Lindsay Poirier

Lindsay Poirier

Cultural anthropologist of data cultures; Associate Professor of Statistics and Data Sciences at Smith College

Publications

Re-Formalizing Owl:Sameas: Iterating Meaning-Making in a Computer Ontology Language

Lindsay Poirier. 2026. "Re-Formalizing Owl:Sameas: Iterating Meaning-Making in a Computer Ontology Language." Social Studies of Science 56(3), 353--377. SAGE Publications Ltd.

Computer ontology languages aggregate a number of properties that can be used to model knowledge for machine consumption. These languages are increasingly playing a role in gatekeeping the conveyance and dissemination of knowledge. This article presents a cultural analysis of owl:sameas—a property i… Read more

Data Ethnography: Cultivating Reflexive Sensibilities through the Cultural Analysis of Data

Lindsay Poirier. 2026. "Data Ethnography: Cultivating Reflexive Sensibilities through the Cultural Analysis of Data." Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education 0(0), 1--14. Taylor \& Francis.

An ability to situate data in social and cultural context is critical to a responsible data practice. However, curriculum for introducing statistics and data science students to such skills is often underdeveloped in undergraduate programs. This article motivates and describes a course for introduci… Read more

What Remains Opaque in Transparency Initiatives: Visualizing Phantom Reductions through Devious Data Analysis

Lindsay Poirier, Juniper Huang, Casey MacGibbon. 2025. "What Remains Opaque in Transparency Initiatives: Visualizing Phantom Reductions through Devious Data Analysis." In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 1703--1714. Association for Computing Machinery.

This article introduces what we call ‘devious data analysis’ a form of data analysis that leverages rather conventional analysis and visualization techniques to undercut an assumption of the data’s objectivity and ‘truthiness.’ Rather than conveying unequivocal truths, the results produced through ‘… Read more

Neat Versus Scruffy: How Early AI Researchers Classified Epistemic Cultures of Knowledge Representation

Lindsay Poirier. 2025. "Neat Versus Scruffy: How Early AI Researchers Classified Epistemic Cultures of Knowledge Representation." IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 47(02), 7--19. IEEE Computer Society.

Accounts of the history of symbolic artificial intelligence (AI) often categorize researchers and their programs through binary oppositions: logicist versus procedural, or alternatively, neat versus scruffy. These terms were often referenced throughout the 1970s and 1980s by AI researchers at instit… Read more

Crafting Compliant Data: Enacting Aggregate Spend Transparency in the US Life Science Industry

Lindsay Poirier. 2025. "Crafting Compliant Data: Enacting Aggregate Spend Transparency in the US Life Science Industry." Economic Anthropology n/a(n/a), e70010.

In the early 2010s, the passing of US legislation mandating that health care manufacturers publicly disclose their financial relationships with physicians gave rise to the field of aggregate spend. Within corporate compliance offices in the life sciences, aggregate spend professionals track updates … Read more

Enacting data context: Fixing meaning in transparency data initiatives

Lindsay Poirier. 2024. "Enacting data context: Fixing meaning in transparency data initiatives." Big Data & Society 11(3), 20539517241270656. SAGE Publications Ltd.

This article documents the “context cultures” underpinning efforts to develop regulations for collecting and reporting data in a United States public database known as Open Payments. Open Payments is a dataset published annually by the US Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services that documents the … Read more

Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substance Exposure Risks in US Carceral Facilities, 2022

Lindsay Poirier, Derrick Salvatore, Phil Brown, Alissa Cordner, Kira Mok, Nicholas Shapiro. 2024. "Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substance Exposure Risks in US Carceral Facilities, 2022." American Journal of Public Health 114(5), 501--510. American Public Health Association.

Objectives. To assess the US incarcerated population's risk of exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs). Methods. We assessed how many of the 6118 US carceral facilities were located in the same hydrologic unit code watershed boundaries as known or likely locations of PFAS contaminati… Read more

Making Plans Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable with Data Infrastructure: A Search Engine for Constructing, Analyzing, and Visualizing Planning Documents

Lindsay Poirier, Dexter Antonio, Makenna Dettmann, Tiffany Eng, Jennifer Ganata, Sujoy Ghosh, Mirthala Lopez, Ranesh Karma, Asiya Natekal, Catherine Brinkley. 2024. "Making Plans Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable with Data Infrastructure: A Search Engine for Constructing, Analyzing, and Visualizing Planning Documents." Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 23998083241227471. SAGE Publications Ltd STM.

Local land-use plans help guide future development, but it is often difficult to compare content across jurisdictions, making regional coordination and plan evaluation challenging. This research reviews federal, state, and local data infrastructure guidance for land-use plans and compares such guida… Read more

Attending to the Cultures of Data Science Work

Lindsay Poirier. 2023. "Attending to the Cultures of Data Science Work." Data Science Journal 22(1), 6.

This essay reflects on the shifting attention to the “social” and the “cultural” in data science communities. While recently the “social” and the “cultural” have been prioritized in data science discourse, social and cultural concerns that get raised in data science are almost always outwardly focus… Read more

Accountable Data: The Politics and Pragmatics of Disclosure Datasets

Lindsay Poirier. 2022. "Accountable Data: The Politics and Pragmatics of Disclosure Datasets." In 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 1446--1456. Association for Computing Machinery.

