HDYK Episode 7: Data spaces, data places- With Deondre Smiles Artwork

How do you know?

It’s ironic that in an era of big data, truth sometimes seems more elusive than ever. To make better choices about how to manage our lives, our work, and our environment, we need to use the best possible information to guide us. But even with great data, humans don’t always make great choices- we misinterpret, we oversimplify, we fail to see fallacies in logic or flaws in the data itself- and even our most rational examinations of the numbers are fundamentally human, shaped by culture, prior experience, and our internal biases.In this podcast, we explore the process of how data becomes information, information becomes knowledge and knowledge becomes belief- and how, in turn, belief shapes the way we take and interpret data. From young learners to practicing scientists, the ways we incorporate information into our worldview is affected by our experiences. We combine social and data science perspectives with the study of how humans learn, in order to examine not just what we know, but how we know it.

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HDYK Episode 7: Data spaces, data places- With Deondre Smiles

December 16, 2021 • Christie Bahlai • Season 1 • Episode 7

Science often treats data and information as a resource that can be extracted. Like colonists coming to conquer new lands, scientists trained in the dominant paradigm often frame data-driven discovery with the same language on the frontier myth used on lands and people. But where is this data coming from- and who is impacted by its extraction? What if, instead of extraction, we thought about data sovereignty? Today on the podcast, we’re Talking to Dr. Deondre Smiles.

Deondre Smiles is a new Assistant professor in the department of Geography at the University of Victoria in BC, Canada. His work focuses on critical Indigenous geographies, human-environment interactions, political ecology, tribal cultural resource preservation, and science and technology studies. He’s written numerous fascinating papers on a variety of subjects, from the role of settler colonialism in space exploration, ethics in fieldwork, and the sovereignty of indigenous bodies in medical examination.

A complete episode transcript is available here.

This podcast is produced with the generous support of the Mozilla Foundation and the National Science Foundation, and with input from community members from Mozilla, the Environmental Data Science Inclusion Network, and our colleagues and students at Kent State University. A special shout Jen Zink for audio production. Music featured in this episode is Reflect, by Evan Schaeffer, and obtained from freemusicarchive.org under a CC-BY license. This podcast and its accompanying materials licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license- please share, like and use our stuff!