Finding the Blank Spots in Big Data
Artists and designers are working to address a major problem for marginalized communities in the data economy: ‘If the data does not exist, you do not exist’
By Meg Miller
Mimi Onuoha is an artist who works mostly with algorithms, data sets, and digital systems, but her best known work may be a file cabinet. White, metal, and unassuming, it’s the kind that used to line the carpeted halls of office buildings before the advent of Google Drive and iCloud. Sliding open Onuoha’s cabinet reveals a column of familiar brownish-green folders, hooked at the sides and marked on top by plastic tabs. The handwritten labels include: “Publicly available gun trace data,” “Trans people killed or injured in instances of hate crime,” “Muslim mosques/communities surveilled by the FBI/CIA.” But when you open any one of the folders, there’s nothing inside.
This is Onuoha’s Library of Missing Datasets, a physical catalog of digital absence. She created the piece in 2016 (and a second version in 2018), after realizing that even with all of the esoteric, eccentric datasets you can find online — every word in the Broadway musical Hamilton, a yearly estimate of hotdogs eaten by Americans on the 4th of July — there’s a lot of urgent, necessary data that’s…
