Day Nineteen: Mobilizing Meaning

SDS 237: Data Ethnography

Lindsay Poirier

What does the following statement mean to you?

On April 10, 2023 at 9AM Northampton’s reported AQI was 54.

Turn to a neighbor and discuss:

  • What information do we need to be able to interpret the meaning of the number 54 in the following slide?

Today’s Topic: How do numbers acquire meaning? Through what means do we determine their significance?

Reading Discussion

Some Terminology in Semiotics

  • Signifier: a material thing that signfies something else (e.g. a number, an word, an expression)
  • Signified: a concept that the signifier represents
  • Indexical: cases where the signifier is assumed to have a direct causal relationship with the signified
    • e.g. My dog’s tail wag signifies that she is happy.
    • e.g. 5 signifies the number of fingers on my hand.
  • Symbolic: cases where is the signifier takes on meaning through culturally-specific interpretation of the signified

Framing Statistics: Comparison/Ranking

  • Is x more/less than y?
    • e.g. “Women make 77 cents for every dollar a man makes.”
    • e.g. “The U.S. ranks first in firearm homicides in high income countries, with a rate of 4.52 firearm homicides per 100,000 population.”

Framing Statistics: Standards-setting/Benchmarking

  • Identifying the yardstick to indicate “good” or “healthy”
    • e.g. “A credit score of 800 or above is ‘excellent’.”
    • e.g. “An AQI of 202 is ‘very unhealthy’.”

Free-writing: Consider a numeric metric you use to measure something about yourself. Pick something that has special meaning for you. Is there a number that you strive for? How do you know when your score is “good”?

Principles for Active Listening

  1. Suspend judgment
  2. Be curious
  3. Halt internal commentary
  4. Listen with intention
  5. Express gratitude for sharing

Structured Story-tellling

  1. Find a partner, and decide who will speak first and who will speak second.
  2. Two minutes:
  • First speaker: Provides uninterrupted narration about this measure. What does it mean to you? How did it come to have its meaning? How do you decide what success looks like?
  • Second speaker: Listens with intention: What does this number mean to this person?
  1. One minute:
  • Second speaker: Reflect back on what you heard/ask questions, etc. (e.g. “From what I understand…”)
  • First speaker: Affirm, correct, clarify, but also listen for what they heard
  1. Swap and repeat.
  • Through what mechanisms did people decide what was good?
  • Did you identify social structures at play in making this number meaningful?
  • Did you hear your partner talk about ways this number might mean different things to different people?

Mobilizing Data Narratives

  • Mobilization refers to the processes by which people prepare something to be put to use or into action
  • Stakeholders strategically engage in meaning-making activities around data
  • Shapes societal interpretations of data