#cesa2015 for accessibility copy of notes/transcript: http://tiny.cc/t0fmxx

1. Quantifying the Self, Reproducing White Sovereignty:
Data, Narrative & Critical Lifelogging
Elizabeth Rodrigues, University of Michigan
1 May 2015, Critical Ethnic Studies Association
Accessibility Copy: http://tiny.cc/t0fmxx

2. A tale of two lifeloggers
● white
● male
● middle class
● tracking sleep, work,
eating
● goal: be healthier &
make more money
● person of color
● female
● precariously middle
class
● tracking lives lost to
violence
● goal: end violence
against people of color

3. Guess who?
Benjamin Franklin, ~1780s
Quantified Selfers, ~2007-
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, ~1890s
Lauren Chief Elk & Lauren
Madison, ~2012-

4. Race & data
“Hoffman combined crime statistics
with a well-crafted white supremacist
narrative to shape the reading of black
criminality while trying to minimize the
appearance of doing so.”
Khalil Muhammad, The Condemnation
of Blackness

5. Defining data
The human understanding, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a
greater degree of order and equality in things than it really finds; and
although many things in nature be sui generis and most irregular, will yet
invent parallels and conjugates and relatives, where no such thing is.
The foundations of experience (our
sole resource) have hitherto failed
completely or have been very weak;
nor has a store and collection of
particular facts, capable of informing
the mind or in any way satisfactory,
been either sought after or amassed.
Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620)
=/= information
=/= statistics

6. Data = narrative?
Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by
which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who
compose it - an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit this data to analysis - it
would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of
the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain
and the future, as the past, would be present in its eyes.
Pierre Simon La Place, Essay on Probabilities
The future of search won’t need to listen to what you ask for in order to know
exactly what you mean. Searches and results will appear before a consumer
even knows he or she needs it. It will simplify everyday life by taking over the
minutiae that were previously taking up time and energy.
Vicki Nowicki reporting from Local Data Summit 2015

7. Life as data, life as narrative
Source: census.gov

8. “the bold and arduous project of arriving at
moral perfection”
Franklin’s
self-tracking
templates

9. “self knowledge through numbers”
Image & text: Shannon Conners http://blogs.sas.
com/content/jmp/2015/03/19/final-reflections-on-
my-discovery-2014-project/
I have now collected enough free-living data
in my own n=1 study to quantify what works
for me to lose weight and maintain in a
healthy range for me -- an understanding
that largely eluded me up to this point in my
life. Not surprisingly, I have converged on the
same deficit strategy commonly employed in
weight loss studies that treat people like caged
rats, closely quantifying their intake and activity
to prove that negative calorie balance is the
critical factor that causes weight loss. I'm truly
grateful that I didn't need to live in a cage to
learn what I have over the past few years. In
many ways, learning what I have from my
data has helped set me free.

10. Self-tracking as reproduction of white
sovereignty
● Represents self as singular narrative
● Produces exceptional, invulnerable body
● Elides relationality
● Imagines only individual agency as effective to
solve potentially systemic problems

11. Wells-Barnett: A Red Record
“While I was thus carrying on the work of my
newspaper, happy in the thought that our
influence was helpful and that I was doing the
work I loved and had proved that I could make
a living out of it, there came the lynching in
Memphis which changed the course of my
whole life.”
Crusade for Justice: Autobiography of Ida B.
Wells

12. Save Wiyabi Project
Source:
https://missingsisters.
crowdmap.com/
Creators/coordinators:
Lauren Chief Elk
Laura Madison
cited with persmission

13. Toward a critical lifelogging
“Imagine, workers doing all sorts of labor engaging with their data traces in ways that make
their work safer and their efforts better recognized. Rather than seeking to perfect
measures and standards of that work through statistical working-over, can we
envision workers taking their own data to management to improve working
conditions? I want Quantified Self to be a messy space, one where users willingly choose
the aspects of their lives they are proudest of, and most troubled by, and allow them to
track, and engage with their narratives over time on their own terms.
I wonder if we can ever reach a point where sensor technology and data-mining can
be accessible and successful, flexible enough to be genuinely empowering, allowing
users to control their own narratives. Is it improbable to dream of a feminist data future?”
--Amelia Abreu, “Quantify Everything”

14. Thank you!
Questions, comments, critique welcome:
Liz Rodrigues
esrod@umich.edu
@letsshall