A Data Designer Driven to Collaborate with Communities

It is fairly common in public discourse for someone to announce, “I brought data to this discussion,” thus casting their own conclusions as empirical and rational. It is less common to ask: Where did the data come from? How was it collected? Why is there data about some things but not others?

MIT Associate Professor Catherine D’Ignazio SM ’14 does ask those kinds of questions. A scholar with a far-reaching portfolio of work, she has a strong interest in applying data to social issues — often to help the disempowered gain access to numbers, and to help provide a fuller picture of civic problems we are trying to address.

“If we want an educated citizenry to participate in our democracy with data and data-driven arguments, we should think about how we design our data infrastructures to support that,” says D’Ignazio.

Take, for example, the problem of feminicide, the killing of women as a result of gender-based violence. Activists throughout Latin America started tabulating cases about it and building databases that were often more thorough than official state records. D’Ignazio has observed the issue and, with colleagues, co-designed AI tools with human rights defenders to support their monitoring work.

In turn, D’Ignazio’s 2024 book on the subject, “Counting Feminicide,” chronicled the entire process and has helped bring the issue to a new audience. Where there was once a data void, now there are substantial databases helping people recognize the reality of the problem on multiple continents, thanks to innovative citizens. The book outlines how grassroots data science and citizen data activism are generally rising forms of civic participation.

“When we talk about innovation, I think: Innovation for whom? And by whom? For me those are key questions,” says D’Ignazio, a faculty member in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning and director of MIT’s Data and Feminism Lab. For her research and teaching, D’Ignazio was awarded tenure earlier this year.

Out of the grassroots

D’Ignazio has long cultivated an interest in data science, digital design, and global matters. She received her BA in international relations from Tufts University, then became a software developer in the private sector. Returning to her studies, she earned an MFA from the Maine College of Art, and then an MS from the MIT Media Lab, which helped her synthesize her intellectual outlook.

“The Media Lab for me was the place where I was able to converge all those interests I had been thinking about,” D’Ignazio says. “How can we have more creative applications of software and databases? How can we have more socially just applications of AI? And how do we organize our technology and resources for a more participatory and equitable future for all of us?”

To be sure, D’Ignazio did not spend all her time at the Media Lab examining database issues. In 2014 and 2018 she co-organized a feminist hackathon called “Make the Breast Pump Not Suck,” in which hundreds of participants developed innovative technologies and policies to address postpartum health and infant feeding. Still, much of her work has focused on data architecture, data visualization, and the analysis of the relationship between data production and society.

D'Ignazio started her teaching career as a lecturer in the Digital + Media graduate program at Rhode Island School of Design, then became an assistant professor of data visualization and civic media in Emerson College’s journalism department. She joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor in 2020.

D’Ignazio’s first book, “Data Feminism,” co-authored with Lauren Klein of Emory University and published in 2020, took a wide-ranging look at many ways that everyday data reflects the civic society that it emerges from. The reported rates of sexual assault on college campuses, for instance, could be…