skip to main content
10.1145/3209811.3209877acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagescompassConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Care and the Practice of Data Science for Social Good

Published: 20 June 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Data science is an interdisciplinary field that extracts insights from data through a multi-stage process of data collection, analysis and use. When data science is applied for social good, a variety of stakeholders are introduced to the process with an intention to inform policies or programs to improve well-being. Our goal in this paper is to propose an orientation to care in the practice of data science for social good. When applied to data science, a logic of care can improve the data science process and reveal outcomes of "good" throughout. Consideration of care in practice has its origins in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and has recently been applied by Human Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers to understand technology repair and use in under-served environments as well as care in remote health monitoring. We bring care to the practice of data science through a detailed examination of our engaged research with a community group that uses data as a strategy to advocate for permanently affordable housing. We identify opportunities and experiences of care throughout the stages of the data science process. We bring greater detail to the notion of human-centered systems for data science and begin to describe what these look like.

References

[1]
Atkinson-Graham, Melissa, Martha Kenney, Kelly Ladd, Cameron Michael Murray, and Emily Astra-Jean Simmonds. "Care in context: Becoming an STS researcher." Social studies of science 45, no. 5 (2015): 738--748.
[2]
Auerbach, J., H. Barton, T. Blunt, V. Chaganti, B. Ghai, A. Meng, C. Blackburn, E. W. Zegura, and P. Flores. 2017. Using data science as a community advocacy tool to promote equity in urban renewal programs: An analysis of Atlanta's anti-displacement tax fund. Data Science for Social Good Conference Paper. Chicago, IL.
[3]
Bhargava, R., E. Deahl, E. Letouzé, A. Noonan, D. Sangokoya, N. Shoup. 2015. "Beyond Data Literacy: Reinventing Community Engagement and Empowerment in the Age of Data." Data-Pop Alliance White Paper Series. Data-Pop Alliance (Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, MIT Media Lab and Overseas Development Institute) and Internews.
[4]
Code, L. 2015. Care, concern, and advocacy: Is there a place for epistemic responsibility? Feminist Philosophy Quarterly. 1(1).
[5]
de la Bellacasa, María Puig. Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
[6]
Dhar, V. 2013. Data science and prediction. Commun. ACM, 56(12):64--73.
[7]
Easterly, W. 2001. The lost decades: Developing countries' stagnation in spite of policy reform 1980--1998. World Bank Report.
[8]
Eguren, I. 2011. Theory of change: a thinking and action approach to navigate in the complexity of social change processes. Report published by United Nations Development Program/Humanist Institute for Development Cooperation.
[9]
Getoor, L., D. Culler, E. de Sturler, D. Ebert, M. Franklin, and H. Jagadish. 2016. Computing research and the emerging field of data science. CRA Committee on Data Science.
[10]
Green, A. Caro, M. Conway, R. Manduca, T. Plagge, and A. Miller. 2015. Mining administrative data to spur urban revitalization. In Proceedings of the 21th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD '15, ACM.
[11]
Hearn, G. N. and M. Foth. 2005. Action research in the design of new media and ICT systems. In K. Kwansah- Aidoo, ed., Topical Issues in Communications and Media Research, pages 79--94. Nova Science, New York, NY.
[12]
Sara Heitlinger, Nick Bryan-Kinns, and Janis Jefferies. 2014. The talking plants: an interactive system for grassroots urban food-growing communities. In CHI '14 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 459--462.
[13]
Houston, L. and S. J. Jackson. 2016. Caring for the "next billion" mobile handsets: Opening proprietary closures through the work of repair. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, ICTD '16, ACM.
[14]
Houston, L., Steven J. Jackson, Daniela K. Rosner, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, Meg Young, and Laewoo Kang. 2016. Values in Repair. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16), ACM.
[15]
Israel, B.A., A. J. Schulz, E. A. Parker, and A. B. Becker. 1998. Review of community-based research: assessing partnership approaches to improve public health. Annual review of public health, 19(1):173--202.
[16]
