Refusing Settler Colonial Data Logics

Jas Rault

As a scholar whose digital humanities work emerges more from the humanities than the digital, my interest in data comes from my broader research orientation toward the political and material work of mundane aesthetics and rhetoric, and specifically the aesthetics and rhetoric of settler colonialism. I grapple with the ways that settler colonial values and interests are rendered not only normal and common sense, but attractive as formations of aesthetic sophistication, efficient and “catchy” information design and communication, good taste or cool style—and how contemporary data economies emerge from and contribute to the logics and looks of settler coloniality. Most recently, my work takes up the question of how transparency (in aesthetics and data practice) has become “the settler colonial version of justice” (Rault, 937). That is, within structures of settler coloniality, open data looks trustworthy.

Most academic research culture is built on and continues the logics of settler colonialism; learning how to study, generate, analyze, and use data against the priorities of what Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls “the possessive logics of patriarchal white sovereignty” (xi), resource theft, and value extraction often means refusing academic rubrics of success. From scholars like Audra Simpson, Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang, and Glen Coulthard, we learn that refusal is a generative praxis of Indigenous survivance, the ongoing assertion of an authority beyond settler colonial aesthetics, certainties, politics, scholarship, and solutions. Refusal is a “no” to coercive settler colonial logics of recognition, inclusion, and participation and a “yes” to decolonial resource and information management and anti-colonial research priorities. As a form of Indigenous information management, refusal means setting limits around what information can be shared—what should be accessible to all, what needs protecting—and provides a fundamental challenge to liberal white settler colonial versions of truth and justice. As Simpson puts it:

To speak of limits in such a way makes some liberal thinkers uncomfortable, and may, to them, seem dangerous. When access to information, to knowledge, to the intellectual commons is controlled by the people who generate that information, it can be seen as a violation of shared standards of justice and truth. (“On Ethnographic Refusal,” 74)

Indeed, if liberal values of justice and truth are violated when Indigenous, Black, and what Tuck and Yang call “Orientalized . . . and other communities of overstudied Others” (223) refuse to share access to the resources, knowledges, and information that they have cultivated, cared for, and generated, we see quite starkly the extent to which liberalism is designed to protect white (settler) colonial property, possession, value, justice, and mundane common sense of goodness (Rifkin).

As Indigenous digital humanities and data studies have explained for years, prioritizing community cultural protocols often puts a digital project at odds with open-access and open-data principles. Mukurtu is perhaps the best-known example of a tiered-access and contextual content management system designed according to Indigenous community priorities, or what Mukurtu cocreator Kimberly Christen has called the “sociality of information” (2887). We might also look to the Pollution Reporter app, designed in 2019 by the Environmental Justice Lab at University of Toronto—co-led by environmental researchers and land protectors Vanessa Gray and Beze Gray (Anishinaabe, Aamjiwnaang First Nation), Michelle Murphy (Métis, Winnipeg), and TRU Lab manager Kristen Bos (urban Métis), along with lab members Reena Shadaan, and Fernanda Yanchapaxi. The mobile app is designed to track and report pollution in Ontario’s Chemical Valley, with a particular focus on “the Imperial Oil Refinery of Sarnia, one of the oldest operating refineries in the world, which is on the traditional Anishinaabek territory, and particularly the land of Aamjiwnaang First Nation” (Gray et al.). As the creators explain:

Pollution Reporter hopes to support community members’ abilities to link health harms to companies and pollution without having to demonstrate their own health harms and be subjected to extractive research. In respect of Indigenous Data Sovereignty, Pollution Reporter does not collect data about its users, and users are in full control of their reports to the Ministry of Environment. (Gray et al.)

The app flips the script of commercial and research data norms, allowing Aamjiwnaang First Nation to collect and share proprietary commercial data (about pollutants and their health effects) without collecting and sharing data about Aamjiwnaang people. The app provides information about the pollution from Imperial Oil and allows community members to report pollution events to the Ontario Ministry of Environment, but importantly, it does not demand or collect data from app users.

