QW - thoughts about quantify wholeheartedly

SLOGAN : And I like winning. I want my life to be more like Mario’s in Super Mario Bros 3.

###Quantification processes how normative are they?

Health trackers help you track and measure specific events of your daily life, mainly the number of steps that you make, the number of water glasses you drink, or your heart beat for example. This helps to track your level of activity, eventually deducing your sleeping time, and finally updating your calories or water intake.All this information is then algorithmically organized demonstrated and quantified.

One can ask what is the scope of this quantification process that discriminates certain specifics of the body. It seems clear that quantified self technologies are simply not designed with a full range of bodies in mind.

Indeed, as body information becomes data, not only does it seems that the measurements are reductionists, but also that social contexts are abstracted away. It is worth asking wether inequalities would be solidified and aggravated by means of their lack of representational presence. If differences, gender based or otherwise, are not represented in data, then it is difficult to address inequalities, but that does not mean that they are not present.

Quantification as a terrain for feminist action

It is as if modern surveillance systems operate upon logics of disembodied control at a distance. As such, they artificially abstract bodies, identities, and interactions from social contexts in ways that both obscure and aggravate gender and other social inequalities.

Further more quantify self procedures drive on a terrain of feminist self help that is not profiting from the Web 2.0 processes that mostly interferes with it by appropriating its languages and processes to the benefit of corporations. http://www.lesoiseaux.io/doku.php?id=feminism_and_the_quantified_self

##FEMINIST DATA VISUALIZATION
https://civic.mit.edu/feminist-data-visualization
Professor Catherine D’Ignazio also lists things a feminist approach to data visualization could do :
Invent new ways to represent uncertainty, outsides, missing data, and flawed methods.
Invent new ways to reference the material economy behind the data.
Make dissent possible.

In this paper, we have outlined six principles for feminist data visualization: Rethink Binaries, Embrace Pluralism, Examine Power and Aspireto Empowerment, Consider Context, Legitimize Embodiment and Affectand Make Labor Visible.

Challenging neutrality, objectivity, and universality does not mean that feminist STS retreats to a position of relativism or solipsism, however. The field rejects neither the scientific process nor quantitative ways of knowing the world. Rather, feminist STS allows us to see how all knowledge is situated, how certain perspectives are excluded from the current knowledge regime, and how multiple true objectivities are possible
Shaowen Bardzell has asserted that feminism can be de-ployed throughout the design process to produce a “generative contribution”.PeterHall coined the term critical visualization in 2008 to describe practices that counteract “the technological view” of visualization,

###Rethink Binaries,

Dividing datas in fixcategories implies choosing determined limits this is a reality of classification that all documentalists hhave had to deal with overtime. They often consider it as a Sysiphian task that constantly needs to be rethought reorganised redefined. Indeed it can be an impossible mission, what to do with objects that belong to 2 categories, with those that refuse to enter in any of them with the changing subcategories that exponantialy grow in importance and become more important than the hosting categories, the ones that change signification overtime, classification work seems an infinite task.

Design Process Questions: Is our data the right type? What categories have we taken for granted? How can we register responses that do not fit into the categories we have provided, even and especially if they are “edge cases” and “outliers”?

Design Output Questions: How do we communicate the limits of our categories in the final representation? How can we allow the user to refactor the categories we have presented for view?

###Embrace Pluralism
_Design Process Questions: _Whose voices are not repre-sented on the design team

_Design Output Questions: _Can the artifact communicate thesubject positions of the researcher(s) and designer(s) in a transpar-ent way? Whose view of the world does the visualization represent?

###Examine Power and Aspire to Empowerment
Design Process Questions: How is power distributed acrossthe design team? Who is who? Who is doing what? Whose voice matters more and why? Who is the end user, is there an end user, is there only one type of enduser, do they have correlating interests.

Design Output Questions: Can the visualization empower the end user and/or her community, group, or organization? can the definition of the end user contribute to a recalification of the purpose of the application.

###Consider Context
L’abstraction de la mesure est propice à la disparition des contextes, pourtant l’émergence des visualisations de données semble s’addresser directement à des enjeux sociétaux lorsqu’il s’agit des visualisations de données de quantification l’information semble largement contextuelle personnelle la question du rapport au corps de l’image intime.
Si les moyens de l’IA et des réseaux neuronaux permettent une recalification de la classification, bien souvent comme le présente Antoinette Rouvroy, elle signifie une réduction des choix de critères à une fonctionalité de la machine, les contraintes de la machine restent prédominantes et absolument contraignantes.Antoinette Rouvroy explique “Nous montrerons chaque fois en quoi les sujets individuels sont en fait évités, au point de créer une sorte de double statistique des sujets, et du « réel »” Rouvroy explique que l’efficacité prédictive est d’autant plus efficace qu’il s’agit de l’aggrégation d’un plus grand nombre de données et par conséquent il ne s’agit pas d’avoir un système qui permet une plus grande finesse contextuelle mais bien au contraire d’un système qui décontextualise l’information.Gouvernementalité algorithmique et perspectives d’émancipation: le disparate comme condition d’émancipation par la relation (Antoinette Rouvroy & Thomas Berns).
Design Process Questions: How can we leverage human-centered design [14] and participatory design [72] methods to learn about and with our end users, As the design is overtaken by corporations it is taken out of the hands of the users this project is to reapropriate the design process to the benefit of community based structures

Design Output Questions: What kinds of terminology, symbols, and cultural artifacts have meaning to end users, and how can weincorporate those into our designs?

###Legitimize Embodiment and Affect
Feminist theory recognizes embodied and affective experiences – that is, experiences that derive from sensation and emotion – as ways of knowing on par with more quantitative methods of knowing and experiencing the world [13].
Design Process Questions: How can we leverage embodied and affective experience to enhance visualization design and engage users?

Design Output Questions: What kinds of embodied and affective experience has meaning to end users?

###Make Labor Visible
Design Process Questions: Can the team work backwards from the given data to document their provenance and talk to their caregivers?

Design Output Questions: Is it feasible to provide a metadata visualization that shows the provenance of the data and their stakehold-ers (caregivers) at each step?

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