5 Questions on Data and Context with Desmond Patton
By Catherine D’Ignazio with editing by Isabel Carter
Desmond Patton is a Public Interest Technologist trained in social work. He currently works at the Columbia School of Social Work where he founded and runs the SAFE Lab, a groundbreaking research center that examines how youth of color navigate violence online and offline. Combining computational methods and social work foundations, Patton’s work at SAFElab seeks to clarify methods for preventing and intervening in violence. During the course of this work, Patton and doctoral student William Frey developed a community-facing collaborative approach to data collection and analysis, which they describe in a 2018 paper titled “Artificial Intelligence and Inclusion”. (Highly recommend checking it out!)
In our book Data Feminism, Lauren Klein and I discuss the importance of considering the context of data — especially when those data concern people — in the chapter “The Numbers Don’t Speak for Themselves.” Too often, researchers and analysts who would seek to collect data do so from a distance, with little meaningful interaction with the people whose data they are collecting. But Patton’s approach at SAFE Lab offers an important alternative. I caught up with him to discuss it further. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation.
