Grassroots resource mobilization through counter-data action

Abstract

In this paper, we document the counter-data action and data activism of a grassroots affordable housing advocacy group in Atlanta. Our observation and insight into these data activities and strategies are achieved through ethnographic and engaged research and participatory design. We find that counter-data action through community-collected data is rooted in a legacy of Atlanta’s black activism and black scholarship; that this data activism enabled resource mobilization and critical conscious making; and that design and media production are essential post counter-data action activities in data activism. Based on these findings, we urge the field of open government data to broaden their concept of social impact of data to include the use data to mobilize resources within oppressed communities not to influence policy and government but to build capacities within community in order to transform, not join, political structures. We also advocate that scholars within the fields of open government data, critical data studies, and data activism recognize the legacy and historic practice of data activism by black communities working towards social change.

Introduction

In 2014, the local government of Fulton County, Georgia, conducted a built environment survey of the English Avenue and Vine City neighborhoods in Atlanta. The purpose of this survey was to capture data on property vacancy and conditions of the built environment. Numerous community and advocacy groups welcomed this initiative and hoped it would bring political attention and resources to issues of housing justice in Atlanta. Among those groups eagerly anticipating the data was the Westside Atlanta Land Trust (WALT): a local organization advocating for the establishment of a community land trust (CLT) policy as a way to protect against gentrification and displacement. In particular, members of WALT were hopeful that the data would provide evidence for their claims and experience of extensive neighborhood affliction, which in turn they could marshal as support for their concerted efforts aimed at neighborhood renewal through a CLT policy.

However, once the county’s data was released there was disappointment among WALT membership. Members stated that they were dismayed by what they perceived to be gross inaccuracies. The data simply did not reflect their knowledge of the neighborhoods and what they experienced with regard to vacancy and blight. As one WALT member explained in an interview, “Fulton county’s website was so incorrect [,] triple incorrect.” Specifically, the data that struck them as “triple incorrect” was the number of abandoned parcels. From their experience, the resident members of WALT said that the Fulton County dataset underreported abandonment. What’s more, there was a concern that this underreporting would undermine their claims for needed action. From their perspective, rather than address their concerns and conditions, the county data thwarted the community’s call for action. In the midst of this situation, members of WALT came to realize their own expertise about their communities and identify an opportunity for action.

The “triple incorrect” data was motivation for WALT’s ongoing endeavor of assembling their own data with the explicit intent of challenging the “official” data and offering their data as a corrective. This endeavor is an example of a “counter-data action” (Currie et al., 2016; Dalton and Thatcher, 2014): the inaccuracy of the county data produced a space that WALT members were able to act within, to challenge the completeness and veracity of the county data, and then to realize and subsequently express their situated knowledge and capacity to collect data themselves.

In this paper, we describe WALT’s counter-data actions, drawing on our ongoing community-based research with the organization. We begin by setting the research in the context of scholarship in open government data (OGD) and critical data studies, describing our research methodologies, and providing further background on WALT as an organization. We then highlight the multiple and varied uses of data collection and data for WALT through four themes: counter-data action and the legacy of black activism; resource mobilization through data activism; data activism as a means for sensitization and the development of critical consciousness; and the role of media and design in data activism.

Our study of WALT’s counter-data actions is situated within a broader research question of “How is data made useful in grassroots advocacy projects?” This question emerges from contemporary conditions in which it is clear that data can have social impact. In contrast to much of the discourse on data and politics framed in relation to national and global issues, our interest is understanding how data is used to affect social change in context of localized politics and activist efforts. Using terms such as “data activism” (Schrock, 2016) and “data justice” (Taylor, 2017), scholars have argued that data can enable oppressed and disenchanted peoples to wield influence in situations that were previously difficult to shape and that data can offer a distinctive means for political action. We set out to empirically investigate how these new means of political action were and were not occurring in local grassroots advocacy projects, to what effects, and with what distinguishing characteristics.

Through our ethnographic research, we have studied how a particular grassroots advocacy projects was making use of data as part of an effort of contentious politics. From this research, we have been able to elaborate on the concept and practice of counter-data actions, providing an expanded view on what counter-data actions are and what their effects might be. Through the practices of counter-data action, multiple, entwined transformations occur for the participants. While counter-data actions can produce better data, that is not all they produce. Counter-data actions also produce affects and capacities that are not reducible to datasets alone and that are important to work of advocacy and empowerment. Moreover, we argue that these outcomes should be considered as distinguishing characteristics of this mode of data activism and its social impact.

