Data in Action Symposium: Data, Power, and Public Life

Join us for a day-long symposium organized by Roopika Risam (Film and Media Studies). This event brings together scholar-practitioners working at the intersection of design, democracy, and Indigenous sovereignty to examine what happens when social life is translated into data. How does visualization shape social belief? What happens when humanities knowledge must become measurable to be valued? How does classification embed particular worldviews? And how might communities reclaim data as a condition of self-determination rather than extraction?

The Data In Action Symposium features:

Abigail Echo-Hawk (Pawnee), Director of the Urban Indian Health Institute, will discuss how Indigenous data storytelling transforms public health practice by centering sovereignty and relational accountability.

Scott B. Weingart, Chief Technology Officer for the Library of Virginia, will draw on his experience as Chief Data Officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities to consider how quantitative frameworks can expand our understanding of the humanities in an era increasingly governed by models and metrics.

Jennifer Guiliano, Professor of History and affiliated faculty in Native American and Indigenous Studies and American Studies at Indiana University Indianapolis, will examine Indigenous data ontologies and the political stakes of classification, asking what it means to design knowledge systems that do not reproduce inherited hierarchies.

Yani Loukissas, Associate Professor of Digital Media and Executive Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Media Arts at Georgia Tech, will discuss an experiential theory of data, reframing it not as static representation but as orientation — something that directs attention, shapes emotion, and conditions experience.

Eli Holder, Founder of 3iap, will explore how data visualization influences social cognition and democratic life, arguing that responsible design is central to sustaining shared reality.

Together, these talks invite us to look more closely at the foundations of AI — not simply how systems are trained, but how data itself is made, framed, and mobilized. If AI systems learn from data, then the future of democratic life depends on how we understand and shape it.

Sponsored by the Leslie Center for the Humanities Venn Vision Grant for "Creative and Critical Data Studies" and the Digital Humanities and Social Engagement Cluster.

For more information and registation please visit https://sites.dartmouth.edu/dhse-symposium/