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The Data Journalism Handbook: Towards a Critical Data Practice provides a rich and panoramic introduction to data journalism, combining both critical reflection and practical insight. It offers a diverse collection of perspectives on how data journalism is done around the world and the broader consequences of datafication in the news, serving as both a textbook and a sourcebook for this emerging field. With more than 50 chapters from leading researchers and practitioners of data journalism, it explores the work needed to render technologies and data productive for journalistic purposes. It also gives a "behind the scenes" look at the social lives of data sets, data infrastructures, and data stories in newsrooms, media organizations, start-ups, civil society organizations and beyond. The book includes sections on "doing issues with data," "assembling data," "working with data," "experiencing data," "investigating data, platforms and algorithms," "organizing data journalism," "learning data journalism together" and "situating data journalism."

Numbers are seemingly uncomplicated and straightforward measures of value, but beware—numbers hide moral and political trouble.

In 2013 a perplexity we had been experiencing for some time around the apparently unstoppable proliferation of contexts in which “the public problem” of Indigenous governance emerged came to a head. As members of an informal consultancy team established within the Contemporary Indigenous Knowledge and Governance Group in the policy research institute where, near the ends of our careers, we find ourselves based, we were asked by a group of concerned government officers – both Federal and Territory, to intervene in ‘governance training’ in five Aboriginal communities. Top-down delivery of Government funded training services on a fly-in-fly-out basis has become a huge industry in Aboriginal Australia, yet a bad smell of failure persistently hangs around these programs. The amount of funding we were offered for our work was significant, but still the size of a ‘rounding error’ in government budgets for governance and leadership training in Australian Aboriginal communities. And like much useful research funding, it was offered to us at short notice, at the end of a financial year. Our very different research-informed approach to services delivery was seen as an alternative to what was not working, and we were approached by people in government with whom we had established relations of confidence and trust. Contracts were duly signed and we found ourselves deeply involved with a group of younger scholars in delivering the ‘Indigenous Governance Development and Leadership Project’ (IGDLP). This in part is the origins of our writers ‘workshop on objects of governance, and this volume.

Having worked in science studies for many years, objects of knowledge are my usual focus of analysis. In particular in the past I have puzzled about how the objects that scientists know, and objects that practitioners of Aboriginal Australian knowledge traditions know, might be connected and separated. One example of that analytic work involved analysing the objects of knowledge involved as scientists and Aboriginal landowners engaged with each other around land management firing (Verran, 2002a). In 2014 I find that the character of the entity that is my focus of analysis must change. Epistemic practices as such, are no longer of much interest to those who fund research in Australia. Nowadays it is objects of governance that are of interest. Of course objects of governance come to life as knowable in knowledge practices, but it is not their capacity to constitute enough certainty about the world known that matters nowadays. It is their role in allowing transparent organisational accountability that now matters. And that shift is accompanied by changed institutional arrangements. Research associated with services provision is now largely the order of the day in Australian universities. Thus it is that, near the end of my career, I find myself working in ‘GroundUP,’ a research group and a services provider located in a policy research unit in Charles Darwin University (see Charles Darwin University’s webpage www. cdu.edu.au/centres/groundup/). No longer a field worker, I am a story-teller who worries at coming up with some useful naming’s of what we are doing in our ground-up policy research and services delivery projects.

This essay is one of three published in response to Casper Bruun Jensen's article “Experiments in Good Faith and Hopefulness: Toward a Postcritical Social Science” (Common Knowledge 20, no. 2 [Spring 2014]: 337 – 62), which concerns the “postcritical” work of Helen Verran, Richard Rottenburg, and Hirokazu Miyazaki. Verran's response clarifies the stance that she takes in her work, and especially in her book Science and an African Logic (2001), toward critique. Here she argues that critique involves grasping the difference between entities in the here-and-now, while conventional analysis in the social sciences explains away difference in the here-and-now by relocating it to an ideal realm. She explains that the method she has developed is a form of infra critique — a way of “doing difference” that keeps it present, particular, and localized. Her essay concludes that the shift to infra critique requires that the “good faith analyst” make her own ontological commitments explicit and accept responsibility for making judgments.

In this article, the authors relate brief stories of episodes spanning a period of 10 years when they worked with Australian Aboriginal groups and individuals as they incorporated digital technologies into their cultural practices. Their story telling is leavened with a dissonant working imaginary designed to interrupt both itself and the stories. As their stories of their digital lives proceed, however, the carefully contrived, resourceful dissonance unexpectedly recedes as the new and surprising digital lives that form part of their collectives evade the grasp of their interrupting tool.