In 2019, the Global Indigenous Data Alliance (GIDA) was formed by representatives of three large Indigenous data sovereignty organizations—the Maiam nayri Wingara Collective (Australia); Te Mana Raraunga Maori Data Sovereignty Network (Aotearoa New Zealand); and the United States Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network—and their first project was to augment existing international open-data principles. GIDA argues that “the current movement toward open data and open science does not fully engage with Indigenous Peoples’ rights and interests,” and so it has proposed the principles of CARE (Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics) to supplement the existing principles of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). As GIDA puts it, “The emphasis on greater data sharing alone creates a tension for Indigenous Peoples who are also asserting greater control over the application and use of Indigenous data and Indigenous Knowledge for collective benefit.” For all DH scholars, but especially those of us committed to anti-colonial, Black, Indigenous, trans feminist, and queer forms of life, this means divesting from settler colonial values and aesthetics of transparency—including the assumed good of openness, freedom, sharing, and the commons.

In the digital humanities, this can mean not onlining the archive of minoritized cultural heritage materials that you and your team have spent years digitizing until you have consent from every person named or photographed, every person whose lives or work created those materials, and developed creative metadata practices to protect rather than expose these materials. In the two projects that I codirect with T.L. Cowan—the Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory (DREC) and the Cabaret Commons—we endeavor to put these principles to practice. While both projects are grounded in my and Cowan’s research and experience in trans feminist queer (TFQ) cultural heritage, they take their leadership from Indigenous approaches to data sovereignty, digital archives, refusal, and relational responsibility. We chose not to online a large collection of TFQ cultural heritage materials that we, technically, had permission to post (both the collector and the photographer of the materials, as well as our university ethics boards, gave us permissions) because we did not have consent from every person named or imaged in the collection (and in some cases did not have names or means to contact those people) (Cowan and Rault, “Onlining Queer Acts”). Instead, we created DREC to share research stories about how we can or do pursue ethical and consentful work (Lee and Tolliver) in digital research environments. At Cabaret Commons, we publish work—focused on TFQ cabaret performance—that learns from the stories at DREC. Consentful practices in digital research might mean prioritizing small data and what Cowan and I think of as the slow work of “heavy processing,” a “lesbian-leaning trans-feminist and queer method of being together . . . [that forms] one genealogy of the many calls for better processing, better information politics in contemporary justice-oriented digital research methods” (Rault and Cowan). It certainly means taking up the labor of being responsible to more robust understandings of consent than we have inherited from settler colonial forms of governance, research norms and technologies.

Principle 11 reads: We refuse a data culture that reproduces the colonial “‘ruse of consent’ which papers over the very conditions of force and violence that beget ‘consent’” in the first place (Simpson, “Ruse of Consent,” 20). We commit to data practices developed by and for Indigenous peoples and in relations of reciprocity.

What Simpson calls “the ruse of consent” is the grand deception and collective delusion, foundational to settler colonial well-being, “that Indigenous peoples had all things been equal would have consented to have things taken, things stolen from them” (Simpson, “Ruse of Consent,” 29). Even if our research is not on, about, or with Indigenous peoples, those of us working within the ongoing structure of settler coloniality—that is, in Canada where I work, and the United States, where many of my collaborators work—our challenge as researchers is to refuse the naturalization of this ruse and to commit to relations of reciprocity and accountability that may indeed violate prevailing liberal colonial values and aesthetics of truth, justice, and transparency.

Accept Only: Feminist, Queer and Crip Theories of the “Compulsory,” or This Data Regime Can’t Take No for an Answer

T. L. Cowan

Principle 9 states: We refuse a data regime of ultimatums, coercive permissions, pervasive cookie collecting, and blocked access. Not everyone can safely refuse or opt out without consequence or further harm. We commit to “no” being a real option in all online interactions with data-driven products and platforms and to enacting a new type of data regime that knits the “no” into its fabric.

