Careful Coding
An ongoing collaboration exploring resident-led data collection and use.
Careful Coding is an ongoing collaboration with Atlanta residents, through which we explore how data can be collected, aggregated, shared, and displayed in pursuit of local political agendas. What’s important about this work is that it’s resident-led — residents decide what data to collect and not collect, what data to share and not share. Residents also set the agenda for our design work, and we work together to create tools and processes to support their data practices.
Much of the Careful Coding work to date has focused on data related to the built environment, specifically code violations in the English Avenue and Vince City neighborhoods. The agenda for this work has been directed by our community partner. Through the Careful Coding project we have collaboratively constructed data sets that can be used to advocate for resources from the City of Atlanta, and created tools and processes to support residents in their data practices, including paper and mobile surveys, maps, and visualizations.
2017 - present
Concept and Research: Amanda Meng, Ellen Zegura, and Carl DiSalvo
Community Lead and Partner: Les Canty
Designers: Carley Rickles, Qian Tian, Nick Tippens, James Lu
Related Publications:
DiSalvo, Carl. 2022. Design as Democratic Inquiry. MIT Press.
Meng, Amanda, Carl DiSalvo, and Ellen Zegura. 2019. “Collaborative Data Work Towards a Caring Democracy.” In Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 3, CSCW, Article 42 (November 2019)
Meng, Amanda, and Carl DiSalvo. "Grassroots Resource Mobilization through Counter-Data Action." Big Data & Society 5, no. 2 (2018): 2053951718796862.
Zegura, Ellen, Carl DiSalvo, and Amanda Meng. 2018. “Care and the Practice of Data Science for Social Good.” In Proc of the 1st ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS '18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 34.