Our essay begins with a story of a disagreement between a senior Aboriginal elder and an eminent Australian environmental scientist about whether two plants are the same or different. This highly specific disagreement, which occurred in the context of an attempt to exchange knowledge about land management, brings into focus what is involved in developing a philosophically sophisticated postcolonial dialogue as part of knowledge and culture work with Yolŋu Aboriginal Australians. We propose an Australian comparative empirical philosophical inquiry (ACEPI) as an intervention located in such encounters to prolong the possibilities for “doing difference” before forming concepts, through which a specific “going on together” becomes possible. We explain why we aspire to dialogue and recognize the worth of ontic discomfort, which might offer resources for ontic innovation. We also briefly discuss a project using a contrived analytic archive of Yolŋu texts, generated over the past twenty-five years.

This paper examines the work that measures and values do in policy in the context of an epochal change in the relations between knowledge and policy in Australia. I tell a story of successive attempts to rehabilitate a dying Australian river. The first attempt employs policy as the application of theoretically justified natural knowledge about rivers and their environs. The second attempt occurs after the evidence-based policy era has dawned in Australia. The contrast shows that measures, values and facts about the dying river justified by epistemic practices have been displaced. In an era of evidence-based policy and governance through market mechanisms, measures and values speak to policy through designs that can be bought and sold. In order to be able to better describe this shift I develop an analytic vocabulary to give an account of the intensive properties of what I call enumerated entities, and link the shift to the move from a disciplinary to a control society.

With the advent of environmental ‘governance by commission’, associated with evidence-based policy and market mechanisms, there is a need to (re)imagine Australia's nature politics. I identify two distinct domains of nature politics – one associated with distribution of goods produced in nature, and another concerned with constituting nature itself. The paper offers two analytically distinct readings of a tender bids hearing to select a contractor to assemble a diagnostic design for a government funded project of river rehabilitation. The tool that enables these incommensurable accounts is a purposefully crafted ethnographic story of the hearing. These dual readings engage alternative framings in order to see alternative political domains. The first reading mobilises an orthodox relativising framing to show a familiar politics evident in the competition for the contract; a politics over the distribution of goods produced from nature. This can be read as a politics over valuing nature. The second reading, proposing an alternative nature politics that should be understood as sitting alongside, utilises an alternative analytic framing. It offers a reading of the tender bids hearing as a politics contesting the form of the entities that should order Australian nature. In concluding I propose that the juxtaposed alternative readings, analyses made with disparate explicit metaphysical commitments, which reveal separate but connected political domains, constitute a politics of imagination, and ask how to configure the analyst who can engage such a politics?

This comment argues that Isabelle Stengers, in her article “Comparison as a Matter of Concern,” is justifiably concerned about the future of science in an imperium of commerce where epistemology has no clout. Agreeing with Stengers that we should focus attention on comparison-as-participant, this comment relates Stengers's argument to Verran's own work in contexts where the epistemic practices of science are challenged—in science lessons in Nigeria (case 1) and in episodes where environmental scientists try to work with Aboriginal Australian landowners (case 2). Drawing inspiration from her African and Aboriginal colleagues, Verran disagrees with Stengers that the only option for science is to make the terms of its defeat explicit. This comment suggests that the sciences might learn from other knowledge traditions in finding the places and the means to develop divergent practices through which resistance is possible. Verran identifies temporal disjunctions as possible sites of innovation, suggesting that contemporary sciences should forego their backward-looking traditional epistemic practices and learn to focus instead on equipping their participant-comparisons for an uncertain future.

This introduction to the Common Knowledge symposium titled “Comparative Relativism” outlines a variety of intellectual contexts where placing the unlikely companion terms comparison and relativism in conjunction offers analytical purchase. If comparison, in the most general sense, involves the investigation of discrete contexts in order to elucidate their similarities and differences, then relativism, as a tendency, stance, or working method, usually involves the assumption that contexts exhibit, or may exhibit, radically different, incomparable, or incommensurable traits. Comparative studies are required to treat their objects as alike, at least in some crucial respects; relativism indicates the limits of this practice. Jensen argues that this seeming paradox is productive, as he moves across contexts, from Lévi-Strauss's analysis of comparison as an anthropological method to Peter Galison's history of physics, and on to the anthropological, philosophical, and historical examples offered in symposium contributions by Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marilyn Strathern, and Isabelle Stengers. Comparative relativism is understood by some to imply that relativism comes in various kinds and that these have multiple uses, functions, and effects, varying widely in different personal, historical, and institutional contexts that can be compared and contrasted. Comparative relativism is taken by others to encourage a “comparison of comparisons,” in order to relativize what different peoples—say, Western academics and Amerindian shamans—compare things “for.” Jensen concludes that what is compared and relativized in this symposium are the methods of comparison and relativization themselves. He ventures that the contributors all hope that treating these terms in juxtaposition may allow for new configurations of inquiry.