Background: Scholarship in open government data and critical data studies

WALT’s interest in data as a means for enacting social change, their recognition of the shortcomings of existing datasets, and data-driven response reflects trends in data practice and scholarship. In particular, research on OGD has long argued for the value of data in enabling social impact through participatory public policy making. But the emphasis on impact through policy may need to be rethought when the projects operate, at least in part, outside of formal politics. Critical data studies offer a complementary perspective to build upon the OGD literature with a focus on understanding both the potentials and limitations of data in the context of political action, broadly construed. Themes from critical data studies, in particular the concepts of data activism and counter-data actions, are especially useful in describing and analyzing the data practices of WALT.

OGD as potential for social impact and empowerment

Since the early 2000s, the United States government has been involved in the OGD movement. Agencies at federal, state, and local levels actively collect data to record and monitor economic performance, population demographics, environmental indicators, public services, etc. This data, often referred to as public sector information (PSI) is meant to enable public officials to create, implement and later evaluate government policy and programming. Not only is government data a useful tool for internal review and monitoring, but, arguably, civil society organizations and social movements can benefit from access to these datasets. In recent years, politicians and civic technologists, driven by values of transparency, accountability, and efficiency in service provision advocate for access to PSI in more developer friendly, machine-readable formats (Open Government Working Group, 2007). The initial dataset collected by the Fulton County assessors is an example of OGD.

Many scholars argue that OGD will improve transparency and accountability and increase the inclusion of marginalized groups in policy making (Chattapadhyay, 2014; Chuulu, 2013; Davies et al., 2015; Keserū and Chan, 2015; Ubaldi, 2013; World Wide Web Foundation, 2015). The claim that marginalized peoples and groups may effectively use OGD to achieve increased inclusion in policy making is referred to as OGD’s social impact. Implicit in this claim is the notion that data is empowering. This impact is widely viewed to be the most challenging to practice and measure (Davies, 2013, 2014; Davies et al., 2015; Granickas, 2013; Ubaldi, 2013; Zuiderwijk et al., 2012). Meng (2016) investigated this claim of increased inclusion in a comparative case study of how social movements make use of OGD. Although she found that social movement organizations may use government data to advocate for change with policy makers, the grassroots populations are not the primary users or audience of OGD. Those most oppressed by government policies do not interact with or make use of OGD. Instead, middle-class social movement leaders and data intermediaries in the form of economists, non-profit staff, journalists, or civic technologists use data primarily to garner support from economic and political elites.

In the context of our research, WALT’s use of data to advocate for a CLT policy provides a city-level example of how OGD could contribute to a grassroots social project. We use this as an opportunity to investigate, and ultimately critique the assumption within the ODG literature that the use of OGD is a sufficient condition for oppressed groups to be empowered and achieve inclusion in policy making. In contrast to much of the OGD literature, we are also interested in understanding how data becomes a resource for “social impact” outside of established political processes; how data has impact in supporting efforts for community self-determination in ways other than the common modes and metrics of public policy change or resource allocation.

Critical data studies and practices of data activism

WALT’s data strategies are not limited to the reuse of OGD. In fact, as noted they found county government data to be “triple incorrect,” leading them to collect their own data. WALT’s interrogation of government data and pursuit of resident-collected data can be conceptualized within the frameworks of critical data scholars, which provide us with labels and themes to describe and analyze WALT’s data practices. Dalton and Thatcher (2014) argue that a critical approach is needed to interrogate data, particularly the social processes that data is embedded in and the associated power geometries of creation and use of data. Similarly, Johnson (2014) identifies the embedding of social privilege in the collection and use of data and warns that unjust data will produce unjust governance outcomes. Kitchin et al. (2015) refer to the socio-technical systems that surround data’s “production, processing, storing, sharing, analysis, and reuse” as data assemblage. We find this concept of data assemblage as particularly relevant to the work of WALT as they create data and navigate social, economic, academic, and political spheres with this data.

Our perspective in this paper is directly informed by Currie et al. (2016), who employ a critical approach to data and the concept of data assemblage to police officer-involved homicide (POIH) data in Los Angeles. They argue that we must position data within power struggles to really understand its qualities. They do this by inviting community groups to explore the POIH data in a hackathon-style event. During this event, community organizations considered how homicide data is collected, granted meaning and value, and operated on. Building off of the work of Dalton and Thatcher (2014), Currie et al. (2016) define counter-data action as an act of data appropriation, whereby individuals intervene to contest the truth of a dataset and construct their own metrics (Currie et al., 2016: 4).

