Data matter(s): legitimacy, coding, and qualifications-of-life

Data are central to geographical technologies and provide the pathways in which geographic investigations are forwarded. The mattering of data is therefore important to those engaging in participatory use of these technologies. This paper understands `mattering' both in the material sense, that data are products resulting from specific practices, and in the affective sense, that data are imaginative, generative, and evocative. I examine these senses of mattering, of both presence and significance, in a discussion of a community survey project held in Seattle, USA. During this four-year project, residents in ten neighborhoods were asked to collect data about their community streets using handheld computers. Residents tracked `assets' and `deficits' by locating objects such as damaged sidewalks and graffiti on telephone booths. These data records were then uploaded to a central server administered by a local nonprofit organization. The nonprofit worked with community residents to help link these data about their changing neighborhoods to agencies in the municipal government. Here, I argue that the legitimacy of these data practices is constructed through processes of standardization and objectification and that these processes transduct urban space. I ask, as participatory mapping practices target governing agencies with their data products, what are the implications for the kinds of knowledge produced and for its legitimacy? In other words, how does data come to matter? doi:10.1068/d7910 (1) A couple of events mark an early interest in reining in and reorganizing disciplinary thought towards these emerging mapping practices. In 2007 Michael Goodchild and Rajan Gupta announced a specialist meeting of around thirty participants on `volunteered geographic information' Crampton depicts a `̀ field of tension in mapping'' between practices of securitization and practices of resistance; the former having to do with more conventional development/ implementation in mapping and the latter with critique and new spatial media (2010b, page 5). However, the more particular challenges of transforming community knowledges into data are less understood. Here, we might turn to work in participatory uses of geographic information technologies (Craig et al, 2002; Elwood, 2006a; 2006b; Elwood and Ghose, 2004; Harris and Weiner, 2002; Merrick, 2003; Nyerges et al, 2006). That community knowledges can be represented as data is, of course, central to participatory GIS. Yet, further inquiry as to the constitutive cultures of technology use is largely missing in this body of research (Wilson, 2005). Here, I ask how geographical data practices are made legitimate in everyday, neighborhood engagements. How are the potential effects of these practices mitigated? In other words, how do data practices materialize and come to matter in urban politics? I consider these questions in light of a specific neighborhood mapping initiative facilitated in Seattle, USA. In 2003 a nonprofit called Sustainable Seattle set out to bolster their constituencies' claims(2) to neighborhood revitalization by using geographic data. In what follows, I discuss these matters of data. `Mattering' is understood both in the material sense, that data are products resulting from specific practices around form and substance, and in the affective sense, that data are imaginative, generative, and evocative. Enrolling these multiple understandings of materialities, I conceptualize data beyond merely storage devices and instead as pathways for urban-political imaginations. To do so, I discuss how the work of indicators in urban assessment links data about declining built environments to the management of social disorder. More specifically, I draw on the concept of transduction (Dodge and Kitchin, 2005a; Mackenzie, 2002) to discuss how indicators about urban quality-of-life are made `legitimate' through techniques of standardization and objectificationöto decontextualize, depoliticize, and ultimately qualify certain lives, especially through motifs of crime, homelessness, and graffiti. Here, knowledge is disciplined and disciplinary; concerns about neighborhood quality-of-life are geocoded, become data, and made legitimate. These materializations, from the perspective of those practicing them, diversely matter in regimes of urban assessment. Technologies of coding `̀The principle is one of multiplication: materiality is never apprehensible in just one state, nor is it static or inert.'' Anderson and Wylie (2009, page 332) The coding work of urban assessment is material. However, as Anderson and Wylie (2009) suggest, materiality is `̀ turbulent, interrogative, and excessive'' (page 332), recovering a concept of materiality as a gathering, an assemblage, or a coming together, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari (1987). Here, I follow Whatmore's (2006) similar recuperation of materiality, as a return to the `̀ processes and excesses of `livingness' '' (page 604), to destabilize notions of the material defined against the immaterial. (1) continued in Santa Barbara, CA, sponsored by the NCGIA, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Vespucci Initiative. Similarly, a World University Network seminar was held in 2008, organized by David Unwin, to further explore the ``technical, societal and academic challenges to traditional academic views and practices''. (2) Survey participants were primarily composed of the `usual subjects' of Seattle neighborhood activismöindividuals representing local chambers of commerce and neighborhood associations, and those volunteers who were available during working-day afternoons. 858 M W Wilson