What potentially relevant information is excluded from representation due to the scope of the unit of observation’s definition?

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Janine Hagemeister's picture
February 23, 2024
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Due to the individualized average, information about the actual distribution of water use is obscured. That could be between household members, or households vs. businesses. The unit of observation is the water billing unit, but the unit of analytical claim is one average German inhibitant. There could be other analytical claims calculated from the water billing units, e.g. regional or neighborhood-based water use. Or there could be other observation units than the billing units / households, e.g. smart meters at every single tap, to allow for other analytical claims.

February 23, 2024

a deliberate decision seems to have been made to count the pedestrians by the hour. one could assume that it would be possible to choose a different (finer or coarser) interval

Catharina Dietrich's picture
February 19, 2024

Interesting is the process in which it was defined, which places are worth of consideration in pedestrian counting.

When the places that should be measured were chosen, the focus was only on the usage of the data as a predictor for revenue losses in the retail sector. Thus the scanners were installed in the so called A-centers of business Frankfurt and the B-Centers (districts centers) which are defined by a high density of businesses and retail stores. They thus do not cover traffic axes or recreational areas which would be important to quantify pedestrian traffic throughout the city. That now the produced data became interesting for traffic planning and monitoring changed the affordances for the definition of important measuring points. 

Catharina Dietrich's picture
February 19, 2024
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The way how the categories are forged, renders information invisible that might have been valuable for political debates. When drinking qulity water is used to clean cars, this can be problematized, however the combination of practices into categories (however necessery) hampers to state how much water is used in particular practices. The data here can only be read in a mingle of watering a garden, providing water to animals, washing a car or the living room, which might be assigned different importances and values in political negotiations on water spendings.