While “data” is often understood today in computational terms, as information coded and organized for interpretation with digital tools and algorithms, the term has a long history dating back to at least the seventeenth century. In its earliest uses, data was defined as a “given” and a basis for decision-making—and thus power. A study of colonial knowledge systems offers numerous examples of the link between power and data regimes. Revealing the integral role of data in the building and maintenance of empires, this talk takes up several methodological questions: How do we handle colonial data, both data generated by colonial administrations and data we recreate from fragmentary sources to address the absences in the historical record born from conquest? And how do we ensure that our own research does not replicate imperial extractive colonial data practices?

This talk will present “restorative data justice” as a theoretical framework, building on the work of Alexandra Ortolja-Baird, Julianne Nyhan, Alex Gil, Roopika Risam, and Adeline Koh, among others whose work seeks to ameliorate some of colonialism’s violences by highlighting and addressing archival silences. Restorative data justice is one response to common scholarly challenges we face when undertaking studies of marginalized populations, especially using colonial archives. It is also a response to this present moment, this era of capitalistic datafication and increasingly urgent calls for social change and justice. Sanders will show how this concept of restorative data justice may serve as a bridge between academic studies and work in current data cultures. It offers one way to redress the problematic past of colonial knowledge production and its legacy in information structures and systems still at work today in the present age of capitalistic surveillance and widespread data misuse.