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
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's first footnote states: "All project and personal names in this book are anonymized. ... Researchers were, for the most part, amenable to being mentioned by name and having their projects...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
In Biruk's appendix, she includes a questionnare titled "sample household roster questions" (pages 217 - 219). These are the questions that the quantitative researchers she was studying were using...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 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
"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
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
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
AO: With her permission, I include Nanjira Sambuli's full typed responses to the interview questions I sent her.Read more