ENV103 Chap.12 Representation, Ownership and Data Ethics
Representation, Ownership and Data Ethics
The last part of the course asks why representations of a Digital Earth are political and why owning it matters. This chapter traces the thread from map naming, omission and borders through the Week 4 questions on corporate control, bias, surveillance and consent, and applies them to the reflection's three questions about the data behind your poster.
Model dot points for a sample project show what a specific, data-tied reflection answer looks like, compared with a generic one that would gain few points.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Why representations are political
- 02
Borders, names and omission
- 03
Maps as constructions revisited
- 04
Three levels of data origin
- 05
Corporate control and data bias
- 06
Surveillance, consent and de-anonymisation
- 07
Answering the three reflection questions
Worked example · free
Sort a study's data by level of origin and trace who benefits
- +1Top down: the boat-ramp layer and census counts come from public agencies, so their categories and boundaries were set by government, not by the people fishing.
- +1Intermediate and bottom up: the catch logs belong to the app company and come from its users, so they over-represent boat owners with phones and under-record shore fishing.
- +1Benefit: charter operators and the council can act on the map, while groups who never used the app, such as iwi with customary interests, have little say in how pressure is labelled.
Key terms
- Epistemic politics
- Epistemic politics concerns how representations shape what counts as knowledge and who holds power over it.
- Political economy
- Political economy concerns who owns, controls and governs resources such as geospatial data.
- Cartographic omission
- Cartographic omission is leaving places, people or features off a map, deliberately or not.
- De-anonymisation
- De-anonymisation is linking supposedly anonymous records back to identifiable individuals.
- Data bias
- Data bias is a systematic over- or under-representation of some people or places in a dataset.
- Informed consent
- Informed consent is agreement to the collection and use of data given with a clear understanding of what will happen to it.
Representation, Ownership and Data Ethics FAQ
Why are maps described as political?
Maps decide what is shown, named and left out, and those choices carry power. A border can appear differently depending on who views a web map and from where, names can record a colonial view, and omission can make communities invisible. Reading a map critically means asking whose view it constructs.
What does the reflection assignment ask?
Three questions, each worth 10 points: whose data it is and who benefits, how the project could affect vulnerable communities or ecosystems, and what assumptions the analysis makes about people or places. Give two to four dot points for each, referring to the data you used.
How should I reference sources in the reflection?
Use the Harvard referencing system for any idea drawn from the literature or from other people's work. The reference list sits outside the length limit, so cite readings such as those on cartographic omission when they support a point about your own data.
Which lectures does the reflection draw on?
The brief asks you to reflect in light of the lectures on representing and owning Digital Earth, which the schedule places in Weeks 10 and 11. It also points to the politics of representation in the Week 8 material, so check Canvas for the exact readings and use whichever lecture content supports your points about your own data.
Assessment move
Treat this chapter as preparation for writing rather than for recall. Begin by listing every dataset your group used for the poster, and next to each write its provider, how it was collected and which of the three data levels it belongs to: top down, intermediate or bottom up. That list becomes the backbone of your answer to the first reflection question.
For the second question, take each map on your poster and ask what would happen if a decision-maker acted on it: who could gain, who could be stigmatised or overlooked, and what ecosystem might be affected. For the third, reread your methods and underline every assumption, such as a distance standing in for access or an area being uniform inside, and link at least one to an idea from earlier chapters, such as the MAUP.
Revisit the Week 4 slides on ethics and power and the Week 2 material on borders and naming, and pick one reading to cite. Draft your dot points, then cut any that would make sense for a different group’s project, because the brief rewards answers tied to your own data. Leave a day between drafting and submitting so you can tighten each point before the deadline.