Irene V. Pasquetto

The conundrum of police officer-involved homicides: Counter-data in Los Angeles County

This paper draws from critical data studies and related fields to investigate police officer-involved homicide data for Los Angeles County. We frame police officer-involved homicide data as a rhetorical tool that can reify certain assumptions about the world and extend regimes of power. We highlight the possibility that this type of sensitive civic data can be investigated and employed within local communities through creative practice. Community involvement with data can create a countervailing force to powerful dominant narratives and supplement activist projects that hold local officials accountable for their actions. Our analysis examines four Los Angeles County police officer-involved homicide data sets. First, we provide accounts of the semantics, granularity, scale and transparency of this local data. Then, we describe a “counter data action,” an event that invited members of the community to identify the limits and challenges present in police officer-involved homicide data and to propose new methods for deriving meaning from these indicators and statistics.

Exploring openness in data and science: what is open, to whom, when, and why?

“Open data” is a popular phrase in research practice and science policy. While stakeholders agree on some aspects of this concept, many others remain hotly debated. As a means to identify the main themes and arguments surrounding open data, we analyzed highly cited publications from the last 10 years that address data sharing or open access to research data. We identify and synthesize eight components of open data that vary among policies, studies, and initiatives, and present problematic arguments worthy of further investigation.

‘What Data?’ Records and Data Policy Coordination During Presidential Transitions

The presidential transition in the United States takes place over the course of several years and involves the efforts of many different agencies and organizations. While it is standard practice for an incoming administration to change the content on government agencies’ websites, the Trump administration pushed this practice beyond convention, even to alter the official narrative on climate change. Almost immediately after the inauguration, the official White House website deleted nearly all references to the phrase ‘climate change,’ and all online mentions of climate change on federal and government websites had been excised in the following months. Even if government data cannot be deleted completely, the manner in which they are preserved and made accessible, or hidden and obscured, is vitally important to the researchers and public that rely on this information. This project argues for the coordination of controls on this information: the policies, standards, and directives that regulate both the content accessed (e.g. the datasets) and the access points themselves, including the government agencies’ websites that act as information sources and portals to the databases and repositories of publically funded research.