Schrock (2016) also looks at the use of data in the hackathon context and identifies “data activism” to occur when civic hackers use data with a political end, for instance, opening up data, contesting data, and creating alternative modes of political participation through data. Milan and van der Velden (2016) develop a theoretical framework for data activism and divide the activity into two typologies: proactive and reactive data activism. Proactive data activism describes an affirmative engagement with data in order to achieve a political goal through data-enabled democratic agency while reactive subverts data collection or surveillance (Milan and van der Velden, 2016). Taken together, these concepts of proactive data activism and counter-data action aptly describe WALT’s data intervention. They found county data to be inaccurate and intervened to not only decry the validity of the authority’s data but to construct a new dataset and put it to use.

Currie et al. (2016) make a distinction that their counter-data activity was done to interrogate and make meaning, not to advocate for policy change, and that the counter-data action they reported on was limited in time and scope. They call for investigation into more sustained engagement between datasets and communities. Because our work with WALT has a longer arc than a hackathon, we are able to trace WALT’s initial counter-data action from interrogation to subsequent data assemblage processes including analysis and presentation. Through Currie et al. (2016), we are reminded of Hacking’s claim that not only do we use data to count, quantify, and govern, we can also use data as a creative form of resistance (Hacking, 2006). We thus add to the critical data studies literature an investigation into how counter-data activities over time support WALT’s work of resistance and transformation.

Who and What is WALT?

To the immediate west of downtown Atlanta lies a collection of historic neighborhoods, collectively called “the Westside.” These neighborhoods were formally designated for black families, as the city pursued racially segregated community planning and housing development in the aftermath of the 1906 race riots (Silver and Moeser, 1995). The black families who settled the Westside ranged from working poor to Atlanta’s first black millionaire, Alonzo Herndon. In the 1960s the homes, churches, and businesses of Vine City and English Avenue became vibrant spaces for organizing and leading the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King Jr. chose the Westside neighborhood of Vine City to raise his family. Despite this legacy of vibrant community, the life and condition of the neighborhoods have deteriorated significantly in the past few decades. From 2000 to 2010, the Westside neighborhood’s resident population dropped by 15.9% (Neighborhood Nexus, 2015). Income inequality is also notable, with a family in Vine City earning on average of $24,610, half of the city of Atlanta’s median family income (Neighborhood Nexus, 2015). Families in the Westside neighborhood of English Avenue earn on average of $15,914, which is less than a third of the median family income in the city of Atlanta (Neighborhood Nexus, 2015).

Due to delinquent investors and persistent poverty, there has been a significant increase in vacancy and abandonment leading to blight, disrepair, and high levels of crime. In the past few years, attention to resident displacement and gentrification has grown with the contentious announcement of the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, a new billion-dollar recreational sport facility breaking ground adjacent to the blighted neighborhoods. This billion-dollar facility was funded in part with public funds. The community was promised a benefits plan that would outline development projects to benefit the neighborhood. Residents openly expressed frustration with how they were excluded from decision-making processes for the stadium and related development in the Westside, but remained committed to restoring the life of their community.

The WALT began in 2013 with the main objective of building the capacity of residents “to have the opportunity to live in an affordable home of their own” (Westside Atlanta Land Trust, 2014). Their strategy to achieving this is multifaceted, but central to it is the establishment of a CLT. The CLT is essentially a dual ownership model, where the land is owned by a community-based non-profit organization with a mission of affordable housing and the homeowner enters into a long-term ground lease of the land and an affordable resale value with the CLT. In this dual ownership model, because the organization owns the land, they are responsible for property taxes. Accordingly, the homeowner is never vulnerable to increases in property value due to new development and therefore is less likely to be displaced. A CLT is guaranteed to be community-driven because the governing members are comprised of leaseholders, other community members, and local government and non-government figures with political or economic resources to support the CLT (Greenstien and Sungu-Eryilmaz, 2005). In their efforts to achieve a CLT in Atlanta, WALT has engaged in training residents in the CLT model as well as organizational and leadership skills; connecting residents with technical and professional experts; establishing and maintaining an outdoor learning classroom on one of their properties; and advocating for a CLT and city-wide CLT policy by educating residents, local politicians, and philanthropists on the CLT model and why it makes sense for Atlanta’s Westside. In addition to the community advocacy context of this work, we note its relationship to the local smart city and Big Data initiatives. Throughout this research and design, our work and the counter-data actions of WALT sits at the cusp of Big Data, and associated discourses, such as those of the so-called smart cities. Local officials aspire to the label of smart and pursue intelligent technologies, policies, and practices—and data—that can scale and make city government and operations more efficient. Meanwhile, we observe this community-based organizations’ seeking to remain as relevant as sensors and Big Data to civic decision-making by engaging in their own data collection and data analysis practices.

