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Numbers have taken on a whole different meaning during this pandemic, and we've all been pinned to their rise and fall with a voyeuristic sense of horror.

Daily case counts. A global death toll.

But the faceless and nameless spectre of numbers masks the mourning...and stories of love, loss, and injustice.

As the Black Lives Matter protests spilled onto the streets after the death of George Floyd in the USA, Black lives are being taken by COVID-19 in disproportionate numbers.

"Something about the datafication of lives dehumanizes them", argues A.I ethics scholar and robotics engineer Inioluwa Deborah Raji.

"If we were to approach our death counting with the intentionality of individual mourning, how would we react differently and who would we finally notice?"

Meet three leading thinkers interrogating numbers to help us all make meaning from mayhem.

Guests

Evelynn HammondsChair, Department of the History of ScienceBarbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of ScienceProfessor of African and African American StudiesHarvard University

Inioluwa Deborah Raji@rajiinioData scientist and robotics engineerFellow, Mozilla Foundation

Noreen GoldmanHughes-Rogers Professor of Demography and Public AffairsPrinceton University

Further Information

The Discomfort of Death Counts: Mourning through the Distorted Lens of Reported COVID-19 Death Data(Inioluwa Deborah Raji, Patterns, 2020)

Reductions in 2020 US life expectancy due to COVID-19 and the disproportionate impact on the Black and Latino populations (Theresa Andrasfay and Noreen Goldman, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 2021)

Prelude to COVID-19A series of conversations hosted by Professor Evelynn Hammonds

Center for Race & Gender in Science & Medicine

Profile of Inioluwa Deborah Raji named one of MIT Technology Review's Top Innovators under 35 in 2020

How our data encodes systemic racism (article by Inioluwa Deb Raji, MIT Technology Review, 2020)

The rest is here:
Meaning in mayhem: COVID death counts and a Black Lives Matter reckoning - ABC News