warm data

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.

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 Quante. "But

It teaches them that data is created, not found; and that creating it well demands humanity, rather than objectivity

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.

The deep knowledge about a place is most likely held by farmers and engaged locals. But it is not likely to be in a form demanded by policymakers to substantiate calls for spending. It’s not just about quantifying, it’s about qualitative data of the kind that amounts to a form of collective intelligence.”

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

"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