Kandel, S., J. Heer, C. Plaisant, J. Kennedy, F. van Ham, N. H. Riche, C. Weaver, B. Lee, D. Brodbeck, and P. Buono. 2011. Research directions in data wrangling: Visualizations and transformations for usable and credible data. Information Visualization, 10(4):271--288.
[17]
Karusala, N., A. Vishwanath, A. Kumar, A. Mangal, and N. Kumar. 2017. Care as a resource in underserved learning environments. Proc. ACM Hum. Comput. Interact., 1(CSCW), ACM.
[18]
Kaziunas, E., M. S. Ackerman, S. Lindtner, and J. M. Lee. 2017. Caring through data: Attending to the social and emotional experiences of health datafication. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW '17, ACM.
[19]
Kontokosta, C.E. 2017. Urban informatics for social good: definitions, tensions, and challenges. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Science of Smart City Operations and Platforms Engineering (SCOPE '17), ACM.
[20]
Gilly Leshed, Maria Håkansson, and Joseph 'Jofish' Kaye. 2014. "Our life is the farm and farming is our life": home-work coordination in organic farm families. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing (CSCW '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 487--498.
[21]
Silvia Lindtner and Seyram Avle. 2017. Tinkering with Governance: Technopolitics and the Economization of Citizenship. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 1, CSCW, Article 70 (December 2017), 18 pages.
[22]
Madsen, A. K. 2015. Between technical features and analytic capabilities: Charting a relational affordance space for digital social analytics. Big Data & Society. 2(1).
[23]
McElroy, E. and A Szeto. The Racial Contours of YIMY/NIMBY Bay Area Gentrification. Berkeley Planning Journal. 29(1):8--46.
[24]
Milan, S. and L. van der Velden. 2016. The alternative epistemologies of data activism. Digital Culture & Society, 2(2):57--74.
[25]
Mol, A. 2008. The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice. Routledge: New York, NY.
[26]
Mol, A., I. Moser, and J. Pols. 2010. Care in Practice: On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms. transcript.
[27]
Murphy, Michelle. "Unsettling care: Troubling transnational itineraries of care in feminist health practices." Social Studies of Science 45, no. 5 (2015): 717--737.
[28]
Neff, G., A. Tanweer, B. Fiore-Gartland, and L. Osburn. 2017. Critique and contribute: A practice-based framework for improving critical data studies and data science. Big Data. 5(2):85--97.
[29]
Shearer, C. 2000. The CRISP-DM Model: The new blueprint for data mining. Journal of Data Warehousing. 5(4):13--22.
[30]
Austin L. Toombs, Shaowen Bardzell, and Jeffrey Bardzell. 2015. The Proper Care and Feeding of Hackerspaces: Care Ethics and Cultures of Making. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 629--638.
[31]
Austin Toombs. 2015. Enacting Care Through Collaboration in Communities of Makers. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference Companion on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW'15 Companion). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 81--84.
[32]
Tronto, Joan C. Moral Boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. Psychology Press, 1993.
[33]
Tronto, Joan C. Who Cares?: How to Reshape a Democratic Politics. Cornell University Press, 2015.
[34]
Zuk, M., & Chapple, K. (2015). Urban Displacement Project.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Reimagining Meaningful Data Work through Citizen ScienceProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36870498:CSCW2(1-26)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
  • (2024)"Come to us first": Centering Community Organizations in Artificial Intelligence for Social Good PartnershipsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36870098:CSCW2(1-28)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Situating Datasets: Making Public Eviction Data Actionable for Housing JusticeProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642452(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
COMPASS '18: Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies
June 2018
472 pages
ISBN:9781450358163
DOI:10.1145/3209811
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 20 June 2018

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. Data science for social good
  2. HCI
  3. care
  4. community engagement

Qualifiers

  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

Conference

COMPASS '18
Sponsor:
COMPASS '18: ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies
June 20 - 22, 2018
CA, Menlo Park and San Jose, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 25 of 50 submissions, 50%

Upcoming Conference

COMPASS '25

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)114
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)9
Reflects downloads up to 28 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media