Making structured data more accessible with Kira Wisniewski

by by the Whose Knowledge?

Episode 29 of Whose Voices? podcast | November 4, 2024

Making structured data more accessible with Kira Wisniewski

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Intro

Welcome feminist troublemakers, friends and allies to the Whose Voices Podcast, the audio explorations of whose knowledge is tech and knowledge justice work. Are you looking for global majority feminist perspectives on internet infrastructures, anti caste and anti-capitalist approaches to tech and what a truly multilingual indigenous and queer internet could look like? Join us as we guide you through an audio journey of deconstructing power structures that underpin how we exist on and offline. So tune in, turn up the volume, and let's ignite the flames of change together because when we ask whose voices, the answer is clear. Ours.

In this season, on Whose Voices we are in conversation with incredible activists, community builders and change makers, providing a space to discuss how we can reimagine and redesign the internet together. This year's season is focused on decolonizing structured data with interviews carried out during Wikimania Singapore 2023 and a pre-convening we held to dive deeper into these systems. Structured data is at the core of how the internet, as we currently know it works. These are pieces of information organized in such a way that they can be easily read, understood, and processed by machines. Through these systems, massive amounts of data get sorted out, organized and classified in relation to other pieces of data. Whose voices inform these specific regulations, traditions, and epistemologies?

Sunshine Fionah Komusana

Hi, this is Sunshine, an African feminist and #VisibleWikiWomen campaign coordinator at Whose Knowledge? Welcome to Whose Voices podcast where I'll be having a conversation with Kira about decolonizing the internet, structured data and everything in between. Welcome Kira.

Kira Wisniewski

Thanks for having me. Sunshine. I'm really delighted to be here. My name is Kira Wisniewski and my pronouns are she/her and I have the honour and privilege of being Executive Director of Art + Feminism.

Sunshine Fionah Komusana

Thank you Kira and very welcome. Such a pleasure to meet you. And I would like for you to maybe share with us about what is exciting you right now and what is bringing you joy before we talk about structured data.

Kira Wisniewski

Well, I love finding feminist community in places like Wikimania. Really great to just find other feminists that are really excited about information activism.

Sunshine Fionah Komusana

It's amazing. It has been so exciting to meet you as well, Kira, we've had a conversational learning, decolonizing structured data and I wanted to know if you have any reflections about that space.

Kira Wisniewski

Yeah, I am really thankful that Whose Knowledge? created that space and that container for before diving into a whole big huger conference. Honestly, I haven't had a lot of thought about structured data previously, so it was all really interesting for me to start thinking about and you can see how it impacts so many different things and why it's so important. And so I think it's really, really interesting work that Whose Knowledge? is doing and asking some really interesting questions and it just has me really just kind of percolating more on what art and feminism could do, what our various communities could work together in really decolonizing structured data.

Sunshine Fionah Komusana

Thank you so much Kira, for those reflections. And I will also be honest in saying that I am a novice at structured data or understanding actually what the kind of impact it has, but both of us being feminist, we understand bias and we understand what bias looks like in different spaces including within machine learning, within structured data. So I wanted to pick your mind a little bit about if there are any curiosities you have about the kind of biases that exist within structured data, but also on the internet specifically and the kind of work that Art + Feminism is doing either to address those but also just in general.

Kira Wisniewski

Yeah, I mean that's a big question but I mean what’s surfacing for me right now is kind of like we did in the workshop. We did kind of these small groups where we each worked on a specific question or problem or just something that's happening within the wikiverse. And so I was part of the breakout that was talking specifically about basically how can structured data make it a safe and also reflective and accurate space for queer communities. And so one of the things that was being highlighted is that currently right now in Wikidata gender and sex are the same field and how that is a problem. But then there goes into all these conversations about what could this look like and well one, yes, those should be separate fields, but then should there be how many different identities should there be there? How can gender be such a fluid thing?

So it's like who is having the authority to work through these things? How does this affect the bigger arguments and conversations that are happening in the wikiverse around dead naming people? All of these things are all intertwined in a way that, like I said, I hadn't really thought about before. And so it just really has me thinking about what are the steps forward? Who are the people that need to be having these conversations and how can we collectively as feminists, as an organization, how can we make changes that will positively affect the communities in which we want to be helping and uplifting.

Sunshine Fionah Komusana

That's amazing. Thank you so much for sharing. I think that what you mentioned around sex and gender are also still the same biases that we see when we look at structured data for images of women, for example, in #VisibleWikiWomen. We have been having a conversation, our breakout session within the workshop was about looking at the data that shows up the structured data, especially the suggested tags for women, especially black and brown women. And we observed that for women, for example, if you're holding a microphone, the suggested tags from, on most cases if you're a black or brown woman, they'll say you are, the suggested text or the suggested descriptions will say that you are a musician or an artist regardless of whether you're doing this in parliament or you're at a protest or you are holding a microphone in any kind of context, the machine will dictate that you're an entertainer or at the very least, well at best a spokesperson instead of, and yet there is so many diversities or plurality of suggested tags and data items for men who are holding microphones.

