Brown Bag Lecture Series: Professor Willie Gin, POLS
Stevenson 3900
12:00 pm
– 1:00 pm
"Reimagining Data: What The Good Place and Baseball Tells Us about Data and Public Policy", Professor Willie Gin, POLS
Summary: Data is produced, analyzed, and used in two ways. One type of data practice (data regime 1) classifies and sorts subjects into groups, often for the purpose of economizing resources. In sports, this is the so-called Moneyball revolution in data analytics. An alternative data practice (data regime 2) aims to experiment and transform individual subjects, allowing subjects to transcend those classifications. In baseball, this is called the Betterball movement in data analytics. The predominance of data regime 1 in contemporary social formations and public policy creates two kinds of inequality. There is an overall epistemological inequality in that the ways of thinking associated with classifying and economizing predominate over experimenting and transforming. There is also a distributive inequality, in that only some privileged actors and entities can successfully engage in the iterative experimentation of data regime 2, while others are stuck primarily being the “objects” of the classificatory schemes of data regime 1.
The Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts Brown Bag Series is always free, open to faculty, staff, students, and the public, and provides a congenial interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of recent research by the HSSA faculty. See the information below for upcoming brown bag talks.