Data-Driven Everything

1940 US Census. Source: Census.gov

My boyfriend wears a Fitbit so regularly that once, scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed, I mistook a friend for him—all I had seen, with half the picture cut off, was an arm and the grey, Flex-model Fitbit on the wrist.

I view the thing as half object of intrigue, half handcuff: while the data it collects (on everything from steps walked to sleep patterns) is interesting, it seems like such a lot of work to scroll through it all.

I admit that I’m a hypocrite in saying this, though. My phone’s built-in Samsung Health app counts the steps I’ve walked and can measure my heart rate. With various other tracker apps, you can note menstrual cycles, food consumption, the number of liters of water you drink in a day...it goes on. It would seem that if it exists, it can be measured.

On a larger scale, this love affair with data—what Berkeley geography graduate students Camilla Hawthorne and Brittany Meché termed “fetishized numeration” in their Space & Society article—is visible in corporate, academic, and policy circles. At UC Berkeley, Chancellor Dirks wrote in March that “Across all of higher education, faculty and administrators are increasingly recognizing the need to treat data literacy as a core competency for liberal education.” In an older article, a campus Electrical Engineering and Computer Science professor was more blunt: “There has been massive growth in job opportunities in data-science-related areas…and a shortage of people prepared to fill them, according to Culler.” Dirks’ language of data as a “core competency for liberal education” disguises the perhaps more pressing motive that Culler’s statement illuminates: market demand for data exists, and the university needs to fill it.

William Deresiewicz has written a lovely article entitled “The Neoliberal Arts” about how “college sold its soul to the market,” but that’s actually not my argument here (Deresiewicz does it better).

My concern is, instead, what we we lose when we treat quantitative data as our preeminent means of knowing things about the world.

I worry about this because people seem to gush a lot about things with the words “data-driven” placed in front of them, whether decision-making or teaching or journalism or policy. We talk about “data” as though it possesses magical qualities of complete rationality and objectivity. After all, how could numbers be wrong?

NYTimes profiled Kate Crawford, a visiting MIT professor and researcher at Microsoft Research; she criticized “Big Data fundamentalism—the idea with larger data sets, we get closer to objective truth.” In one example she provided, even something like analyzing the millions of tweets following Hurricane Sandy could provide biased data (since Twitter users tend to be younger and more affluent than the general population affected). Further, she added that “Big Data is neither color blind nor gender blind…Facebook timelines, stripped of data like names, can still be used to determine a person’s ethnicity with 95 percent accuracy.” (Indeed, ProPublica recently published a piece about Facebook using their “Ethnic Affinity” data to give advertisers the option to restrict who viewed their ads—a potential violation of the Fair Housing Act.)

“Ethnic Affinity” is only a recent inheritor of a long history of politically charged data. The late scholar of South Asia Bernard Cohn did extensive work on the first Census conducted by the British in India, pointing out that their Census had a mercantile, extractive goal—after all, counting the subjects of a state is a prerequisite for taxing them. If the British Census in India, Kate Crawford’s example of analyzing tweets, or the use of Facebook’s Ethnic Affinity by advertisers, all serve as any indicator, data is rarely objective: neither in its motives, collection, nor analysis.

But what if we lived in a happy utopia—one of both objective data and objective data analysts? There’s still a problem with privileging one form of knowledge production because of its perceived objectivity and rationality: it denigrates other academic fields. And the fields that my CS major friends might describe as “hand-wavey” are, incidentally, also fields that are heavily populated by women. The ranks of your average Anthropology or English class are very different from those of your average CS or Mathematics class. In 2014, when Berkeley offered its inaugural online data science master’s program, 78% of the course’s students were male (Daily Cal). Certainly people like my data science class’s professor and others at Berkeley are making admirable efforts resulting in tangible change (a little over than half of my intro to data science class is female).

