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
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 writes that she hopes the book will reflect the potential of anthropology's commitment to "slow research" but also prompt anthropologists to "reflect on how our own data activities...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
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
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
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 notes extensive research fatique by Malawi participants and states: "residents across sub-Saharan Africa have now become accustomed to projects in their midst," (23). In her conclusion...Read more
The document doesn't give information on the definitions of the seven categories that are represented in the table. It might be interesting to find out, how the broad bundles of practices have...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
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