Bridging digital divides: We are proud partners of the CDH Social Data School 2021

In the data-driven age, we believe it is our duty to help bridge some of the digital divides that plague our societies. The Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy is proud to partner on the CDH Social Data School 2021.

We are pleased to announce that applications are open to the CDH Social Data School 2021, taking place entirely online from 16-29 June.

Originally conceived by Cambridge Digital Humanities, this year’s event is organised in association with us, the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy. We co-designed and will deliver together a new version of an already outstanding initiative.

Two of our goals at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy are to enhance public understanding of digital technologies and build journalistic capacity to interrogate big data and Big Tech.

These goals align neatly with the objectives of a Data School, borne out of the need to democratise the exploration of digital methods and push back against abusive practices of data appropriation and exploitation by internet giants.

I was part of the team that originally put together the Data School pilot, back in 2019, and it was clear to us then that academia was, once again, falling short on its mission and failing the public it should serve.

In the data-driven age, we believe it is our duty to help bridge some of the digital divides that plague our societies.

The yawing skills-gap between those who can and those who cannot understand key aspects of digital data manipulation and analysis, is one of the digital divides that must be urgently closed.

For that purpose, the CDH Social Data School utilises in-house expertise in digital methods and provides hands-on training and knowledge exchange across sectors, professions and disciplines.

Who can apply?

We invite, in particular, people and organisations whose role is to form and inform the public, such as journalists, watchdogs and NGOs, academics, and civil servants, to join us in Cambridge.

The CDH Social Data School also strives to address, even if modestly, other digital divides that fall along the traditional class, gender and racial fault-lines.

Although open to all, the selection procedure prioritises individuals from organisations whose access to digital methods training is limited or non-existent due to insufficient human or financial resources, especially the ones located in the Global South

Furthermore, we particularly welcome applications from women and black and minority ethnic candidates as they have historically been under-represented in the technology and data science sectors.

While this will do little to redress centuries of colonial, affluent, white, male fuelled inequalities, we at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy believe that academic institutions, widely perceived as bastions of elitism, have a special responsibility to adopt inclusive practices and adapt our events to pressing public needs.

If academics want to remain relevant and have proper impact beyond obtuse journal impact factors, we must remove the barriers standing in the way of cross-sectorial and interdisciplinary dialogue.

The CDH Social Data School is a venue for that dialogue and an avenue to foster the development of better technical, legal and ethical practices in digital methods research. Both our delivery format and our programme intend to facilitate a conversation among professions, disciplines and methods.

Whenever someone asks to describe the CDH Social Data School format the term “data stroll” comes to mind.

It bears some resemblance with what our colleague Tommaso Venturini calls a “data sprint”, intensive code and data-driven gatherings of people with different skill sets focused on specific research question, but with a more critical and even contemplative nature.

For starters, the pace is slower as we intend to reflect critically upon problems arising from data rather than solving them in a week.

This peripatetic wondering confers the Data School its “strolling” colours. It caters more to “adventurous beginners” willing to get their hands dirty than to data whizzes obsessed over data cleaning.

It is less about having experts looking into a pool of data than about inviting participants to share their knowledge and experiences within the context of a guided immersion into digital methods.

For these reasons, having people from diverse backgrounds is not just a matter of desegregating or decolonising curricula but also an opportunity to confront and learn from different regional, disciplinary, cultural or gender informed perspectives over the widespread practices of data surveillance.

In the context of the Social Data School, democratising access to digital methods is also a call to reclaim our data and demonstrate that data appropriated for private profit can be reappropriated for the common good.

This year’s programme is very rich and ambitious, covering topics ranging from data protection and surveillance to machine learning.

We will also try to make (some) sense of the online disinformation nonsense.

If you are a journalist who has the interest but lacks the tools to investigate the spread of misinformation, work for an NGO who wants to monitor online abuses, a watchdog trying to assess the impact of Machine Learning, a civil servant working to improve the health of our online spaces, an academic willing but hesitant to experiment with digital methods, the Social Data School was designed for you.