Research methods and our relationship with WALT

We were first introduced to WALT through a presentation of our prior research that mapped funding patterns in the English Avenue and Vine City neighborhoods. After presenting our data and map to the Executive Director of WALT, she relayed the story of the inadequate windshield survey on the built environment conducted by local county officials and went on to share how WALT had collected 1900 data points to catalog the built environment in the neighborhoods. She explained that residents had become “desensitized to the slow decline of the neighborhood” but that through the data collection activity, resident data collectors started to see with new awareness the extensive blight in the English Avenue and Vine City neighborhoods. She opened her laptop and pulled up a map of this data on her ArcGIS account and used the table view to filter for properties owing significant back taxes. She explained the process of matching their built environment data collection to county data. Looking again at the investments map, she pointed out the “massive billion-dollar investment” next to a neighborhood without potable drinking water. At the close of the conversation, we asked if the dataset we had just presented (documenting funding patterns in the neighborhoods) would be of use to her work and offered to share that data with WALT. She did not say “Yes,” instead, she answered with a request: “[I] would like an analysis or infoviz of what we could do in our neighborhood with just one dollar per parking space from one game at the stadium.” This request launched an ongoing relationship with WALT, through which we (as university researchers, staff, and students) have endeavored to accompany WALT in their inquiries into the community and the articulation of local data.

In terms of method, our research is broadly ethnographic. This includes participation in group activities from data collection to workshops to meetings, semi-structured interviews, informal oral histories, and the analysis of existing media systems and artifacts. WALT holds monthly board meetings that one of the authors attends on a regular basis, at the invitation of WALT. The other author has attended these meetings on occasion, and, at the request of WALT, assists in the organization in strategy and planning activities. The authors, together with students have also participated in data collection activities with WALT, as members of the organization canvas the neighborhood collecting data on the built environment through both observation and informal interviews (discussions on the street) with residents. In addition, we regularly accompany WALT to meetings with city officials, foundations, and other community organizations, roughly 1 to 3 times a month.

Our ethnographic data is comprised of field notes from our meetings and activities with WALT together with the various media artifacts we have and continue to create together. Fields notes are taken by multiple researchers, often attending the same event, and then collected together for analysis using an online qualitative coding tool. Throughout our research, thematic coding was used to analyze and synthesize concepts from the field notes and the artifacts, but we do not rely solely on this method to make meaning of our experiences and relay findings. Thematic coding employs the methods of a general grounded theory approach; however, substantive categories are identified from the literature and first texts as a guide (Flick, 2009). Accordingly, coding categories were chosen based on successive reflections on in-field observations framed by the OGD and empowerment literature.

Drawing on practices of participatory design and community media (Boler, 2010; Simonsen and Robertson, 2012), we are also involved in various kinds of media making together with WALT in support of their data collection efforts. Over the past two years we have engaged approximately 10 media and design projects. Some of these are relatively simple and quick, such as designing a flyer for a community data collection event. Others require significantly more time such as designing a video with animated information graphics explaining the tax structures behind a CLT and its specific implications for the English Avenue and Vine City neighborhoods. We also have an ongoing project of developing maps and information graphics for WALT that display their collected data across a variety of views into the data such the spatial distribution of back taxes owed and potential properties to acquire. Finally, we regularly assist WALT in various activities of data cleaning and organizing. The design and production of these artifacts, and the conversations that occur through the attendant processes of collaboration around and with data and media, are a core source of our ethnographic data and insights.

In what follows, we describe and analyze the data practices of WALT, drawing from our research and theories from ODG and critical data studies. We employ frameworks from critical social theory and social movement studies that enable us to bolster the ODG and critical data studies framing, terminology, and understanding of data activism and counter-data action. We have clustered our discussion around four themes: counter-data action and the legacy of black data activism, resource mobilization through data activism, sensitization and critical consciousness making through data activism, and data activism through design and media. Taken together, these themes and practices provide an empirical account of data activism over multiple years, and contribute to an appreciation of the possibilities and limitations of the use of data by communities for social change.

Discussion

Counter-data action and the legacy of black data activism

WALT’s desire to systematically collect data on the built environment, with an emphasis on blight, is multifaceted. There is an instrumental motivation to produce an accurate dataset that can be used to support arguments and decision-making. This motivation is common within the rhetoric of data. Particularly in civic contexts, there exists the idea that data can and should be precise and true and that such data, if appropriately collected and maintained, can improve decision-making (Baack, 2016; Fortun et al., 2016; Rieder and Simon, 2016; Rosenberg, 2013). This strategy of collecting and presenting data is not new to WALT’s community—and by community we refer to both race and place. More than a century before OGD and data activism scholars explored the use of data in communities, Dr WEB Du Bois conducted a series of studies out of the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory from 1898 to 1907 that were meant to provide objective, empirical data on urban black Americans (Wright, 2006). Students, alumni, and community researchers in cities across the south conducted interviews, questionnaires, and participant observation (Wright, 2006). Du Bois believed reports from these objective studies could help his nation “rise above its racial intolerance” (Du Bois, 1961). He encouraged black people to effectively study their conditions by becoming trained in observation and social science methods (Du Bois and Aptheker, 1985). During a speech to a group of teachers in Athens, Georgia, Du Bois explained that people must understand a social problem before they seek to solve it (Du Bois and Aptheker, 1985: 71) and went on to describe his methodological practice of mailing out 2500 surveys to black merchants. He represented this data in hand drawn visualizations at the Paris Conference in 1900.

