Curatorial Statement

By: Valeria Alladio
School of Communication and Culture, University of Aarhus
Jens Chr. Skous Vej 2, 8000 Aarhus, Denmark


“The Human is measure of all things”’

In a world where data have grown to scales that exceed human capacity for direct handling (Dalton & Thatcher, 2014), information structuring itself is designed for machine-reading (Ford & Iliadis, 2023), and classificatory systems are often shaped by black boxes (Milano et al., 2020), this Protagorean aphorism might seem outdated.Yet this philosopher's concern for the plurality of human perspectives resulting in different cultural values and epistemologies rang especially true to me in the context of contemporary datafication. Thus the present curated archive will present my work through the framework of perspectives, to promote intercultural understanding and visibility.

Data are generated, selected, and made meaningful within specific epistemic frameworks (Gitelman & Jackson, 2013). Wisdom, understood as situated, ethically informed knowledge oriented toward future action, both shapes and is shaped by data (Kitchin, 2014). It determines what is recorded, how it is organized, and the purposes behind its analysis. It is precisely this purpose which goes back to the human being “measure of all things”. Akoff, in fact, notes that wisdom requires direction and intentionality (Ackoff, 1989), something that algorithmic systems, for all their efficiency, lack. Without human intention, LLMs risk recirculating information within loops, amplifying biases, and producing knowledge that drifts away from human needs or meaning (Si et al., 2024).
So, even as data infrastructures increasingly mediate knowledge production and memory of data as Van Dijck’s work on digital memory indicates (Van Dijck, 2007), they remain human-made systems that reflect social values, political priorities, and material constraints (Milano et al., 2020; Seaver, 2022). Technologies serve human structures (whether communities, markets, or states), and thus embed the epistemic, ethical, and cultural orientations of their creators and maintainers. The question is therefore not whether “the human” is still the measure of all things, but “which human”, and whose perspective is rendered authoritative through curational practices.

This question compels us to confront the coexistence, and conflict, of multiple cultural, social, and political perspectives, now intensified by global data collection and platformed infrastructures. These infrastructures construct their own economies of attention, interoperability, and value (Milano et al., 2020), and are not always designed to serve the interests of users but rather those of their owners, governments, or markets (Seaver, 2022). Recognizing this, my work throughout the semester sought to foreground the role of positionality in data curation, interpretation, and visualization. So to allow each “human” to position themselves in a larger panorama (Loukissas, 2019).

My study of Cognitive Sciences led me to recognise the importance of “narratives” (structures of associations pre-existing any stimulus assimilable to perspective for the purpose of this text) in cognition, from visual perception (Priorelli et al., 2023), to the formation of opinions (Johnson et al., 2023), to intuition (Kahneman, 2011), and yet their fundamental importance for our ability to interact with our environment (Kahneman, 2011, Priorelli et al., 2023).

The selection of works included here illustrates how cultural perspective informs the production and presentation of knowledge through data curation. My first project explicitly showcased my personal interests as a foreigner seeking to immerse myself in the language and culture of my host country. My second project extended a decolonial orientation by integrating an underrepresented perspective into Wikidata, foregrounding the politics of representation in global knowledge infrastructures. Finally, drawing on my identity as an Italian woman, I translated and visualized data concerning gender-based violence in Italy, aiming to make a national issue more communicable across cultural and linguistic boundaries, while communicating my own perspective.
Across all three works, I aimed to make my standpoint explicit and to contextualize the information presented so that the viewer may understand the reasoning that structures categorizations, analyses, and conclusions. Ultimately, the purpose of my work through the semester has been to illuminate how data-driven knowledge practices, from datafication to archiving, need to be transparent about the perspective they adopt in order to allow (human) users to derive knowledge from them.


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References

Ackoff, R. L. (1989). From data to wisdom. Journal of Applied Systems Analysis, 16, 3–9.
https://softwarezen.me/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/datawisdom.pdf
Dalton, C. (2014, May 19). What does a Critical Data Studies look like, and why do we care? Seven points for a critical approach to “Big Data.”
https://www.countercartographies.org/critical-data-studies-look-like/
Ford, H., & Iliadis, A. (2023). Wikidata as semantic infrastructure: Knowledge representation, data labor, and truth in a more-than-technical project. Social Media + Society.
https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231195552
Gitelman, L., & Jackson, V. (2013). Introduction. In Raw data is an oxymoron. MIT Press.
https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9302.003.0002
Johnson, S. G. B., Bilovich, A., & Tuckett, D. (2023). Conviction narrative theory: A theory of choice under radical uncertainty. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 46, e82.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X22001157
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Macmillan.
Kitchin, R. (2014). The data revolution: Big data, open data, data infrastructures and their consequences. SAGE Publications.
https://doi.org/10.4135/9781473909472
Loukissas, Y. (2019). A place for plant data. In All data are local: Thinking critically in a data-driven society. MIT Press.
https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11543.003.0006
Milano, S., Taddeo, M., & Floridi, L. (2020). Recommender systems and their ethical challenges. AI & Society, 35(4), 957–967.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-00950-y
Priorelli, M., Pezzulo, G., & Stoianov, I. P. (2023). Active vision in binocular depth estimation: A top-down perspective. Biomimetics, 8(5), 445.
https://doi.org/10.3390/biomimetics8050445
Ring, A. (2021). Review of Uncertain archives: Critical keywords for big data (N. B. Thylstrup, D. Agostinho, A. Ring, C. D’Ignazio, & K. Veel, Eds.). MIT Press.
https://www.academia.edu/45171047
Seaver, N. (2022). Chapter 4: Hearing and counting. In Computing taste: Algorithms and the makers of music recommendation (pp. 95–115). University of Chicago Press.
https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226822969-006
Si, C., Yang, D., & Hashimoto, T. (2024). Can LLMs generate novel research ideas? A large-scale human study with 100+ NLP researchers (No. arXiv:2409.04109). arXiv.
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2409.04109
Van Dijck, J. (2008). Mediated memories: A snapshot of remembered experience. Leiden Journal of International Law, 71–81.

