D. Boyd, K. Crawford: Six Provocations for Big Data I thought this article accurately established problems that arise when we focus too much on big data as a goal. I especially appreciated the attention to ethics near the end, as that is not something I have paid enough attention to in the past, and I think it’s very important to consider in the future. I also liked the way in which the article tackled specific issues, such as the difference between articulated networks and behavioral networks, as well as broader theoretical questions, such as how knowledge has changed. It was nice to read alongside Drucker, as her piece made me feel confident that at least some aspects of some of these provocations are being addressed in smart ways.

Johanna Drucker, Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display and Data as Capta I thought Drucker did a very compelling job of challenging existing ideas about data, and especially about data in the context of the humanities. Already on the first page, she writes “So naturalized are the Google maps and bar charts generated from spreadsheets that they pass as unquestioned representations of ‘what is.’” I definitely struggled with moving beyond these unquestioned representations, although I really agree with most of her ideas, especially when she introduced capta. I certainly agree that a ‘humanistic approach to the qualitative display of graphical information’ is necessary, and I think it makes sense that the interpretive nature of knowledge is emphasized. That said, while I was really intrigued by Drucker’s ideas, I couldn’t stop thinking about how they seem to make graphics less accessible than they are currently. I could certainly see them as useful and understandable in some of the contexts; for example, figure 6d represents well the difference between the time of telling contrasted with the narrated time for a document. That said, I struggled more with other examples. Perhaps, I only see typical bar graphs or other charts as more accessible because my brain has been trained on them, but I still feel that it would be very difficult to make graphical representations of the type that Drucker is suggesting that would be accessible to a wider audience. I definitely agree with the premises that led to the graphics, but when they were put into practice, I often found them difficult to understand at first. I’d like to think that if such practices were to be implemented more widely, people would come to understand them, but I don’t know enough to know if that’s true.