By Peter Dizikes | MIT News

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.