But even if the arbiters of data are increasingly members of underrepresented groups, the issue of discrimination against certain forms of knowledge remains. There’s a clear bifurcation of disciplines into those we think of, implicitly or explicitly, as “feminine” or “masculine.” It’s something that you can witness every time you turn on the evening news, with its lineup of “hard news”—the talk of war and death, money and politics. But take a look at women’s magazines and websites, and it’s often a different set of stories. XOJane has an entire section called “It Happened To Me”: personal narratives. New York Magazine’s The Cut: a weekly feature called Sex Diaries, in which people (men and women alike) submit anonymized documentation of a week’s worth of sexual exploits. Increasingly, however, there’s cross-over—magazines like Cosmopolitan, once better known for aspirational sex positions, are covering “hard news” (documented in this Vox article, “Don’t Underestimate Cosmo: Women’s Magazines Are Taking On Trump”). And papers like the New York Times, with its stiff “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” now feature columns like Modern Love and Campus Lives that put personal narratives, not coldly outlined facts and figures, front and center.

I see this as progress. Plenty of feminist writers like Jessica Valenti use their personal experiences to illuminate global problems, but the language of memory and the personal as a language of knowledge production is not reserved for women alone. Personal narratives should not be considered the stuff of “women’s issues” any more than the 2016 election should be considered not a “women’s issue.” Consider PostSecret (which collects postcards from around the world with secrets depicted on them, posting them weekly), Story Corps (a non-profit project aiming to record stories from Americans of all backgrounds), Moth Radio Hour (a weekly series featuring true stories told live on-stage). One of my favorite Medium articles, a haunting piece with the title “You’re 16. You’re a Pedophile. You Don’t Want to Hurt Anyone. What Do You Do Now?” came from an amazing series called Matter. Matter articles talk about big issues, like “The Racism Beat: What it’s like to write about hate over and over and over,” or “Living and Dying on Airbnb: My dad died in an Airbnb rental, and he’s not the only one. What can the company do to improve safety?”

Notice anything?

These articles all provide knowledge that is grounded in the personal—in story, in life, in memory. 

Not numbers, tables, and scatterplots.

I’m not saying that we don’t need quantitative data. We do. But putting it on a pedestal, ignoring and belittling personal narratives or ethnographies or literary analyses, ignores everything that can’t be quantified.

Take Colorado State University anthropologist Jeffrey Snodgrass’s article “A Tale of Goddesses, Money, and Other Terribly Wonderful Things: Spirit Possession, Commodity Fetishism, and the Narrative of Capitalism in Rajasthan, India” as an example. It told the story of a young mother named Bedami and her husband Ramu. The story started with Bedami’s possession by a goddess (with this being her community’s understanding of her condition). That story unfolded in parallel to an exploration of Ramu’s rejection of the community’s traditional livelihood and norms; he had chosen to take a salaried job, open a bank account, and ordered Bedami to undergo sterilization because of the worry of the expense of too many children. But this parsimonious behavior meant that peers viewed him as insufferably stingy and a traitor to his community. The community concluded that her possession had occurred at least in part due to his miserliness and rejection of tradition. Most of this narrative would go unseen if not for the qualitative information of Snodgrass’s laborious ethnography. The job, bank account, and sterilization might become faceless numbers swimming about in some massive pool, but the real impact of the rocky incursion of modernity in Bedami’s community, and on individuals’ lived experiences, would be rendered invisible.

If you’re a policy-maker trying to get more Indians to sign up for bank accounts (a real priority of the current government, which in August 2014 launched the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana scheme to increase bank account penetration) you need to see people like Bedami and Ramu, not just the numbers of the latest World Bank report, to make effective policy. 

The information that comes from documents like personal narratives and ethnographies is often our only window into worlds that are too fraught to speak of in terms of big data. Where do you get statistics on things like pedophilia or goddess possession? Who answers the polls, or tweets, or picks up the phone, to talk about those topics?

Not everything can be quantified, and that’s a good thing.

I said at the beginning that this was an article about quantitative data, but really, this is a plea for humility. The idea that any one discipline has a monopoly on the truth is highly dangerous. Worshipping at the feet of gods we build out of numbers and code is no better than worshipping at the feet of the gods we imagine. (I’m reminded of that classic Dumbledore line: “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”)

Scientists and engineers who believe that their fields lend them omniscience make bad things happen: just Google “scientific racism,” “Guatemala syphilis experiment,” or take a look at the current news about Standing Rock, where engineers seem willfully ignorant of Native American history in their aptness to dismiss the protestors' cause. These all should serve as reminders that our world is much, much better off when scientists and engineers learn from, and believe in the value of, fields like the humanities and social sciences.

And right now, that equality has to start with revising how we look at numbers.

Neither Here Nor There

Picture from a visit to Xi'an, China. 2008.

