Everyday Sexism Datahack

A Creative Exploration of the Sexism We Experience in Our Daily Lives

The Everyday Sexism project, founded by Laura Bates in 2012, documents the frequency and range of instances of sexism experienced by people in their daily lives, with stories and accounts submitted directly to the website. The more than 120,000 entries crowdsourced from the public so far draw attention to this persistent and pernicious problem within contemporary society.

To encourage new ways of thinking about and engaging with the problem of sexism in daily life, the Everyday Sexism Datahack, organised by the Oxford Internet Institute, will encourage creative engagement with the textual data gathered by the project, and bring together people with different disciplinary backgrounds to analyse, process and display the data in imaginative ways, and discuss the meanings behind it.

A research team at the OII has already been analysing the content, and will provide data that can be analysed both subjectively and computationally, principally through qualitative and quantitative methods. The OII will also provide data-facilitators, who will be able to help attendees explore, combine, manipulate and build on the data. We hope that University faculty, staff, students and members of the public will come together to create both digital and analogue outputs from the text gathered by the project.

While the data is ideally suited for those with an interest in computational social science and natural language processing, the day will allow participation from those with no particular technical expertise: and indeed, we hope to create a space where computational scientists can engage with social scientists, and humanities and arts scholars; where undergraduates can work with emeritus professors; where digital data can interact with and inform physical material. We don’t yet know what the day (and data) will produce: all we ask is that you bring enthusiasm, curiosity, and an open mind!

Outline of the Datahack

The day will begin at 10am with an introduction to the project by founder Laura Bates, and an outline of the dataset by Taha Yasseri, followed by a speed-dating session led by Kathryn Eccles to build teams around shared ideas. Once teams have been assembled, work begins, with OII facilitators ensuring that teams are provided with any materials and data-expertise they require. Over lunch teams will give brief progress reports and perhaps request additional input or resource. At the end of the day, teams will pitch their projects to the group, a prize will be awarded for the best project, and the day ends with a drinks reception, and a chance to reflect on and discuss what was discovered in the data and the stories.

What about the data and software?

No data expertise is required from attendees. For technical people: we will provide participants with data packages extracted from the Everyday Sexism public website. The data will be provided at different levels of processing, ranging from the structured raw data, html-cleaned and stemmed, tokenized and stop-word free, to the final word-bags produced by topic modelling algorithms. The data are not for public dissemination and will only be shared internally with the datahack participants.

Please bring your own laptops!

Support

This event has been organised as part of the OII research project “Semantic Map of Sexism: Topic Modelling of the Everyday Sexism Content”, supported by the John Fell OUP Research Fund. We are grateful to Laura Bates for her valuable input.

How to get involved

This will be a small event, with a maximum of 22 participants. If you’d like to attend, please send an email to events@oii.ox.ac.uk by Thursday 17 November with the following information:

• Name
• Department
• Why you want to attend
• Whether you have any technical, artistic or other specialist skills

The OII team will review the applications to ensure that we have a diverse group of participants. We will let you know by Friday 18 November whether we can offer you a place.

We welcome those who can only attend part of the day to still participate.

#SocialHumanities
Digital Humanities

Contact name: Kathryn Eccles
Contact email: events@iio.ox.ac.uk
Audience: Open to all