Biruk challenges the abstract universality of data, seen as unanchored from its site and relations of produciton, by demonstrating through her ethnography how Malawi and Malawians shaped it...Read more
This document is a collection of screenshots that I made from data visualizations in the urban data platform as well as Hystreets website. The graphs look quite different although representing similar data.Read more
"We use here play in the sense of Winnicott (2005) and others when thinking of play as a form of therapy. What we mean by this is that playing with numbers is a productive approach for thinking...Read more
One might analyze the data journey even more fine-grained when attending to more technical processing that mostly remains hidden. However, I'll stick with those sites that I found represented in...Read more
Biruk highlights that the demographic surveys she studies "raise the specter of the exploitation, extractive logics, racism, and ethnocentrism that have underlain science in Africa," (22)....Read more
Biruk builds on scholarly discourse (called critical data studies?; sociology of quantification?) about how numbers, categories and statistics are produced by their social contexts and actors. Read more
Here I copied the scarce technical specifications that Hystreet provides on its website.Read more
The flow of electrones in the cables in the ground is altered due to electromagnetic interaction with metal that moves above them. These variantions in the flow are interpreted by sensors...Read more
Biruk hones in on quantitative demographic health data in Malawi as the "science" she chooses to study. Throughout the book she draws on her experience as an anthropologist and compares the...Read more
Abstract: " In Cooking Data Crystal Biruk offers an ethnographic account of research into the demographics of HIV and AIDS in Malawi to rethink the production of quantitative health data. While research practices are often understood within a clean/dirty...Read more
Here you find a translation of an interview that I conducted in German with an employee of the municipal GmbH Economic Development in order to find out more about data processing and sharing practices as well as about the use cases for pedestrian counters. It is slightly shortened for reasons of...Read more
AO: With her permission, I include Nanjira Sambuli's full typed responses to the interview questions I sent her.Read more