The black legacy of using data to describe and address a social problem and advocate for social change provides a context in which to understand and appreciate why counter-data action is a valuable pursuit by our partners. WALT’s target neighborhoods sit just north of the Atlanta University Center and their work recently involves this neighborhood. The community’s collection and use of data is a strategy to demonstrate knowing, to not be silent, and to speak objectively to white (and black) people of power. Similar to Du Bois’ studies, WALT makes use of “insider researchers” or community researchers to carry out their data collection (Wright, 2006: 5). One such example of the use of data to articulate both knowledge of the neighborhood and a plan for affordable housing was in a presentation to Atlanta City Council’s Human Resources and Community Development Committee. WALT requested time to present on the CLT model to this committee. They relied heavily on data in their effort to convince the council to pursue a CLT policy. The powerpoint included screenshots of cartoDB maps and each committee council member was given a handout with an analysis of how a community revolving fund from the new Mercedes-Benz stadium could fund the development of CLT properties. We recognize that this conviction to proactively engage with data is demonstrative of the continued legacy of scholars and activists like Du Bois’ and Ida B Wells, who carefully documented data on lynchings across the south and published this data in A Red Record.

The strategy to collect and present data also finds resonance with Audre Lorde’s writings on critical social theory and explanation of the connection between scrutiny and power. Sister Outsider includes an article published in 1977 in which she advocates for people of color to interrogate and speak stating:

as we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us. (Lorde, 2007: 36)

Lorde aligns Wells, Du Bois, and the concepts of data activism and counter-data actions in her position that scrutiny, and products of that scrutiny, are powerful and necessary alternatives to silence. Following from Lorde, we can understand the data in the counter-data actions of WALT as both the object and the product of scrutiny, it is with and through data that communities interrogate and speak back to contemporary conditions.

WALT is well aware of the complexities of data collection and the limitations of the rhetoric often found in discussions of civic data. Indeed, as previously noted, it was precisely a failure of accurate data collection that initially motivated WALT to become more engaged with data. Still, while critical, members of WALT are also tactical with regard to significance of data in the contemporary civic context. They recognize that many municipal governments as well as non-governmental organizations are embracing data as key to civic action, and in some cases social change (Dalton and Thatcher, 2014; Jasanoff, 2017; Kitchin and Lauriault, 2014; Milan and van der Velden, 2016). This interest in data as key to civic action is certainly the case in Atlanta, and members of WALT thus see data as necessary, if not sufficient, in achieving their vision. As one member of WALT explained, “if the language is not data-driven, it doesn’t exist. If the language is not data-certified, it doesn’t exist. If the language is not data-referenced talking points, it doesn’t exist, particularly for public policy.” WALT’s use of data gives empirical basis to recent theoretical typologies of data activism labeled as affirmative engagement with data or reactive resistance to data (Milan and van der Velden, 2016).

From these historical practices and theoretical perspectives, we can situate and appreciate WALT’s counter-data action and counter-data action more broadly as part of the legacy and continued black practice of data collection and data articulation through data-based medias. Moreover, we can see this localized effort as another site of exploration in the use of data for examining black lives, alongside endeavors like the Sentencing Project’s series of analyses on incarceration data beginning in 1990 (The Sentencing Project, 1986), the Mapping Police Violence Project (2014) and Data for Black Lives (2015). Across these projects, individuals, organizations, and their campaigns rely on objectivity as the lynchpin to provide truthful accounts to decision makers and contest rhetoric and practices that oppress.

Resource mobilization through data activism

WALT’s vision of housing justice is predicated on community land ownership and assembly. As such, the most instrumental use of data for WALT is in making material gains, in particular acquiring property. While other forms of transformative empowerment are important, it is fair to ask whether WALT’s work with data has resulted in any material gains towards a CLT. The answer is yes: WALT has made strategic use of their data to expand their real estate portfolio.

