5  Ethics in Understanding

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“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

– John Muir, as quoted by the Sierra Club John Muir Exhibit (Wood 1998)

This chapter is in-progress.

5.1 What “understanding” includes

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5.1.1 Understanding the data

Figure 5.1: Understanding the data, in the context of the data science lifecycle.

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5.1.1.1 Proxies

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5.1.2 Understanding the world

Figure 5.2: Understanding the world, in the context of the data science lifecycle.

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5.1.3 Uncertainty

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5.1.4 Validity, overfitting, generalization

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5.2 Test

Test citations for understanding as situated, embodied interpretation: the Sierra Club John Muir Exhibit discussion of a common misquotation (Wood 1998) and Data Feminism for Data Visualization (Klein and D’Ignazio 2025).

5.3 References

Klein, Lauren, and Catherine D’Ignazio. 2025. “Data Feminism for Data Visualization.” October. https://openvisualizationacademy.org/courses/data-feminism-for-data-visualization/.

Wood, Harold. 1998. “John Muir Misquoted.” https://vault.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/misquotes.aspx.