This principle emerges from a long and complicated feminist analysis of compulsory forms of belonging. One of my favorite pairings of feminist/queer/crip theory is the way that Robert McRuer’s “Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer Disabled Existence” takes up Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Together, these texts taught me how our social and political culture is shaped by the ways that “dominant identities are not really alternatives but rather the natural order of things” (McRuer, 89). As we were writing this Manifest-NO, I had a penny-dropping moment as I connected my long-ago reading of Rich and more recent reading of McRuer to my experiences of data bullying. I often talk with my students about those moments when “the penny drops”—those moments when all of a sudden we experience something that allows us to grasp the full heft, the big weighty centrality, the consequence of a concept or a full text that was previously perhaps just beyond or marginal to our understanding. Immediately, the newly grasped concept becomes an analytic that leads us to a more full understanding of something perhaps apparently unrelated. For me, the concept of compulsory modes of existence, like heterosexuality, able-bodiedness, and able-mindedness, has been one that has shaped my ways of thinking about and studying contemporary data culture.

As a queer person and a disabled person, I have often felt the ways that dominant modes of being are presented as inevitable and good, and I have long known that if I chose to go against the inevitable modes of being, or refused or failed to comply with the logics of inevitability, I would either be punished, rejected, or rendered invisible. This is how compulsory norms work. As the ubiquity of false choices about data collection began to proliferate in my daily life online, Rich’s and McRuer’s analyses helped me to understand the familiar relations of power on which these “choices” are based. Every day I am offered the choice to “accept” or consent to a limited range of data collection options while a much larger range of data collection practices are carried out whether I agree to them or not. It is like being told by the school bully that you have the option to either give up your lunch and your brown bag, or that you can give up your lunch and keep the brown bag. I realized, during our brainstorming for the Manifest-NO, that it is not only the kinds of data being collected, or the ways that “my data” are being used, but the way that data collection is framed that is so vile and so provocative for a trans feminist, queer, crip, anti-racist analysis.

Data politics is modeled on ongoing capitalist, colonial, and imperial structures of compulsory extraction-and-possession-for-profit of resources and humans as able-bodied laborers or wives. This model is a co-constitutive practice and logic with the stories we tell about cisgender male sexuality that “once triggered cannot take responsibility for itself or take no for an answer” (Rich, 25). An extension of this adage is that while women have historically “chosen” to give up/give away/submit to more than they might ideally wish to, in order to “accept” the previously set terms of heterosexual marriage, these choices are necessary in order for the system/site/institution to work how it needs to work. How many times do we look at the “partners” that a news site, for example, sells our data to and realize that, once sold, that news site has no responsibility for what those partners do with that data? Do we not find, more often than not, that there is no way to opt out from that partnership? Either we accept the data partnership and its terms—previously agreed to, unknown to us, and drawn up without our consultation—and give up/give away/submit to more than we might ideally wish to, or we choose not to access the content on that site, even though that content is often necessary for us to conduct our jobs that day, or even just to stay informed of global affairs. Not much of a choice, is it? How many times have you tried to access content blocked by a “cookies” notice, only to see that there is only an “accept” button and no “decline” or not even a “manage cookies” option? If you go along with it, you may access the materials you need and give away whatever they are taking/scraping. If you decline, you are booted off the site.

In the context of disability, McRuer explains that a universal, coercive “accept” signals a culturally predetermined good, one that has decided “in advance that we all agree: able-bodied identities, able-bodied perspectives, are preferable and what we all, collectively, are aiming for. A system of compulsory able-bodiedness repeatedly demands that disabled people embody for others an affirmative answer to the unspoken question, ‘Yes, but in the end, wouldn’t you rather be more like me?’” (93). When we encounter choices that are not real choices in our data encounters, we see another instance of the compulsory “yes,” which assumes, in advance, that we all agree. Who could possibly disagree? The alternative is so obviously more bother and trouble!

Compulsory data regimes operate by offering us only one legitimate choice, to which all other “choices” are subordinate. For example, when accessing Rich’s foundational (but not unproblematic) text, the Project Muse database displays a banner across the bottom portion of the screen that reads, “This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless.”