This paper attends specifically to what I call ''disclosure datasets'' - tabular datasets produced in accordance with laws requiring various kinds of disclosure. For the purposes of this paper, the most significant defining feature of disclosure datasets is that they aggregate information produced a… Read more

Data, Knowledge Practices, and Naturecultural Worlds: Vehicle Emissions in the Anthropocene

Lindsay Poirier. 2022. "Data, Knowledge Practices, and Naturecultural Worlds: Vehicle Emissions in the Anthropocene." In The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology, edited by Maja Bruun, Ayo Wahlberg, Rachel Douglas-Jones, Cathrine Hasse, Klaus Hoeyer, Dorthe Kristensen, Brit Winthereik, 273--290. Springer.

This chapter details the various techno-cultural assemblages giving rise to data collected to model and measure anthropogenic worlds, arguing that data-based technologies both represent and co-produce the Anthropocene. It begins with a review of scholarship emerging at the intersection of science an… Read more

Reading Datasets: Strategies for Interpreting the Politics of Data Signification

Lindsay Poirier. 2021. "Reading Datasets: Strategies for Interpreting the Politics of Data Signification." Big Data & Society 8(2), 20539517211029322. SAGE Publications Ltd.

All datasets emerge from and are enmeshed in power-laden semiotic systems. While emerging data ethics curriculum is supporting data science students in identifying data biases and their consequences, critical attention to the cultural histories and vested interests animating data semantics is needed… Read more

Moving Ethnography: Infrastructuring Doubletakes and Switchbacks in Experimental Collaborative Methods

Aalok Khandekar, Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn, Lindsay Poirier, Alli Morgan, Alison Kenner, Kim Fortun, Mike Fortun, The Team. 2021. "Moving Ethnography: Infrastructuring Doubletakes and Switchbacks in Experimental Collaborative Methods." Science & Technology Studies 34(3).

In this article, we describe how our work at a particular nexus of STS, ethnography, and critical theory- informed by experimental sensibilities in both the arts and sciences- transformed as we built and learned to use collaborative workflows and supporting digital infrastructure. Responding to the … Read more

Data(-)Based Ambivalence Regarding NYC 311 Data Infrastructure

Lindsay Poirier. 2021. "Data(-)Based Ambivalence Regarding NYC 311 Data Infrastructure." Cultural Studies 0(0), 1--28. Routledge.

In New York City, data documenting complaints made to 311 - the city's municipal 'customer service' agency - are increasingly being analyzed by city agencies, politicians, activists, and residents to make sense of urban quality of life. This article examines the infrastructural and socio-cultural co… Read more

Ethnographies of Datasets: Teaching Critical Data Analysis through R Notebooks

Lindsay Poirier. 2020. "Ethnographies of Datasets: Teaching Critical Data Analysis through R Notebooks." The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy(18).

With the growth of data science in industry, academic research, and government planning over the past decade, there is an increasing need to equip students with skills not only in responsibly analyzing data, but also in investigating the cultural contexts from which the values reported in data emerg… Read more

Data Sharing at Scale: A Heuristic for Affirming Data Cultures

Lindsay Poirier, Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn. 2019. "Data Sharing at Scale: A Heuristic for Affirming Data Cultures." Data Science Journal 18(1), 48.

Addressing the most pressing contemporary social, environmental, and technological challenges will require integrating insights and sharing data across disciplines, geographies, and cultures. Strengthening international data sharing networks will not only demand advancing technical, legal, and logis… Read more

Classification as Catachresis: Double Binds of Representing Difference with Semiotic Infrastructure

Lindsay Poirier. 2019. "Classification as Catachresis: Double Binds of Representing Difference with Semiotic Infrastructure." Canadian Journal of Communication 44(3).

Background This article explores the results of a three-year ethnographic study of how semiotic infrastructures- or digital standards and frameworks such as taxonomies, schemas, and ontologies that encode the meaning of data- are designed. Analysis It examines debates over best practices in semiot… Read more

A Turn for the Scruffy: An Ethnographic Study of Semantic Web Architecture

Lindsay Poirier. 2017. "A Turn for the Scruffy: An Ethnographic Study of Semantic Web Architecture." In WebSci '17. ACM.

This paper examines how legacies of thinking about ontology, logic, and how best to approach knowledge representation have become interwoven in the architecture of the technologies that enable a Semantic Web. As a cultural anthropologist, I approach this study with qualitative historical and ethnogr… Read more

Mapping Organized Ignorance in Environmental Health

Laura Rabinow, Lindsay Poirier. 2017. "Mapping Organized Ignorance in Environmental Health." XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students 23(3), 16--19.

How data collection and reporting standards have shaped what we know and do not know about water contamination in Hoosick Falls, NY…. Read more

Devious Design: Digital Infrastructure Challenges for Experimental Ethnography

Lindsay Poirier. 2017. "Devious Design: Digital Infrastructure Challenges for Experimental Ethnography." Design Issues 33(2), 70--83.

Diverse disciplinary communities approach design with diverse design logics design directives informed by critical theoretical commitments that are to be translated into material form. Recounting the design of a digital humanities platform, this paper shows how design logics of existing digital infr… Read more

Pushback: Critical Data Designers and Pollution Politics

Kim Fortun, Lindsay Poirier, Alli Morgan, Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn, Mike Fortun. 2016. "Pushback: Critical Data Designers and Pollution Politics." Big Data & Society 3(2), 2053951716668903. SAGE Publications Ltd.

In this paper, we describe how critical data designers have created projects that 'push back' against the eclipse of environmental problems by dominant orders: the pioneering pollution database Scorecard, released by the US NGO Environmental Defense Fund in 1997; the US Environmental Protection Agen… Read more