that impact a given community and to integrate the knowledge gained with interventions for policy or social change benefiting community members.*

What is data? Data are facts, statistics, and other basic units of information about a people, place, or community. They are the building blocks elected officials, policy-makers, organizers, and educators use to draw conclusions about how a community functions. Data is collected all the time, often without our conscious awareness of it and it could be anything from your birth date on a form to social media likes on Facebook. However, data can be so much more. That’s what we hope to explore in the readings.

The aim of the Black Beyond Data Reading Group is to gather people (researchers, faculty, community activists) who have an interest in Black community-based data analytics to critically research and study social issues to initiate transformative change in Black communities.

This digital humanities initiative addresses how data, technology, and computation are generally seen as objective and neutral, when in fact those data are not at all removed from the histories of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism. Digital Humanities libraries practitioners have and will continue to play a central role in that interrogation, towards data literacy, and data justice.