On March 17, Clancy Wilmott, Assistant Professor in the department of Geography at UC Berkeley, presented her work "Data practice as theoretical inquiry: machine learning, polygons and other notebook adventures in cartography and GIS". Wilmott begins with describing a disciplinary war that is taking place in areas of research, like Geography. There is a technology of control but there are also important ways spatial data can be used to help people improve their lives. She navigates the two sides of the debate and, in her work, she asks “Where in the data process do politics lie?” In the case of mapping data in order to advocate for better health outcomes due to the location of a power plant nearby, will this data be accessible to the people in the community or is it on a server they cannot access?
Wilmott continued the seminar with an exploration of projects she’s worked on that illustrate this debate and how this work can help communities, from unconventionally housed people who had living on a piece of land under I-880 in Oakland to the Sogorea Te’ Land trust who wanted data sovereignty -- they didn’t want their data to exist on university servers. For the former, Willmott was able to get access to data that would have been a huge challenge for the community and, in the latter, she was able to fulfill the request for data sovereignty. She readdressed data sovereignty at the end of the talk:
...agreements with organizations that we're working with that protect them, that guarantee their sovereignty, their intellectual rights...[it] is really important just to make sure that that protection exists
Don’t miss the rest of this fascinating talk, complete with modern mapping techniques and a look back at archived maps. Watch the video below!