How many times per day are you threatened with the ultimatum that if you do not accept those cookies, do not accept being tracked by the site you need to access in order to do your job, that your “experience may not be seamless” or “optimal”? If I had a nickel for every time a relative told me that living a nonheterosexual life was going to be so much more difficult (i.e., would not be seamless) than if I would just accept a heterosexual life! If every disabled person in the world had a dollar for every time they were reminded that our way of being, our embodiment, our cognition, was not the “seamless” or optimal way of being. The message is consistent and clear: Either you accept the way the system is rigged and internalize it as natural, necessary, and normal and go along with it, or you deal with the consequences. It is not an overstatement to observe that our contemporary data regime makes sense only in the context of the naturalization and normalization of coercive relations of power. 

It is precisely through the daily, endless repetition of these non-choices that our current data regime operates. As McRuer notes in relation to sexuality, “compulsion is . . . produced and covered over, with the appearance of choice . . . mystifying a system in which there actually is no choice” (90). There is no option to not have your user data collected and collated for the financial gain of others—either you access that information or you don’t. Acquiescing to the normative relations of data collection is a prerequisite for belonging, for having access to the culture. In addition to the ways that the production of these “bad” choices, these non-seamless ways of inhabiting this data regime, constitute the seamlessness of the regime itself, the “disciplinary formation” of the regime coheres—modeled on systems of compulsory heterosexuality, able-bodiedness, whiteness, cisgender-ness, citizen-ness—as its “origins . . . are now obscured . . . emanating from everywhere and nowhere” (McRuer, 92). However, the political analytic tools offered by Rich, McRuer, and many other transformational thinkers give us a way to identify these origins so that we can see how we might inhabit data norms in the same way that lesbians, queers, and crips have been inhabiting systems of compulsory able-bodiedness and heterosexuality—by committing to living with, making work, and doing research in ways that take responsibility and take “no” as a real option, even when we are being railroaded into thinking that to refuse the compulsory forms of existence is to refuse existence itself. Rich argues that “in the absence of choice, women will remain dependent on the chance or luck of particular relationships and will have no collective power to determine the meaning and place of sexuality in their lives” (37). The Manifest-NO is our call to practice a critical digital humanities as a kind of collective action, a commitment to data existences that offer real choices to women and everyone so that we and our research participants and materials do not have to be dependent on the luck of the data relationships we enter into. Even a good data relationship may be one we want to get out of. 

The Digital Afterlives of Atlantic Slavery Archives

Tonia Sutherland

The increasing number of digital archives, databases, and other digitization projects focused on the slavery era are transforming how scholars in the digital humanities study the history of human enslavement. For example, Jessica Marie Johnson, writing for Social Text in 2018, considers the deeply human elements of the archives of Atlantic slavery in counterposition to the digital humanities’ drive for data. Similarly, in her 2019 article “Archival Encounters: Rethinking Access and Care in Digital Colonial Archives,” Daniela Agostinho argues that the digitization of the United States Virgin Island records by the National Danish Archives raises new questions about the limitations and possibilities of colonial archives. Agostinho contends that colonial histories of quantification have structured digital humanists’ technological encounters with colonial archives. While digitization projects centered on the pre-emancipation era hold the potential for powerful new humanistic narratives about Black resilience and redress to emerge, projects that take a more data-centric approach to the lived experiences of enslaved people have proved to be fraught and often problematic research sites. Here, I address concerns about the ways that the mass digitization and datafication of slavery-era archives have contributed to a distancing of the lived experiences of enslaved people from slavery’s historical imaginary, or what I call the digital afterlives of slavery-era archives.

The Manifest-NO’s principle 3 states: We refuse the use of data about people in perpetuity. We commit to embracing agency and working with intentionality, preparing bodies or corpuses of data to be laid to rest when they are not being used in service to the people about whom they were created.

