Queer Data: Who Counts?

Kevin Guyan will join CJS for a talk on “Queer Data”. Guyan, soon to be a Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, has written extensively on data collection and LGBTQ communities. The first step in so many reporting projects is a data set, and even our own US Census Bureau has proposed asking questions about Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity on the American Community Survey. What is different about Queer Data? How has it been collected and why? What has been the impact on Queer communities?

Kevin Guyan will touch on these and other questions in his lunchtime talk “Queer Data: Who Counts?”. This is the first speaker in the Computational Journalism Class taught this spring by Mark Hansen and Gina Chua. (We will occasionally open our talks to the whole school.) The Office of the CJS Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is co-sponsoring this event.

Lunch will be served, but please register for the talk so we know how much to order.

Queer Data: Who Counts?

[Register here to reserve a lunch]

Blurb: Data has never mattered more. Our lives are increasingly shaped by it and how it is defined, collected and used. But who counts in the collection, analysis and application of data? Join Kevin Guyan to discuss themes from his book Queer Data: Using Gender, Sex and Sexuality Data for Action (Bloomsbury Academic) including the relationship between data and visibility, the politics of who and how to count, and the intersection of queer lives and everyday data practices and systems.

Bio: Dr Kevin Guyan is a researcher whose work explores the intersection of data and identity. He is the author of Queer Data (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022) and is currently writing his second book, which explores queer encounters with different classification systems in the UK, from hate crime reporting to dating apps. In March 2024, Kevin joins the University of Edinburgh Business School as a Chancellor’s Fellow.