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Title details for Everyday Adventures with Unruly Data by Melanie Feinberg - Available

Everyday Adventures with Unruly Data

by Melanie Feinberg
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Paired informal and scholarly essays show how everyday events reveal fundamental concepts of data, including its creation, aggregation, management, and use.
Whether questioning numbers on a scale, laughing at a misspelling of one’s name, or finding ourselves confused in a foreign supermarket, we are engaging with data. The only way to handle data responsibly, says Melanie Feinberg in this incisive work, is to take into account its human character. Though the data she discusses may seem familiar, close scrutiny shows it to be ambiguous, complicated, and uncertain: unruly. Drawing on the tools of information science, she uses everyday events such as deciding between Blender A and Blender B on Amazon to demonstrate a practical, critical, and generative mode of thinking about data: its creation, management, aggregation, and use.
 
Each chapter pairs a self-contained main essay (an adventure) with a scholarly companion essay (the reflection). The adventure begins with an anecdote—visiting the library, running out of butter, cooking rice on a different stove. Feinberg argues that to understand the power and pitfalls of data science, we must attend to the data itself, not merely the algorithms that manipulate it. As she reflects on the implications of commonplace events, Feinberg explicates fundamental concepts of data that reveal the many tiny design decisions—which may not even seem like design at all—that shape how data comes to be. Through the themes of serendipity, objectivity, equivalence, interoperability, taxonomy, labels, and locality, she illuminates the surprisingly pervasive role of data in our daily thoughts and lives. 
 

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    October 11, 2022

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780262371452

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780262371452
      • File size: 23747 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      Starred review from September 1, 2022

      Feinberg (information science, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) states that readers are confronted with data in their everyday lives, sometimes in the most ordinary of ways: questioning numbers on a scale, analyzing a package of butter, navigating within a foreign setting, or even a trip to the library places data front and center. In this volume, the author explores data from the human element and not from the perspective of a data or systems analyst. There are seven chapters labeled and centered on a specific aspect encountered by the author: Serendipity, Objectivity, Equivalence, Interoperability, Taxonomy, Labels, and Locality. Chapters are divided into two sections: a main essay describing her personal adventures with data and how the author came to understand this experience; and a second essay with a reflection on the adventure through the lens of her scholarship work within information science. VERDICT This is a highly engaging and recommended study on the daily encounters with data. Best for data specialists, librarians, taxonomists, and consumers.--Jacqueline Parascandola

      Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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