Because of the significant temporal gap between the violence of the past and the visual experience of the present, when slavery-era records are digitized en masse, records appear and circulate in different contexts. This decontextualization removes the immediacy of trauma, giving archival records that document that trauma new afterlives. These records are then read and experienced as dislocated from human suffering. The extension of analog records into the digital—and the subsequent removal of historical context—exacerbates the inability of these archives’ historical subjects to construct their own agency, realities, or representations in the present. Principle 3 addresses the heart of an ongoing and increasing concern: even after death, Black people’s lives are extended, prolonged, and ultimately changed in the present, in the future, and even in history through new circulations, repetitions, and recontextualizations of data to various publics.

The documents and other records that constitute the archives of Atlantic slavery were created by colonizers and slaveholders. Rather than being faithful representations of the colonized and enslaved, they are a deeply complex, fraught, and often problematic set of sources that speak to how archives hold, produce, and reproduce agency, privilege, and power. Given the nature of slavery-era archives and the long-acknowledged problematics of the history of systems of archival production, it is important to continually critique these archives, posing critical questions about the history they represent and our affective relationship with the memories they evoke. Although digital archives have the potential to create “third spaces” in which Black people might have more control over their ancestral materials and records, digital humanists working with these records must stop to consider, for example, the ways that privacy is racialized as something that is only afforded as a condition of whiteness or disparate—and often conflicting—cultural positions on sovereignty, ownership, and access. Embracing principle 3 of the Manifest-NO helps us reckon with the archival permanence that burdens Black people’s bodies specifically because there is no right to refusal, no Black digital sovereignty; the ordinary (and extraordinary) Black lives in the archives—how they lived, how they died, how they are remembered, how their digital afterlives are constituted, and what happens to those afterlives—is forever intimately linked to systemic and structural practices of anti-Black (and often state-sponsored) violence that is too frequently reinscribed and reified in—and also justified by—the archival record. Principle 3 reminds us that if you want to honor Black lives, you must also let us rest in peace.

Digitization projects focused on the pre-emancipation era frequently foster a drive for data, as scholars are increasingly encouraged to mine these archives as part of digital humanities work. This work can, and often does, lead to what Saidiya Hartman calls a “second order of violence” whereby the bodies already numbered in the archives are requantified, thus becoming what I have argued (Sutherland, 26–37) is a new form of commodifiable raw material—seemingly disconnected from human bodies and human lives, and from which new value can be extracted. Scholars such as Simone Browne, Jessica Marie Johnson, and Jacqueline Wernimont have argued that data is deeply embedded in colonial histories of quantification that have a defining moment in the accounting and marking of enslaved bodies. Johnson further argues that if left unaddressed, the violence of these archival processes can “reproduce themselves in digital architecture” (58). In now-digitized slavery-era archives, this means archivists have uncritically adopted and reproduced both structures of knowledge organization and descriptive practices used by slave traders, slaveholders, and colonial officers. As digitization leads to the construction of more slavery studies databases, for example, it has become commonplace that users are required to search holdings according to local descriptive practices.3 Because digital archives currently mirror the organization of information as it already exists, rather than taking up the goal of reorganization or redescription, researchers have found themselves searching for terms that have long been considered outdated, offensive, violent, and harmful. It is essential, therefore, that the raw data that DH scholars use be approached with a critical eye.

Principle 4 of the Manifest-NO demands that we refuse to understand data as disembodied and thereby dehumanized and departicularized and that we commit instead to understanding data as always and variously attached to bodies, which is one way forward—in both theory and practice—to approach the digital afterlives of slavery-era archives with compassion and care. I challenge us all to refuse to ignore the ways that Black people’s lives are affected and changed in the present by new digitized and datafied engagements with the past, and to commit to (re)articulating and to (re)membering the humanity in our digital humanities work.

