Dr Laura James's writings

Superflux ask whether this drive for data as evidence has led to the unshakeable belief that data is evidence. “Evidence is just a special kind of data. Data becomes evidence when it stands in a particular testing relationship with a hypothesis.” — Brendan Clarke. Lecturer in History and the Philosophy of Medicine at University College London. So, why is data being consistently conflated with evidence? As new business models have emerged which commodify data; from Google to Facebook, Uber and Amazon, the paradigm of data capital has firmly rooted itself in our collective consciousness. Big data can be a powerful tool for the good of society, but data is not evidence, and the rise of the use and misuse of big data in policy has risen in parallel with its more commercial deployment. And as highlighted in this Quartz piece , much of the data used about us may be wrong. We can only influence one part of it — and the inferences built on top of that may be right or wrong. Goo...

A couple of conversations this week touched on natural capital and community goods, and a few relevant links came up too. Thanks to Richard Pope for the reminder about https://www.keepitinthecommunity.org/  — I wonder how this sort of idea can relate to slightly more abstract things like green spaces or even individual trees. Could tracking urban green spaces like this play a role in helping preserve them, either through council action or something else? (An example being the controversial felling of valued trees in Sheffield .) Libraries are a useful community good, as illustrated by this crowdsourced selection of libraries around the world (via Sentiers). At Doteveryone we’ve explored ways libraries could be part of local information infrastructure . So it was good to see this proposal for Toronto libraries to play a role in data governance for the (troubling) Sidewalk Labs venture there.  I was glad to find this clear Conversation article , which explains fairly wel...

Designing systems is quite different from designing, say, computer interfaces. I don’t identify as a designer, and I’m fascinated by the range of activities of people I encounter who do; and also by the people who clearly design things but don’t see their work as design. They might be creating business models or figuring out a system for aid delivery, say. At Doteveryone, we identified one of the underlying causes of problematic technology today is the focus on user-centric design — optimising for a single user, and neglecting larger groups (be they families, communities, society at large). Cassie Robinson wrote a  great post about this in late 2017 . Design also came up in a conversation with Oli Sylvester-Bradley this week, talking about the new  distributed, decentralised applications  which would be enabled by new systems such as Holochain. So much of today’s user experience / user interface design practice is based on a set of now well-established ideas — data...

I write weeknotes, so why not yearnotes? I made a concerted effort in 2018 to work more in the open, blogging events and ideas, and also since September writing weeknotes. The weeknotes are a bit of a grab bag of things I’ve read or seen, conversations I’ve had, fragmentary bits of synthesis where there seems to be any. Publishing rough notes, without any serious thought about a reader (sorry), is a discipline which encourages me to put time into reflecting, which otherwise probably wouldn’t happen. You, dear imaginary reader, are a tool for personal accountability. It is an effort to write weeknotes; they take time. Reflection takes time, and with a set of part time jobs at present, only one of which is paying me to do anything like this (and then only partially), it’s good to have a reason to make myself step back a bit. With yearnotes I suppose I am stepping back another level; possibly it would be worthwhile doing this more than annually, and perhaps about specific topics. One thin...