Taking number as material and semiotic, this article considers the enumeration of Australia’s water resources as both a form of audit and a form of marketing. It proposes that a scientific enumeration utilizes the relation one/many while an economic enumeration utilizes the relation whole/parts. Working the tension between these two forms of enumeration can be understood as an inventive frontier in contemporary Australian life.

In this paper I juxtapose the work of the 2003–2006 Australian Research Council Project ‘Indigenous Knowledge and Resource Management in Northern Australia’ (IKRMNA) and the British imperial expedition of HMS Investigator (1800–1803) to scientifically reconnoitre what would become Australia. The first project explored the use of digital technologies in indigenous knowledge management, the second sought to add to the imperial archive. I argue that the culture and knowledge work of both projects is usefully revealed through the analytic concept of assemblage. In turn their juxtaposition usefully articulates the analytic leverage gained in the concept's use.

This contribution to the special issue ofASRon Jane Guyer'sMarginal Gains(2004) takes up two recent, and radically different, constructivist contributions to the field of economic sociology—those of Phillip Mirowski and Michel Callon. The article makes use ofMarginal Gainsto interrogate both these analytics, asking if they can meet the challenge posed by the diversity and multiplicity of African popular economic practice.

The paper describes an approach to digital design grounded in processes of Indigenous collective memory making. We claim the research should be understood as performative knowledge making, and accounting it should also be performative. Accordingly we present four texts generated in the course of our research as an exhibit. They attest design processes for a file management system TAMI. We briefly theorise our approach as exemplifying Suchman’s ‘located accountability’.

Is it possible to learn and simultaneously articulate the metaphysical basis of that learning? In my contribution to the forum I tell of how I came to recognise that bilingual Yoruba children could articulate the contrasting metaphysical fra- mings of Yoruba and English numbering. The story introduces an arena I call 'ontics' that recognises the contingencies of metaphysical commitments in the present. My claim is that learning to recognise and strategically articulate ontics as enacted metaphysical commitments in the present is useful in cross-cultural and transdisci- plinary learning and crucial in inquiring into learning.

A poster promoting policy change in Australia’s fisheries, which features a list of seven numbers in its effort to persuade, serves as occasion to do ontology. A performativist analytic is mobilized to show the mutual entanglements of politics and epistemics within which these numbers, agential in policy, come to life. Three distinct types of entanglement are revealed. Numbers have different political valences, and mathematicians need to attend to these in order to act responsibly as mathematicians.

Nanda’s irresponsible book carelessly prescribes for the U.S a return to Cold‐War science politics; and for India, nothing less than a cultural revolution which would install science as the arbiter. She sees this as smashing the backwards looking metaphysics of Hindu thought. I argue that her iconoclasm carries with it a purist fetishism deriving from science’s denied metaphysics. The metaphysics embedded in Nanda’s secularist critique is no more innocent than that she wishes to smash, yet being denied is more tricky to deal with. I claim Nanda’s book is irresponsible both in the context of India’s contesting social imaginaries, but also in the USA where she seeks to intervene in the so‐called science wars. Taking seriously the neo‐Buddhist Dalit resistance waged by those occupying the lowest rungs of the Hindu caste system, as Nanda prescribes, requires a refusal of metaphysics and positivist thought generally. Being unaware of the metaphysical ladeness of her critique, the ontological move that is neces...

In the foreword to Gayatri Spivak's In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics Colin McCabe suggests that Spivak's remarkable contribution to postcolonial critique lies in recognising how identit...

I juxtapose a story of Aboriginal landowners demonstrating their firing strategies with a story of environmental scientists elaborating their regimes of burning. The firings are profoundly different, and maintaining those differences is crucial for both Aborigines and scientists. Yet it is also important for both these groups to develop links between the forms of firing. I argue for understanding both firing regimes as expressions of collective memory which embed evaluative witness. This sameness enables modest yet sufficient connection. Acknowledging this translating form of ‘sameness’ would have scientists and Aborigines engaging an alternative form of generalizing, promoting a transformative moment in both knowledge traditions. This alternative form of generalizing embeds a politics different from the politics embedded in orthodox scientific and Yolngu forms of generalizing. I claim the tension made in articulating these alternative forms of generalizing as a ‘postcolonial moment’.