Computational Methods for Restorative Data Justice

Introduction

While “data” is often understood today in computational terms, as information coded and organized for interpretation with digital tools and algorithms, the term has a long history dating back to at least the seventeenth century. In its earliest uses, data is defined as a “given” and a basis for decision-making—and thus power. A study of colonial knowledge systems offers numerous examples of the link between power and data regimes. Revealing the integral role of data in the building and maintenance of empires, this paper takes up several methodological questions: How do we handle colonial data, both data generated by colonial administrations and data we recreate from fragmentary sources to address the absences in the historical record born from conquest? How does a “collections as data” approach situate colonial archives themselves as data to be analyzed? And how do we ensure that our own research does not replicate the extractive colonial data practices of empire?

The Case Study 

During the 1830 French conquest of Algeria, witnesses watched, aghast, as officers looted administrative buildings, and soldiers used official Ottoman documents to light their pipes. In the following years, the plunder continued until most of the official records from Algiers and neighboring cities were either lost, stolen, or destroyed. The case of Algeria, a palimpsest of overlapping Berber, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, and French legacies, highlights the problematic nature of colonial and colonized archives and the question of what decolonizing data means in such a complex context.

Restorative Data Justice: A Definition

The few extant fragments of knowledge from Algeria’s Regency period emerge from French and Algerian chronicles of the governors, travel narratives, diplomatic correspondence, a few surviving Ottoman registers, and commercial records from the French coral concessions. Through close reading, structured notes, and developing a custom, context-specific classification schema, I reconstructed data sets on the governors of Ottoman Algeria (1518-1837) for prosopographical study. This reconstruction does not simply reconstitute imperial ontologies but rather seeks to describe these men and women (in the social network study) with categories that they themselves would have likely employed. Historical data set (re)construction is one way we can begin to address voids in the archive. Similarly, through text mining to identify named and unnamed entities and social network analysis to illustrate and study their relationships, unnamed women’s spectral presence may be recovered and represented despite their absence in the archival record. Hand-in-hand, these techniques allow us to reassemble data lost in the violence of colonial conquest and to resurrect the stories, if not the voices, of men and women long silenced. In this way, we subvert colonial weapons of quantification and convert them into tools for restitution. 

This is how I define “restorative data justice,” a theoretical framework that builds on the work of Alexandra Ortolja-Baird, Julianne Nyhan, Alex Gil, Roopika Risam, and Adeline Koh, among others whose work seeks to ameliorate some of colonialism’s violences by highlighting and addressing archival silences. I present restorative data justice as a response to both common scholarly challenges we face when undertaking studies of marginalized populations, especially using colonial archives, and it is a response to this present moment, this era of capitalistic datafication and increasingly urgent calls for social change and justice. I argue that this concept of restorative data justice may serve as a bridge between academic studies and work in current data cultures. It offers one way to redress the problematic past of colonial knowledge production and its legacy in information structures and systems still at work today in the present age of capitalistic surveillance and widespread data misuse.  

Restorative data justice is not simply a concept, but, as suggested above, it is also a process that involves three steps:
– thinking of, and working with, our sources as data or generating data from them specifically on/about people who have been marginalized, 
– structuring the ontology of that data based on their own epistemologies (or as close as we can come) and not those of the colonizing or otherwise oppressive forces, and 
– conducting analyses of that data in ethically and historically responsible ways that highlight the experiences and roles, if not the voices, of those who have been marginalized, restoring them to their historical context, restoring information about their lives to a general, if not specific, archive of knowledge not, as the colonial archive once did, to control and dominant, but to resist imperial narratives of the past. 

In the historical context, this means returning actors to the narrative through data gathering and analysis. I use my own work on re/creating Ottoman Algerian registers as a case study for this process. In identifying governors, specific details of their lives and their families through prosopography and social network analysis, I seek to bring their actions, experiences, even their very existence, to light, to literally restore people to the historical record, recreating a historical record that has since been lost or destroyed, and outlining the limits of what is or can be known about this specific past. Through this work we notice the spectral presence of those long-since dead, as well as the shadow of records of their lives that may have once existed and those that only ever existed in our imaginary archive. 

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