Meeting Your Data

HES 505 Fall 2025: Session 4

Matt Williamson

Checking in

  • Have you used the videos and lessons?

  • How can I make them more useful?

  • Anything I can clarify from last class?

Today’s Plan

  • Data, information, and knowledge

  • The elements of data quality

  • Concerns with the growth in available data

  • Towards data justice

Revisiting Workflows

Get Data???

Boisot and Canals, 2004

Observations become data through the filters we put on them

  • Our questions guide which observations we consider data

  • But what about found data?

FAIR Data and Found Data

Alvanço 2021

FAIR data improves our ability to leverage existing data, but we haven’t really reached this ideal.

Most spatial data is “found” data

  • Military advancement

  • Enumeration of populations

  • Delineations of authority

Making the invisible visible…

  • Globalization of data resources
  • Data “traces” and policing
  • Bias in data ⇒ Bias in policy

Data Justice

Data Justice promotes ethical and equitable practices in the collection, analysis, and use of data to serve the dignity, rights, and well-being of individuals and communities, especially those who have been historically marginalized

Data Justice in Practice

Hoefsloot et al., 2022

From FAIR to CARE

Global Indigenous Data Alliance

  • FAIR is about access and documentation

  • CARE is about sovereignty, governance, and justice

Questions to ask yourself?

  • Where did this data come from and why was it collected?

  • How might the intention and biases of the collector affect the data?

  • Who might benefit or suffer from this analysis and what do I owe them?

  • Are there ways I can address this in my analysis or interpretation?

… but you have data!!

…but you have data!!

  1. Documenting your data

  2. Exploring your data

  3. Doing both with Quarto