After the initial collection of built environment data, which included street addresses and property conditions of neighborhood parcels, WALT members searched each parcel in the county tax assessor’s online portal for back tax amounts and recorded this in their dataset along with the contact information of the owner. Parcels attached to significant amounts of back taxes were flagged as potential CLT properties. WALT contacted these owners, who were often heirs, explained the mission of the CLT, and offered them the opportunity to transfer the deed to the organization. This strategy resulted in the acquisition of five CLT properties in the English Avenue and Vine City neighborhoods and a total of 11 on the Westside.

WALT’s dataset has also become a negotiating point with local decision makers—when local foundations and city policy makers make requests to access the dataset, WALT is able to request an audience for presenting their agenda. Most recently, a policy advisor to a city council member and 2017 mayoral candidate requested access to WALT’s data. As these asks occur, WALT is able to use the requests as evidence in arguments for the legitimacy of their standing as civic actors: if the data collected and maintained by WALT is in demand, then WALT as an organization also gains credibility, which then in turn bolsters the standing of their policy objectives. Returning to the notion of a counter-data action (Currie et al., 2016; Dalton and Thatcher, 2014), the recognition of WALT’s data as timely and accurate (as evidenced by repeated requests from local foundations and city policy makers) shifts the authority away from the county to the community. This new data collection becomes an act of counter-data action by “appropriation and intervention” and an opportunity to mobilize data to assemble the legitimacy to contest the authority of the county in producing accurate data (Currie et al., 2016: 4). WALT also used the data collection activity as a way to employ local residents. They designed a data collection process that would not only augment the number of data points and improve the accuracy of the county data but would also employ local residents with an hourly wage.

In addition to acquisition of property, and data collection, data offers WALT opportunities to expand organizational capacity through the activation of partnerships. It is important to acknowledge that, for WALT, there is a resignation to this research. The community is well aware of the political economy of research: for WALT, research is accommodated as a mode of engagement for other purposes. Gutierrez and Milan (2017) call this outcome the organizational purpose of data activism. Here, we identify this organizational purpose or empowerment as a collective affair, achieved actively in and through data and relations. This is evidenced in WALT’s work with academic institutions, which is neither accidental nor circumstantial—it is a strategic move to leverage relational capacity and status. The pursuit of data, then, is useful not just for the end of data collection but also to establish relationships with local academic institutions. Recognizing the interest of universities in data-driven research, WALT made strategic offers of partnership—quite astutely proffering the opportunity for academics to collect local data that would serve WALT. Through these partnerships, as WALT continued to meet with city officials and foundation directors, they looked to academic partners to bring legitimacy. WALT believed that the city considered local academic institutions to be domain experts and a legitimate voice in issues of city planning. They qualify this belief by citing past projects the city has implemented that grew out of academic research projects. They were aware that their use of data might not translate into immediate and direct influence, but the accompaniment of academics in their data activities further legitimized their work. However, despite years of advocacy, there is no CLT or CLT policy. Taken together, the lack of success in policy-advocacy campaigning with data and the strategy of leveraging academic relationships for legitimacy demonstrate that in this context data in itself does not provide the power to influence decision makers as the OGD enthusiasts might expect. But still, data collection and use of data in articulating advocacy campaigns were considered valuable opportunities for collaboration and relationship building with academic partners. Moreover, these empowering relationships were activated by and centered on counter-data action.

We can also position the strategy and relational gains of community-academic data collection and activism (Gutierrez and Milan, 2017) within the framework of a multi-institutional approach to social movements (Armstrong and Bernstein, 2008). There is a relation between these organizational practices and outcomes of data activism and Armstrong and Bernstein’s (2008) broadened, multi-sited, multi-institutional approach to conceptualizing social movement. Armstrong and Bernstein (2008) highlight acts of power and oppression that occur outside state and political processes. They surface organizational, communal and cultural sites as locations or levers of oppression, struggle, and gain. With this expanded definition of social movements, we observe WALT’s explicit strategy of using institutions such as universities as a social movement strategy to counter other institutions like city council and local philanthropies. In addition, one of the distinctive contributions of Armstrong and Bernstein (2008) is the recognition that social movements might strive for cultural as well as political goals, that the outcomes of social movements might be related to issues of identity as well as resources. As they note, this requires that we as researchers consider more broadly the work of social movements, recognizing that “challenges that appear to be primarily about distribution are also over social honor, and the ways in which contestations over meaning are critical to the fate of struggles over resources.” (Armstrong and Bernstein, 2008: 86). This is indeed the case with WALT as we will discuss in the subsequent section: for WALT the outcome of counter-data actions is not just data or the hope for acquisition of property, it is also in affective encounters that prompt sensitization and critical consciousness.

