Feminist Data Set workshop: How to Make, Collect or Archive Feminist Data


Learning and Interpretation
September 3, 2018
Data is Cultural, Caroline Sinders

What is data made from a Feminist perspective? What does Feminist Data do or need? Join artist and researcher Caroline Sinders in this introductory workshop proposing new methodologies and solutions for data collection through a feminist lens. The workshop is part of the Artificially Intelligent display and Digital Design Weekend programme.

Saturday 15 September, 11.00-15.00

Seminar Room 1, Sackler centre for arts education

Followed by a talk by Caroline Sinders.

Free, please contact digitalprogrammes@vam.ac.uk to reserve a place.

The session will investigate varying methods of creating a feminist data set. What is feminist data inside of social networks, algorithms, and big data? A feminist data set queers the archive, the spreadsheet, and the data set. It moves beyond a white and male space, forcing the technology to reflect the community. A feminist data set acts as a means to combat bias and introduce the possibility of data collection as a feminist practice, aiming to produce a slice of data to intervene in larger civic and private networks.  Exploring its potential to disrupt larger systems by generating new forms of agency, the session asks: can data collection itself function as an artwork? How can we create data to be an act of protest against algorithms?

Participants are invited to bring digital content such as images, gifs, videos, sound, music and texts, which they feel is feminist in nature, to feed into the data set, which teaches an AI system to recognise such data (examples: The Feminine Mystique, Beyonce’s Lemonade, “I Want a Dyke for President”, the Cyborg Feminist Manifesto, etc.). This process raises questions concerning qualitative data collection and requires the group to reflect on categories supposed to capture feminism.

This workshop is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. 

Caroline Sinders is a machine learning design researcher and artist. For the past few years, she has been focusing on the intersections of natural language processing, artificial intelligence, abuse, online harassment and politics in digital, as well as conversational spaces. Caroline is the principal designer and founder of Convocation Design + Research, a design and research agency focusing on the intersections of product design, user research, AI, emerging technology and public good.

Caroline has held fellowships with the Yerba Buena Centers of the Arts, Eyebeam, the Studio for Creative Inquiry and the International Center of Photography. Her work has been featured at MoMA PS1, the Houston Center for Contemporary Art, Slate, Quartz, the Channels Biennale, as well as others. Caroline holds a masters from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Feminist Data Set, Caroline Sinders
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