About The Series

The CIVICA Data Science Seminar series is a unique multi-disciplinary series focused on applications and methodologies of data science for the social, political, and economic world.

Session 1 Details

What is feminist data science? How is feminist thinking being incorporated into data-driven work? And how are scholars in the humanities and social sciences, in particular, bringing together data science and feminist theory in their research?

Drawing from her recent book, Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020), Prof. Lauren Klein of Emory University will present a set of principles for doing data science that are informed by the past several decades of intersectional feminist activism and critical thought. To illustrate these principles, as well as some of the ways that scholars and designers have begun to put them into action, she will discuss a range of recent research projects including those from her team: 1) A participatory design project about feminicide that uses machine learning to reduce the labor of feminist data activists 2) a thematic analysis of a large corpus of nineteenth-century newspapers that reveals the invisible labor of women newspaper editors; and 3) the development of a model of lexical semantic change that, when combined with network analysis, tells a new story about Black activism in the nineteenth-century United States. Taken together, these examples demonstrate how feminist thinking can be operationalized into more ethical, more intentional, and more capacious data practices, in the digital humanities, computational social science, human-computer interaction and beyond.

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