Society and institutions both normalize. They’re always trying to figure out how to fit people and things and ideas into boxes. That’s essentially what quantitative data does. It gets rid of context to normalize a data set to make it fit into a set of numbers. Institutions do that too. They take a set of things that are fuzzy, like human interactions, and they try to put them in a box. There can be a lot of value in normalizing, but it can also be really dangerous, especially when you don’t stop to ask: why are we doing this? What happens to the things that don’t fit in the boxes? What happens to the people who don’t fit into the institutions or who aren’t represented in the data set. Are they made invisible? Who and what is being excluded?
People Are Your Data: an interview with Tech Ethnographer Tricia Wang