Image choiche:

I chose this Escher print "Another World II" (Escher, 1947) because it evokes both the idea of the impossible neutral perspective, which sees all at the same time (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020) and the idea that each perspective has its own panorama. Each point of view lies behind a siren, one enticing us towards certain biases and obscuring the rest of the pictures available. We might never be able to truly achieve a neutral perspective that is comprehensible, but we should be aware of which siren’s call we are following.

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References

D’Ignazio, C., & Klein, L. (2020). 3. On Rational, Scientific, Objective Viewpoints from Mythical, Imaginary, Impossible Standpoints. Data Feminism. https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/5evfe9yd/release/5

ETHICAL STATEMENT


Given the importance, underlined in my curatorial statement, of ensuring contextualisation at every stage of analysis and archiviation, my objective has been to render each source as explicit and traceable as possible. This emphasis on contextualisation has a twofold function.
First, it makes visible the biases embedded within the materials, methodologies, and interpretive frameworks. In doing so, it aligns with a post-human curatorial stance, as articulated in “Curator | Curating | the Curatorial | Not-Just-Art Curating” (Tyżlik-Carver, 2017), whereby data are gathered, handled, and presented with deliberate attention to mapping the complex web of relationships, politics, and power structures in which they are situated, partly through the inclusion and structuring of metadata (Acker, 2021).
Secondly, contextualisation corresponds closely with the FAIR principles of data curation, which articulate normative guidelines regarding the legal and procedural treatment of data and metadata (Larsson et al., 2025). In particular, the principle of Reusability is central to my approach: the information provided through both reports and associated metadata enables others to conduct independent analyses using the same materials. I have sought to promote Interoperability through the adoption of widely used software systems (Excel, R, RStudio), and Accessibility by integrating the data directly into the present archive. Findability, where applicable, is enhanced through linking practices and clear navigational structures.

Still I state the human is a measure of all things, at least in their effects and aims, a principle which doesn’t just involve legalistic, data-centered, prescriptions, but also an attention to the social and ethical panorama from which data were gathered. Drawing on the CARE principles formulated by the Global Indigenous Data Alliance (Collective, 2021), I critically reflected on questions of representation and the potential impact of my curatorial decisions. This includes contextualising my interest in the DVDs that constitute my collection; foregrounding, in my second project, the life of a woman whose experiences challenge normative paradigms yet remain obscured by colonial biases; and working to communicate, to the broadest possible public, the perspectives of Italian activists confronting gender-based violence while identifying with its victims. These efforts aim to enhance visibility across cultural barriers.
Yet such visibility must itself be ethically situated. Accordingly, I adopt what Alcoff terms “positionality” (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020), explicitly indicating how I sourced the data, conducted my analyses, and constructed my interpretive stance. This reflexive transparency is essential not only for disclosing the limits and biases of my own perspective but also for strengthening the ethical integrity of the curatorial process.
This final consideration is especially important because it underscores the relevance of small, context-rich datasets (Kitchin & Lauriault, 2014)within a data environment increasingly dominated by large-scale, decontextualised information. By foregrounding positionality and contextualisation my curatorial approach aims to sustain a composite and ethically grounded (thus human-centered) understanding of the data panorama. One that might allow for data, often recategorised by large algorithms, to keep trace of their origins.

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References

Acker, A. (2021). Metadata.
https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12236.003.0035
D’Ignazio, C., & Klein, L. F. (2020). 3. On rational, scientific, objective viewpoints from mythical, imaginary, impossible standpoints. In Data feminism. MIT Press.
https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/5evfe9yd/release/5
Indigenous Archives Collective. (2021). The Indigenous Archives Collective position statement on the right of reply to Indigenous knowledges and information held in archives. Archives & Manuscripts, 49(3), 244–252.
https://doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2021.1997609
Kitchin, R., & Lauriault, T. P. (2014). Small data, data infrastructures and big data. SSRN Electronic Journal.
https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2376148
Larsson, Å. M., Bornsäter, B., & Hacke, M. (2025). Developing practices for FAIR and linked data in heritage science. NPJ Heritage Science, 13(1), Article 53.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s40494-025-01598-x
Tyżlik-Carver, L. (2017). Curator | curating | the curatorial | not-just-art curating. Springerin – Hefte für Gegenwartskunst.
https://www.springerin.at/en/2017/1/kuratorin-kuratieren-das-kuratorische-nicht-nur-kunst-kuratieren/

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