Representationalism at work: dashboards and data analytics in urban education

Abstract

This paper explores data analytics applied to urban education, focusing in particular on issues of representationalism, the view that representations (here, digital data) stand in mimetic relation to some external reality from which they are ontologically distinct. Based on interviews conducted over the 2016–2017 school year with a team of data professionals employed by a Charter Management Organization (CMO) that operates one dozen schools in South and East Los Angeles, this paper shows that respondents endorse a range of views about how data can stand in for things, events, and people. Data professionals charged with the creation and management of student-level data expressed views consistent with a representationalist understanding of digital data; by contrast, those charged chiefly with aggregating and analyzing heterogeneous streams of data expressed greater skepticism toward representationalist commitments. Despite this heterogeneous set of views, all of the data professionals interviewed relied on the same medium to communicate their interpretations of data to other members of the organization, including school personnel: a bespoke platform that consists of 125 dashboards. Critically, graphical means of visualization expressed objectivity, certainty, and actuarial foresight, even in cases where data professionals expressed ambivalence about the representational power of a given source of data.

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