"我不想我的肤色写我的--我的--uhhh--怎么说 'destiny'?" I said, frustrated, during one particularly angsty phone call with my mom. I was trying, clumsily, to say "I don't want my skin color to write my destiny." But there was one little problem--I didn't know how to say "destiny," and I wasn't even sure if my grammar was half-correct.

That clumsy declaration sums up my simultaneous attachment to, and flight from, the language that is my mother's mother tongue. Lots of children of immigrants can relate to the feeling of running away from the language their parents speak, seeing it as foreign, yet another thing to mark them as "other," or just inconvenient. I had a French neighbor who would speak French to her sons only to hear them respond in English: they were the blonde-haired mirror images of my sister and me in our rebellious childhood. We were Chinese school dropouts, tired of having to make the trip to Kirkland on Saturday mornings to struggle through memorizing characters we never dreamed we would need or want to use.

But it becomes a little more complicated when you're not really forced to use the language or learn it via osmosis. When your dad speaks English and all your aunts and uncles do too, it becomes pretty easy to get by on English alone. Sure, it gets a little awkward at family gatherings, when your grandparents fix beseeching eyes on you and deliver yet another lecture on the value of learning Chinese: don't you know that China is an ascending economic power, don't you know that China has 1 billion people--but you could get that from any Econ or History or Poli Sci class, so what you really hear is the subtext, don't you know that you're Chinese?

I thought of being a South Asian Studies major, once. First it started as a joke, the kind of thing I said in Facebook group chats to scare the kind of friends who think of any majors that end in the word "Studies" (whether of the ethnic, American, media, or regional variety) as hopeless wastes of money. After I'd taken my second class in the South and Southeast Asian Studies department and realized that these classes were the sources of my sole A+'s at Cal (and, more importantly, the classes I most enjoyed going to), I started thinking about it more seriously. I could happily envision taking endless classes about everything from pre-Mughal history to religious nationalism to the effects of globalization in the subcontinent.

My only hang-up was the language requirement: two years of one of the department's supported languages. I still remember telling my mom casually during a hike in Marin County that I was thinking of studying Hindi or maybe Sanskrit to do the major, instead of just the minor.

"I think the minor is enough," she said with an inscrutable expression. "What about Chinese?"

What about Chinese? 

This question has haunted me ever since I was a kid.

I don't want my skin color to write my destiny, I think now, and yet there is only one language other than English in which I can even begin to construct that sentence. When I try to use three years of high school French some mis-connected neurons in my brain send me every other word in Chinese, instead. There is only one language other than English in which I can improvise insults to say to my sister, describe my major, say the words "colonialism" and "government representation" and "politics"--

And most importantly, only one language other than English in which I can talk to my grandparents.

That was a good reason to study Chinese, said one Berkeley Language Exchange Program group facilitator. He was an exchange student from Hangzhou, a boy in a pink button-up who excitedly told us all about his upcoming performance of an Eminem song at the Chinese People's Union annual concert. He asked us all why we were studying Chinese, and he seemed singularly intrigued by my answer. He remembered it later, when I showed up to the group late one time -- "Hey! You're the one who studies Chinese to speak it with your grandparents."

Something about that web of filial piety immediately binds us together, creates recognition between the exchange student from Hangzhou and this half-Chinese girl from Seattle: no matter if we feel we are the spider spinning, or the unlucky insect fated to be devoured. Sometimes I feel more like the latter. Once, I vented to an Asian-American psychologist who I see sometimes about feeling guilty for not wanting to see my parents (who live locally) more often. She told me, with a ruefully knowing expression, "You sound so Chinese right now! You don't hear it?"

But then -- "You're such a banana, Adora." The voice of one of my friends. Banana: yellow on the outside, white on the inside. He said it after a Chinese class where we'd talked about traditional table manners, and I'd confessed I didn't know any. My family makes frozen fish filets from Costco and mixes tofu and bok choy with lemon pepper pappardelle pasta from Trader Joe's; you'll realize quickly we don't care too much about traditional Chinese cooking, much less table manners. I liked my childhood, I liked eating out at more Indian and Italian, Mexican and Thai joints than Chinese, but--

What about Chinese?

