 So today I'm talking briefly about the metaphors we use when we talk about data, and some of this is coming out of my research from the last year at the Oxford Internet Institute. So when we do Google image search for data, we see that data is really taking literally here. It's all ones and zeros. It's cool electric blue that evokes the computer that the data is related to, but it's still really intangible. So we have to use physical metaphors to make this understandable, embodied, tangible, legible. And to do that, we use metaphors. We are borrowing from Lackoff and Johnson's concept of the way we talk about metaphors in our language and that govern our thoughts. And so all of these sentences here illustrate how we metaphorically think of time as money. We equate time with money. But it also illustrates how that analogy enters into our thought and filters into our language and frames the way we see the world even if we're not kind of conscious of that relationship. So I wanted to look at how the tech industry talks about the metaphors we use to talk about data. So when we describe data as the new oil, it suggests that there's great value in the natural resource to be mined and refined, but it also suggests that it has to be handled by experts and by large-scale industrial processes. When we talk about data as an exhaust, we're talking about it as a byproduct of our digital transactions, but it's also suggestive that it's wasteful and pollutive and it might not be interesting. When we talk about data as a deluge, we talk about it in liquid fluid terms, but we're also talking about its overwhelming scale in disastrous terms, something that we can't control the flow of. When we talk about data as a shadow, we talk about the fact that it's attached to us that might be tied to us, gives an indication of the shape of who we are, but it's incomplete and possibly not necessarily representative. So these metaphors all get at the intangibility and obscurity of data, but they're really impersonal and dehumanizing, and they don't address the individuals to which the data refers. So I wanted to look at more personal, human-centered ways of relating to data, and so to do that, I looked at the quantified self-community, who are using apps and wearable sensors to create data about themselves and their bodies and to understand their lives. In some ways they're an early adopter group, but some of these tools are becoming much more commonplace in the consumer world, but their concerns and challenges reveal some of the pressure points that we all might start to be concerned with as more of our data and more of our lives turn into data. So I looked at how the quantified self-community talks about data and their personal relationship to it. So in the quantified self-community, when we talk about data as a mirror, we suggest that it's something to reflect on. It shows us, it is a tool for reflecting on ourselves and how others in the world see us, but it still might be a distorted view. When we talk about data as a self-portrait, we're talking about the artistic, interpretive, creative potential of data and constructing a sense of self, but it still might be granular and bitty and not yet photorealistic. When we talk about managing what we measure with data, we're introducing a very mechanistic objective view of the self inspired by Taylorism and scientific management. And when we talk about data as a practice, we might think of self-tracking as being associated with navel-dazing and narcissistic tendencies, but in talking about it as a practice, we're also getting at the fact that using data as a mode of introspection or practice towards self-knowledge. So why does it matter how we talk about data? The introduction of new technologies into our everyday lives, we need ways of familiarizing ourselves with those technologies, and metaphors have always helped with that. So when the television entered the living room in the 1950s, we framed the cathode ray tube with wood, literally domesticating it as furniture in our homes. And we see this when we use visual metaphors in the physical world that bring the physical into the digital to familiarize ourselves when we have new computers in our pockets. We call this skeuomorphism in design, and these visual metaphors teach us how to use technology by relating it to old technologies that we're familiar with, but they begin to also fall away as the technology becomes more familiar. So remember, maybe some of you students don't remember, but remember when we talked about the internet as an information superhighway? We wanted to talk about ideas spreading through space and time, and the highway system was our best analogy to understand that kind of interconnectedness and scale. So my provocation to all the digital problem solvers in the room is to be conscious of the ways that these metaphors influence how we approach our problems. To take a second look at the way it frames, the way we think about technology, is the way we use them, the way we design them, and the way we flip them.