Intelligibility, Access, Collaboration, Process: The Early African American Film Project

Marika Cifor

The digital humanities offers a uniquely powerful means to activate and to mobilize archival records. Records created by communities minoritized along lines of race, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, and HIV serostatus in the United States can be used to provoke and support social justice movements. In this short reflection, I focus on my experiences collaboratively building the digital project called “Early African American Film: Reconstructing the History of Early Race Films, 1909–1930.”4 This project was created and developed collaboratively over the course of one academic quarter. The project team included DH faculty member Miriam Posner, six UCLA undergraduate students—Shanya Norman, William Lam, Hanna Girma, Karla Contreras, Monica Berry, and Aya Grace Yoshioka—and me. (At the time I was a doctoral student in information studies.) We devoted ourselves to building a relational database of race films from the silent era: films made by and for African Americans. We sought to document the community of practice that developed around the race film industry in the first three decades of the twentieth century. These films, many of which have been destroyed or lost, are starkly underrecognized, as are the people who created and viewed them. This remains true in spite of these films’ deep importance to film and media histories, Black studies, and American studies. My work on this project taught me the value of data intelligibility, as well as the need to enhance access and engender ethical collaborative processes in building an ethical, critical, and social justice–focused digital humanities. These lessons are reflected in the Manifesto-NO, especially in principles 7 and 10. 

Manifest-NO principle 7 emphasizes that too often data and the systems used to “generate, collect, process, and store it” are framed as either “too complex or too technical” to be readily knowable and understood by the very same individuals and communities whose lives are so deeply implicated in them. The Early African American Film dataset contains the 303 silent race films that we were able to identify and verify through archival research. The films are then linked to 759 actors and other film personnel and to 176 race film companies. Each record in the relational database is supported with any descriptive and archival information that we were able to uncover. The dataset is publicly accessible as a perusable database on Airtable, as raw comma-separated value (CSV) files on GitHub, and is linked to research data repository site Zendo. We prioritized enabling others to engage with the data in their own uses, reuses, augmentations, and corrections. Within the data package, we included a data dictionary, a Creative Commons license, and other documentation important to understanding and engaging the dataset. The project’s website features maps, social network diagrams, and other data visualizations that were designed to show how this data might be conceptualized and used by scholars, students, curators, librarians, archivists, and other community members.5 In a refusal to accept that data-driven projects are only accessible to those with particular technical skills accompanying data visualization, we included information about the specific data used and, in a more unusual act among similar DH projects, we offered step-by-step instructions about how to create related visualizations. The project’s website also features a series of tutorials designed by Posner on working with the dataset. These tutorials are notable because they aimed to make the data accessible for use in visualizations and analyses regardless of the user’s technical savvy or digital humanities experience level. For example, the dataset includes locations for production companies, and in the tutorials, we provide detailed guidance on mapping using the dataset. In every step we refer users to further resources. These efforts reflect the commitment of principle 7, “to seek” always “to make systems and data intelligible, tangible, and controllable.”

The Early African American Film project is both a work of scholarship and the product of an experiment in DH pedagogy. We worked carefully, methodically, and collaboratively through pressing questions about race, filmmaking and artistic output, and American history. “We refuse to ‘close the door behind’ ourselves,” as principle 10 of the Manifest-NO emphasizes. It continues to reflect our shared commitment to working within “ethically compromised spaces like the academy and industry” in ways that do not simply accept standing “hierarchies of power” but instead look for ways to “subvert, undermine, open, make possible.” This principle is embodied in such collaborative work. DH projects can be important spaces for feminist pedagogy, spaces that value co-learning, shared agency, and mentorship. Such projects represent a refusal to value only accelerated production, individual work and acclaim, and hierarchical pedagogy. In our project, we worked to acknowledge and value every collaborator’s diverse academic and personal identities, experiences, knowledges, and skills. Throughout the process, we used as our guide the “Student Collaborators’ Bill of Rights,” a document coauthored by UCLA DH students and faculty that codifies the responsibilities and expectations for all members of DH project teams (Di Pressi et al.). It demands from all faculty-student project collaborations in which students are uncompensated that those students have real intellectual autonomy and complete oversight of their portions of the project; that they are authorized and moreover encouraged to publish on, present, or otherwise share the work; and that they be acknowledged for their contributions in all subsequent productions and project iterations. As the Feminist Manifest-NO reminds us, the importance of DH is not situated simply in the products we create; rather, it is centered in the collaborative feminist digital processes we engage in our project design, our modes of collaboration, our data ontologies, and our accessibility to new audiences.