Much like physicists using simulations to model particle interactions, scientists in many fields, including the digital humanities, are today applying computational techniques to their analysis and research and to the study of large data sets. This paper is about the emergence of computer networks as the historical backbone of modern data sharing systems and the importance of data modeling in scientific research. By exploring the history of computer data production and use in physics from 1990 back to 1970, when the Adam & Eve scanning machines began to replace human scanners in data collection at CERN, this paper is as much about retelling the story of the invention of the Web at CERN as it is about some of the technical, social and political roots of today’s digital divide. Using archival material, it argues that the Web, developed and first used at physics research facilities in Western Europe and the United States, was the result of the growing infrastructure of physics research laboratories and the need for international access to and exchange of computer data. Revealing this development also brings to light early mechanisms of exclusion. They must be seen against the backdrop of the Cold War, more specifically the fear that valuable and expensive research data at CERN could be stolen by the Soviets, which influenced both the development and the restriction of data sharing.

This presentation explores differing concepts of “data” with respect to the Indigenous Māori people of Aotearoa and colonial settlers. A historical lens is used to tease out long-term power imbalances that still play out in the data landscape today. Though much data has been collected about Māori by successive governments of New Zealand, little benefit has come to Māori themselves.
This research investigates how colonisation impacted Māori, and the ongoing implications for data. The privileging of Western approaches to harnessing the power of data as opposed to indigenous ways stems from colonisation – a system that results in “a continuation of the processes and underlying belief systems of extraction, exploitation, accumulation and dispossession that have been visited on Indigenous populations.”
We examine the census, an important tool that provides an official count of the population together with detailed socioeconomic information at the community-level and highlight areas where there is a fundamental disconnect between the Crown and Māori. Does Statistics New Zealand, as a Crown agency, have the right to determine Māori ethnicity, potentially undermining the rights of Māori to self-identify? How do differing ways of being and meaning impact how we collect census data? How does Aotearoa commit to its Treaty obligations to Māori in the management and optimisation of census data? We also delve into Māori Data Sovereignty, and its aim to address these issues by ensuring that Māori have control over the collection, storage and use of their own data as both enabler of self-determination and decolonisation.

Daphne, Zhen Ling Boey

As both object and concept, the electronic digital computer featured prominently in discussions of societal change within the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. In an era of “rights revolution,” discourse on transformative technology paralleled anxiety about American society in upheaval. Ever in motion, shifting popular conceptualizations of the capabilities of computing drew comparisons to the revolutionary language of youth protest and the aspirations of advocacy groups seeking full political, economic, and social enfranchisement. The computer itself – as concept, as promise, as installed machine – became a contested “site of technopolitics” where political actors appropriated the language of systems analysis and extrapolated consequences of data processing for American social change. Computers might accelerate, or impede, social change.

This paper examines three paradigms of the computer as "a machine for change” that emerged from this period: 1) One group of political observers focused on data centralization, warning of “closed worlds” of institutional computing that might subject diverse populations to autocratic controls or stifle social mobility; 2) In contrast, a network of social activists and radicals (many affiliated with West Coast counterculture and Black Power movements) resisted top-down paradigms of data centralization and insisted community groups could seize levers of change by embracing their own forms of computing. 3) Finally, a third group of well-meaning liberals embraced the potential of systems analysis as a socially-transformative feedback loop – utilizing the very act of data processing itself to bridge state institutions and local people, sidestepping ideological, generational, or identity-based conflict.