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
... See moreRichard Fisher • Why We Need New Words for Life in the Anthropocene
New research suggests that AI is reducing complexity, or at least our experience of it. A recent study, The Platonic Representation Hypothesis , shows that as AI models become more powerful, they form increasingly similar statistical representations of the world. The result is that we are effectively simplifying our understanding of the world and t... See more
🏡 I Don’t Resonate With You
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.”
Pocket Observatory • Mass Observation
The power in softness
Exploring the importance of soft data alongside hard data, embracing complexity and using personal data to understand and reclaim oneself, with a focus on emotions and human experiences.
LinkIf 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
... See moreMelanie Feinberg • The Myth of Objective Data
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.
Ijeoma Oluo • So You Want to Talk About Race
“Data only tells you what was.
It doesn’t account for what could be.”
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.