#3 - For the Love of Data

I’ll never forget the day I downloaded my first Twitter dataset. I was a student working on a submission, it was late at night and I was trying to find a way to make a map of what the citizens of Barcelona were saying on Twitter about their city. I was working hard on making my algorithm work until I got that damn line of code just right, clicked on “Run” and boom: my spreadsheet started to be filled with thousands of rows of information on all the tweets that had been posted in the last 2 months mentioning the word “Barcelona”. Along with the text, I had gained access to the Name and surname of the users, their age, the time they posted it, their location, any images they had attached to it, any links. In a matter of seconds, I had gained access to the back-end of Twitter and I had broken 0 laws. It was a powerful moment, that made me think deeply about the power of this technology. I had to pause and look at my computer screen while the spreadsheet kept registering more and more rows of data. At that moment, I understood how easy it was to scrape the internet. I thought of Facebook, I thought of Google, I thought of privacy, I thought of morality.

It’s been 6 years since then, and now all the students that came after me learn how to do this at some point in their studies. Personally, I’ve come to understand that data is meaningless, as it’s just the act of recording something. What matters is why you want to record it, what information you plan to derive from it and what actions this information will instruct. Just as with any other technology, intentions matter. For architects and urban planners, data science has truly become a game changer as it allowed us to move away from the world of speculation and go straight into what we call informed decision-making. Architects and Urban technologists Weronika Sojka and Joseph Bou Saleh went through a very similar journey this year and thought that it was time for us to get a fresh perspective on this complicated, ambiguous relationship that the world has with data.