Data Sharing Optimism

• data sharing will improve knowledge production and discovery
• data interoperability will lead to stronger knowlege claims (e.g., climate science)
• data openness will encourage the discovery of errors and discourage fraud
• data sharing will promote reproduction and replication in science

What is data?

Research data means the recorded factual material commonly accepted in the scientific community as necessary to validate research findings . . . (according to the federal government)

. . . without metadata?

“Data” are defined as the recorded factual material commonly accepted in the scientific community as necessary to validate research findings. This includes original data, but also “metadata” (e.g.,experimental protocols, code written for statistical analyses, etc.)

Positivism and its Critics

Positivism, briefly

An explanation for scientific knowledge that says that objective knowledge, or science, is based on sensory input (from the senses or instruments that amplify our senses) which is in turn processed with reason and logic.

Often assumes incremental, progressive, inevitable accretion of more correct facts and beliefs that are assumed to be universal and transhistorical; predicated on a separation of science and society.

Objectivity and Class Consciousness

Property relations obscure our real relations to our existence

Through struggle, we become aware of objective conditions

Class consciousness is objective understanding of subjective experience

Vienna Circle (1924-1936) and Post Positivism

All observations are theory laden (can't observe independent of pre-conceptions)

Theory is underdetermined by evidence (amount of evidence to "prove" is socially determined, contingent)

Can't separate science from society (logic and language are socially determined)

Post positivists Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn

Theories and Theorists of Science

social epistemology (coined by librarian Margaret Egan), strong programme, sociology of scientific knowledge, science studies, science and technology studies, indigenous standpoint epistemology, 3rd world/women of color feminism.

Nancy Hartsock, Gloria Anzaldua, Chela Sandoval, Patricia Hill Collins, Susan Leigh Star, Kim TallBear, Kyle Whyte, Katie King, and many others.

No one is either the beginning or end of the conversation.

Standpoint Epistemology

Sandra Harding, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad

Harding's Strong Objectivity

We can think of strong objectivity as extending the notion of scientific research to include systematic examination of such powerful background beliefs. It must do so in order to be competent at maximizing objectivity. (1991, 149)

Harding on Standpoint Theory

Standpoint theory is not arguing that only women can generate feminist knowledge; it is not an “identity politics” project. Men, too, can learn to start their thought from women’s lives, as many have done. These misunderstandings come about because objectivism insists that the only alternatives to its view from nowhere are special interests claims and ethno-knowledges that can only be understood within a relativist epistemology. (1995, 343-344)

Haraway's Situated Knowledges

So, I think my problem and ‘our’ problem is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own ‘semiotic technologies’ for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world, one that can be partially shared and friendly to earth-wde projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness. (187)

Haraway on Standpoints and Positioning

The standpoints of the subjugated are not ‘innocent’ positions. On the contrary, they are preferred because in principle they are least likely to allow denial of the critical and interpretive core of all knowledge. (191)

I am arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. (195)

Haraway against Identity and Wholeness

The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another. Here is the promise of objectivity: a scientific knower seeks the position not of identity, but of objectivity; that is, partial connection. . . . Positioning implies responsibility for our enabling practices. (193)

Barad on Bohr

Apparatuses [in Bohr’s view] are not passive observing instruments; on the contrary, they are productive of (and part of) phenomena. (142)

Barad's Agential Realism

In my agential realist account, scientific practices do not reveal what is already there; rather, what is “disclosed” is the effect of the intra-active engagements of our participation with/in and as part of the world’s differential becoming. (361)

Barad on Objectivity and Situatedness

Objectivity is a matter of accountability for what materializes, for what comes to be. (361)

We are not merely differentially situated in the world; “each of us” is part of the intra-active ongoing articulation of the world in its differential mattering. (381)

Contributions to Data Literacy and Curation

• Metadata can document conditions of possibility
• Documentation is necessary but not sufficient for objectivity
• Background beliefs should be examined
• A dataset describes a very minute part of the disclosed universe
• No dataset stands alone but must join with others
• We can make data available to wider range of knowers

The End

Works Cited

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press.

Haraway, D. J. (1991). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge.

Harding, S. G. (1991). Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking From Women’s Lives. Cornell University Press.

Harding, S. (1995). “Strong Objectivity”: A Response to the New Objectivity Question. Synthese, 104(3), 331–349. JSTOR.