warm data

A founding motivation for the pair was a belief that the discussion of climate change needed to be participatory, not a one-way lecture. "One of the things that frustrated me so much while working for major environmental groups is this concept that there are anointed people who 'know' and there are people who are 'not knowing'," says Quan

"Palestinians are often pinioned between two opposing but equally harmful tendencies: to turn them into abstractions on a political stage, or to turn away from them because what they’re enduring is too horrendous to truly grapple with

We are, each and every one of us, a collection of our lived experiences. Our lived experiences shape us, how we interact with the world, and how we live in the world. And our experiences are valid.

The data collected would enable the organizers to plot “weather-maps of public feeling.” As a matter of principle, Mass-Observers did not distinguish themselves from the people they studied. They intended merely to expose facts “in simple terms to all observers, so that their environment may be understood, and thus constantly transformed.”

All information is grounds for knowledge, whether empirical or aphoristic, no matter its truth-value. We should embrace the scientific-poetic synthesis and informed naivety of a magical realism. Error breeds sense.

Mass Observation is a social research project. Everyday Britains send in observations about their everyday lives. It's a great resource for getting behind the headlines and into how people really feel about culturally significant moments.

Can even the most unfathomable statistic feel real if it's not accompanied by a singular human's story? We need both stories and stats. The hyper-personal and the sense of scale.

despite the undeniably consistent picture that we see across studies of scientific data collection, the desire to remove the human from the data in order to enhance objectivity remains very strong. Invariably, it seems like the ethical move.

If in our daily lives we tend to overlook the diverse, situationally textured sense-making actions that information seekers, conversation listeners, and other recipients of communicative acts perform to make automated information systems function, we are even less likely to acknowledge and value the interpretive work of data collectors, even as the