Sensitization and critical conscious making through data activism

Data collection also serves affective purposes for WALT, which they believe are of equal importance to the tactical purposes of producing accurate datasets that can be “used.” One aspect of these affective purposes is a process of sensitizing, or re-sensitizing residents to the environment itself. According to WALT, members of the English Avenue and Vine City neighborhoods have become “numb to the environment,” no longer seeing the blight, or taking it as a given of the neighborhood. One young resident recounted the sadness and confusion he experienced every time his friends moved away. He never understood why at the beginning of each school year there were more and more empty desks. It was only after he participated in collecting data on the built environment with WALT as a high school senior that he connected the empty desks to blight and abandonment and to the issue of housing affordability. Milan and van der Velden (2016) would say this is exemplary of the epistemic culture of data activism, which gives us new, data-enabled agency to filter and make sense of the world around us. The work of black feminist scholar Audre Lorde is again useful. Lorde (2007: 68) distinguishes between knowing and understanding. For Lorde, knowledge serves understanding. With this lens we could say that as a result of the knowledge gained through counter-data action, the young resident better understood his experience in the neighborhood. Lorde believes there is a need for examination and self-actualization before any true advancement through transformation can occur (Lorde, 2007: 46). She calls for individuals to reassess the qualities of their lives and examine the ways their world can be truly different (Lorde, 2007: 55). We find data collection/counter-data action to be an appropriate activity towards this end of empowerment.

Members of WALT use data collection as a way to call attention to the blight and to, hopefully, reorient residents’ positions and spark desires for change. As the community researchers explain, by walking the neighborhood and cataloging the built environment they came to see more acutely the prevalence of blight and vacancy. Data collection became a way of generating not simply awareness of the conditions, but a sensitivity to the conditions and to their own experience of and situation of being blinded to these conditions. As residents carefully cataloged each blighted and abandoned structure, they engaged in the critical reflection characteristic of a counter-data action. One community leader explained this saying, “People that live here didn’t realize how many dilapidated houses there were here until we mapped them. When you are oppressed, when you have Stockholm Syndrome, you don’t realize how tough it is.” Data collection was not only an opportunity to reflect on the environment or advocate for policy change, it was also an opportunity for residents to reflect upon their own subjectivity as people who lived and were affected by the environment.

This finding is significant and not sufficiently discussed in data activism or critical data studies literature. We find Freire to offer important theoretical foundation to understand how sensitization and/or conscientizar through data collection supports data activism. Writing from his experience as an educator in Brazil working with sugar cane harvesters, Freire requests that we learn to perceive the social and economic order we exist in. As we discover ourselves as active participants in this order, we can reflect, become critical, and we can actively engage to transform the order. We think counter-data action offers a praxis-oriented method to do just what Freire requests. This is evidenced in WALT’s claims that collaborative data collection has the potential to arouse residents’ awareness of their situation and shift attention towards care for the neighborhood in the moment and for what its futures might be. This committed involvement and conviction to transformation exemplifies Freire’s discussion of discovery and co-intentional recreation of knowledge (Freire, 2000: 69). Again, counter-data data collection is a way to practice and achieve this committed involvement, intentional recreation of knowledge, and critical conscious.

Data activism through design and media

Of course, data does not just exist in the abstract, it fills and is given form. Drawing from our experience in design and media production, much of our work with WALT has been assisting in giving form to the data. One way data is given form is through maps. The majority of the maps used by WALT are constructed and maintained through CartoDB, an open and accessible platform for mapping and hosting data. Although CartoDB lacks some of the functionality of ArcGIS (the standard for mapping and spatial analysis, particularly in planning), it is more than suitable for the needs of WALT, and indeed, facilitates easy customization of the aesthetics of the maps, which can be important for the rhetorical purposes for which these maps are commonly used.

Although the maps are regularly used in presentations to city council and foundations, the maps are also often used within the organization. Specifically, within WALT, maps and mapping work to provide coherent views of the neighborhood, which then prompt reflective discussion and help set courses for action. Put another way, the maps provide an opportunity for reflection similar to the data collection, but separated by time—the maps allow for ongoing reflection after the activity of data collection, and in a format that is shareable. This exemplifies a line of thinking in critical cartography exploring maps and mapping as reflexive endeavors (Crampton and Krygier, 2005; Dodge et al., 2011; Wood, 2010), yet another form of a counter-data action.