It's a diverse range of, and those are some of the biases that we have to confront and it makes me think about how we are consistently trying to catch up and consistently trying to clean up oppressions. And it is difficult work, but it's also very important work like you mentioned. And so I'm wondering if there are any ways you're thinking about doing this work or what are some of the positive speculations, this is a phrase that we got from our learning circle online before we had this physical learning circle. If there are any positive speculations that you think would be a great starting point?

Kira Wisniewski

Well, I think that, I mean [inaudible] or holding a microphone like doing a podcast. I think that these kind of conversations in these kind of spaces that whose knowledge is really leading are super important because honestly, I am a fan of y'all and that's why I'm like, yes, let me come to your workshop even though I don't really know anything about structured data, but it was really my fan girling of y'all to come to that. And then being able to, the way that you have framed it and presented it and is a way that's been very accessible to me, which I think in some other spaces if there was a topic that I didn't know anything about, I might feel a little bit more like, I don't know if this is the space or the conversation for me, I don't have any background information, but I think just really continuing these conversations is really what's going to happen and really what could be the most valuable.

I'm really excited to go back to my team and just share about the learning circle that you all facilitated and really having those conversations ongoing to be able to really properly help address them because some, I guess some granular questions that I have, you were saying this cleanup work, I don't even know how that happens. I don't even know how you would start to do the cleanup work even though it's very much necessary. So then that also leads me to be like, are there people that we could talk to within the movement that could create tools or automations or how are those even informed in the first place? I mean, just to segue slightly, there's been a lot of conversation about Wikimania, about AI in general in varying different ways, and that's more or less what this is, is AI being like, a woman with a microphone is an artist or an entertainer, and so how do we retrain or do the cleanup of this AI to be more accurate?

Sunshine Fionah Komusana

Yes, the cleanup work for sure, but also I like the positive speculation about continuing to have these conversations because we've also met a number of people who have said, we had no idea what structured data is. I had no idea what structured data is until I was part of the Whose Knowledge? collective. And it's very kind of you to say that you feel like we created the space to do that. And also the ideas around being able to find resources and tools because I think of the feminist movement as a very creative space as well. It's just that many of us do not occupy the spaces where we need to be able to create the spaces or it looks like these are very complicated things. One of the other conversations I had with someone, they said because of the work that we're doing around #VisibleWikiWomen within the workshop, they were able to upload images for the first time. And that is very political work of saying, I am able to upload images and upload them in this way and also add data in this way. And so thank you very much. That is very kind for the feedback. And so I have one last question. Is there anything else you would like to share about your work and people could be able to continue to connect to Art +Feminism, but also what are your amazing plans for the rest of your time in Singapore? Maybe we could jump on as feminists.

Kira Wisniewski

Yeah. I don't know if I have any amazing plans for my time left in Singapore, but I am really excited to be having, and I feel like a lot of times in feminist work, a lot of it can feel like things are moving slow. Things need to move slow in order to make sure that we are giving space to bring people into the conversation. We need to give the space and the time for that. We can't always be operating with such urgency even though it's not to make the issue smaller not, cause they are not. We do not have to go at it with such urgency where we're leaving people out of the conversation. And so this work is often have that sense of immediate gratification of like, alright, well we talked about it and now we're going to fix it. But really just kind of taking that time to have the conversations to bring people in to be like, yeah, structured data. This affects all of this other stuff that you might've not been thinking about and this is how an example of how it's kind of fucked up right now. And so like how do we, I'm sorry, can I curse?

And just being able to create those spaces and those conversations. I mean the other thing about something like a conference, and I understand it's talking about time, the challenges at stake, but your session was what, 30 minutes or something on the first day with the space that you all were able to create. We were able to have a whole day to really kind of talk about it. And frankly it was a beginning, right? It was a beginning kind of conversations that we were having in the full day learning circle that you had. So it's just really hard in these conference settings to be able to really fully get into a topic when you have 30 minutes. Just it's a challenge. And so I always kind of think about how do we make sure that this work continues? I feel like it can be very exciting and invigorating to be hearing a lot of new ideas, but how do we not get the day-to-day life of this is what my job has to do and this is like the this and the that getting sucked into, and I mean this is everyone, right? Just getting sucked into the daily tasks of a job that are also important to be able to create the space to continue these conversations, I think is always a challenge, but one that I'm very hopeful that we can continue.

Sunshine Fionah Komusana

Amazing. We are very big on slow and spaciousness at Whose Knowledge?. And it's very important for us to remember that this work is, it's not just undoing work, but it's also work of correcting so many layers of injustice and to really pace ourselves and the piece about conferences being bullshit and not being the space where we can be able to do the revolutionary continuous work of decolonizing, not just the internet, but really every day decolonizing. We have to live within these systems. So thank you so much for that nugget of wisdom and thank you for joining us today at our podcast and we hope to catch up.

Kira Wisniewski

Yeah. Thank you, thank you.

Outro

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