I dutifully picked Chinese to satisfy my Development Studies major language requirement. In my third semester of Chinese, "Advanced Chinese for Heritage Speakers," I sit next to classmates whose parents speak Mandarin to them regularly, a class that reminds me every day that really, I'm not Chinese enough to be there, not white enough to be somewhere else. Today when my teacher passed out test results -- I looked to my right and saw the boy next to me had gotten a 90.75, something he made a disappointed noise over -- and behind me, more 90s -- she didn't pass out my test. I went up to her and asked for my test, and she asked if I had time to stay after class. I went to her office hours, where she surprised me by printing out a blank test and asking me to redo the listening portion. "I know you don't have the same background as the others," she said softly and kindly in Chinese. It's not the only time she's alluded to this--once, she told me that she "worried" about me, because of how badly I was doing on quizzes, and reminded me to go to her office hours--you're not like the others, she'd said then too. I was a little blindsided by the generosity of being able to do the listening portion again but also too tired to do much better. I finished, and she-regraded my test. I went from 57.5 to 60.5. (Out of 100.)

Someday, I thought ruefully, maybe it's the kind of thing I can show my kids. Like the time I found one of my dad's old math quizzes from elementary school at my grandpa's house and he had a D, and it was so funny because my dad was so good at math. But that was only funny because of his PhD in Physics, and I wonder if my Chinese test D will ever be funny in contrast to some hoped-for eventual fluency, or just another reminder that I failed to be good at the one language that people expect me to speak. I'm serious: people (usually well-meaning 60-something white men in tweed suits) have approached me at conferences and started sentences with "Ni hao!" Just like that: a brutal reminder that I am at least slightly Other, and that no number of reminders that I was Made in the USA (e.g., first line of my Wikipedia page, "born 1997 Springfield, Oregon") or SAT vocabulary words in my speeches can erase the everyday fact of the color of my skin.

That same color of my skin that I don't want to write my destiny.

When I walked out of my teacher's office hours there was a balding white man who emerged from one of the offices in the same hallway; she saw him and they conversed briefly in fluent Chinese. Two other classmates and I exchanged a shocked glance, and one of my classmates said, "He speaks better than me!"

I will never get that kind of reaction for speaking Chinese. If I'm lucky, a "You've improved!" but otherwise a sort of palpable disappointment that it isn't better. When Gary Locke went to China as the American ambassador, a tremendous amount of awkwardness ensued when people expected him to speak Chinese and he couldn't. My teacher held him up as a cautionary tale.

It's a tremendously shallow desire, but deep inside I want to be that guy in that hallway, not Gary Locke. I want to be able to walk into a room and speak a language that no one expects me to know, instead of forever feeling duty-bound by heritage to study one language, but too un-fluent to claim it passionately.

Does this make me a traitor -- to my heritage, to my family, to myself?

I declared my Development Studies major in the office of an advisor who I can only describe as one of those jovial tall white guys who seems like an Adult Who Plays Sports (probably something cardio-intensive like Ultimate or soccer or running marathons, and probably with other tall, pretty people). He looked at my transcript, looked back at me, and said in the blunt way that funny people can get away with, "You know that studying a language that doesn't align with your regional concentration is pedagogically crap, right?"

He was so jovial that I responded only, dryly, "I'm aware."

What I didn't say: Mr. Major Advisor, I do this pedagogical crap because it doesn't get easier, walking into family reunions and being reminded of my shirked responsibility, answering people's questions as to why I'm studying South Asia and not East Asia, why I spent my summer in India and not China, constantly trying to outrun and disprove the tenacious notion that I want nothing to do with my heritage. I do this pedagogical crap because it is my penance, my haircloth shirt and my bread and water, for using my other classes to study history and culture and literature so foreign to my grandparents.

See, Mr. Major Advisor, I do this pedagogical crap because I'm not white.

When I was little, I wanted to look white (more on that here), and maybe my misguided obsession with physical appearance belied a desire for a sort of freedom: when people have forgotten who your ancestors are and where they came from (I mean, we say 'white people,' not 'Irish-German-Czech-French'), your ethnicity goes from being the determinant of the languages and cultures you study, to a mere suggestion, to irrelevance.

I suppose you can call it freedom; I suppose you can call it loss.

I'm undecided. And so I plod on, clumsy composition after composition and failed test after test, trying to catch up, trying to memorize the characters to--if only on the surface--rewrite myself.