One of the distinctive qualities of the maps is that they allow for representations that are both communal and multiple. Rather than striving for a singular representation of the neighborhood, WALT uses the maps to allow for a multiplicity of representations to be made, each sharing the common factor of the geography of the neighborhood, but each also offering differing views on the community as expressed through data. For instance, one map presented investments by size made by different actors in different locations on the Westside. Another one presented every parcel as a point color coded by neighborhood and sized by how much was owed in back taxes, and hovering over each point displayed the occupancy and condition of the parcel. While reviewing this map during a workshop, one WALT member described being pleasantly surprised by the neighborhood comparison. She had always felt like people were most critical of her neighborhood for tax delinquency, but saw it was more even between the neighborhoods. A third map presented the density of vacant properties per block. In each case, the maps functioned to visualize a particular issue of concern in relation to the specifics of the neighborhood.

As we continued to meet sometimes weekly with WALT, the members continued to request maps and visualizations. WALT members were convinced that data, specifically tax roll data, would legitimize their argument for a CLT. In one planning meeting of how to use maps to make this argument, the Executive Director of WALT requested data analysis and maps that would show “what [no action] costs in unpaid taxes, versus stabiliz[ing] with a CLT, versus skyrocketing gentrification over 3, 5, and 7 years.” Our team at Georgia Tech conducted the analysis, mapped it, and made infographics and a 5-minute video. This use of data exemplifies Hacking’s (2006) notion that data can be used as a creative form of resistance. There is a persistent hope that the WALT data, presented effectively and creatively, will convince city officials and people of power that the CLT model should be implemented. As Kitchin and Lauriault (2014) contends, data is embedded with aspirations and goals. And as WALT demonstrates, the aspirations and goals are also embedded with data. WALT affirms data studies scholars’ findings that there is much at stake, much to be gained, through this counter-data action, media creation and subsequent data activism (Currie et al., 2016; Dalton et al., 2016).

Conclusion

Throughout the discourse on communities and data, there is a persistent theme of empowerment—an assumption (sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit) that the possession and use of data by communities can be enabling (Corburn, 2005; Fortun et al., 2016; Loh et al., 2002; Ogneva-Himmelberger et al., 2010). As discussed in the earlier sections on OGD and critical data studies, literature from those fields set up the expectation that data will empower marginalized groups. In the case of WALT, this might be assumed to mean power over the policy-making process. Power is often treated as a zero-sum game and the implication seems to be that possession of data will, in some way, refactor that sum towards communities as they acquire more and more data. For instance, Gutierrez and Milan (2017) claim that proactive data activism projects trigger emancipatory processes, one being the generation of “an alternative digital public sphere for equal participation.” Although that might be the case in some projects, our experience with WALT and our analysis suggest otherwise. Instead, we observe grassroots data action as most effective for communal gains and multi-institutional strategies.

Our analysis of the field notes and interviews reveals that while data is often discussed in reference to the municipal government, empowerment is most associated with residents and their collection of new data and use of that new data. Hence, while data is a strategic asset pursued with the intent to influence the policy process within halls of government, empowerment was a process that occurred within the community, through resource mobilization, relationship building, and development of critical conscious. That is, although data is seen as a necessary component of making claims of municipal government as part of a familiar performance of contentious politics, data is not de facto “power-over” municipal government. This finding counters the OGD enthusiasts’ notion that the social impact of data occurs as marginalized groups use data to obtain influence over policy makers. Rather, what data seems to enable is the development of greater self-reliance and new subjectivities through the counter-data action of affective data collection. This data collection also enabled new vectors of action and associations that empowered WALT in advocacy settings. Thus, data still affects power relations, but it is a shift from conditions seen as who has power over whom, to conditions in which exercise of power unfolds through diverse registers, not limited to conventional structures and repertoires. If inclusion is not the end goal (Freire, 2000), then the use of the term “marginalized” and notions of power and impact through data should be reexamined. In data activism, power and impact can also be witnessed when a community uses data to generate communal empowerment, through greater self reliance, critical consciousness, and multi-institutional leverage.

What we have provided in this paper, then, is an analysis of a data activism project, with a focus on counter-data actions. First, we recognize counter-data action and data activism as deeply rooted in black activism and the civil rights legacy. We bring the activity of data collection to the discussion and framing of counter-data action. We surface that when residents engage in data collection the experience of that process can sensitize and orient participants to conditions that otherwise might be overlooked, and in turn develop a critical perspective on data from that environment. From this orientation and sensitization, a grassroots organization proceeded to use data to mobilize resources, build organizational networks, and advocate using design and media. As of writing this article, WALT continues to work for long-term affordable housing in the English Avenue and Vine City neighborhoods in Atlanta, GA, and they continue to use data as a cornerstone of that work. Although it is impossible to know what the outcome of their struggle will be—whether they will achieve their goals of self-determination and social justice—they persist in collecting data and designing media to advocate, and we continue to accompany them in this process. As researchers, we continue to co-design and co-create data, systems, and media with grassroots groups to learn how data is made useful in civic projects for social justice.