THE POWER OF CURATION

Laws of ordered form

The fact that no newspapers from Greenland are not collected and datafied, might give us an information gap, both now and in the future, where it will be hard to decipher historic events, and understand the Greenlandish everyday life in as much detail as the danish. This exemplifies how much power the choice of what data to collect, can hold.

Another way to study data, is by looking at the metadata surrounding it. Metadata are the categories and names for the variables that have been chosen. The categories and names for the data are important to scrutinize, as they tell a story of what values the person/organization making the categories have, and can also enlighten us about what kind of discrimination the dataset might entail. This can for example be seen, when the Danish state is to decide if a housing-area is to be on the “Ghetto-list” or not. Here they have decided that people from Greenland are counted as non-western-immigrants.