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
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
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
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
"To imagine Community Data further meant imagining another kind of classroom as a data infrastructure, something that opened up the idea of the classroom - and campus - itself as Community...Read more
Biruk highlights that "a main point of controversy between anthroplogists and demographers is how they might answer the question: "what is the relationship between data and social reality it...Read more
AO: With her permission, I include Nanjira Sambuli's full typed responses to the interview questions I sent her.Read more
Here I copied the scarce technical specifications that Hystreet provides on its website.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
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