Using big data to solve big problems

Two top-tier data researchers moved to Canada in 2019 to try to answer big questions about democracy and equity in the digital age, with support from the Canada 150 Research Chairs Program (C150).

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, a trailblazing new media theorist at Brown University, left the United States after 25 years to come home to Canada and become the C150 in New Media at Simon Fraser University.

“I wanted to see what we could build in Canada,” Chun says.

Deb Verhoeven, an award-winning researcher and digital infrastructure creative came all the way from Australia to join the University of Alberta as the C150 in Gender and Cultural Informatics.

“I really felt like the work that I was doing had a receptive environment in Canada in a way that I hadn’t experienced in other places,” Verhoeven says.

Enhancing Canada’s research reputation

The C150 program was designed to enhance the country’s reputation as a global centre for science, research and innovation excellence, in celebration of Canada’s 150th anniversary. The Government of Canada invested $117.6 million to launch the C150 competition, enabling the country’s universities to attract top-tier, internationally based scholars and researchers (including Canadian expatriates) to Canada. Over 60% of the chairs selected were women. The program comes to a close in 2025.

More productive online debate

At Simon Fraser University, Chun founded the Digital Democracies Group, which grew into the much larger Digital Democracies Institute (DDI). It looks expansively at the “information environment,” meaning where humans (and systems) collect, process, disseminate and act on information. What makes the DDI unique is that it’s a multi-institutional, multidisciplinary project. It draws experts in data science and communications together with others from within social sciences, humanities and the arts.

The mix of disciplines is a natural fit for Chun, whose own background is in systems design engineering and English literature—a rare and powerful combination.

The DDI’s research takes on some of the hard problems that democracies face, such as online polarization and discriminatory algorithms. It has a project on responsible AI that focuses on the role the humanities can play in AI development. It also studies why and how people spread information they feel is authentic (regardless of its veracity), as well as how healthy conflict (not aimed at shutting others out), crucial for democracies to thrive, unfolds online.

Chun’s biggest undertaking at DDI right now is the Data Fluencies Project, an international effort supported by the Mellon Foundation to boost what she sees as today’s “data literacy” into “data fluency”. Its goal is to better equip future students and leaders to change, build and resist the data-filled world. For example, Gillian Russell, a Simon Fraser University professor, will be running a free public night school in Vancouver, to help participants imagine better technologies and futures. All of the DDI’s projects engage international partners.

“I think every C150 research chair has many international partners and ties, which they’ve been able to bring together,” Chun says. “C150 has been great not only for bringing people to Canada, but also different forms of scholarship and funding opportunities.”

Chun brings her expertise to the world stage with, for example, the International Panel on the Information Environment. This Swiss-based organization is modelled on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Chun chairs the Scientific Panel on Global Standards for AI Audits, which calls attention to how central AI audits are in assessing the risks and impacts of AI systems and enforcing regulation around them. Chun spoke on these issues at the Summit of the Future Action Days, during the United Nations General Assembly in New York in 2024. Chun has also served as a commissioner for Democratic Expression in Canada.

“I think that the international impact of our research and policy work has been an important accomplishment of the DDI,” Chun says.

She is confident she made the right decision in coming to Simon Fraser University.

“I’m proud of the work that all the C150 chairs have accomplished.”

More effective gender equity policies

Verhoeven has taken two passions and combined them into one extraordinary academic career. She started out in film studies, an experience that inspired her to pursue data science to illuminate social inequality in different settings, from the corporate boardroom to information infrastructure, to the film industry.

As a C150 at the University of Alberta, she spearheaded the innovative use of predictive network data modelling to understand the persistence of gendered inequality in a range of industries. Her award-winning research on film industry networks resulted in the headline-making report Re-Framing the Picture: An International Comparative Assessment of Gender Equity Policies in the Film Sector. Launched at the Berlin International Film Festival, this collaborative report looked at male domination across key creative positions (directors, writers, producers) in three film industries: Germany, the United Kingdom and Canada.

Using “what is” and “what if” analysis, Verhoeven and her team were able to model the impact of different gender equity policies to assess their effectiveness. They found that most existing policies designed to stimulate gender equity in fact do very little to reduce the influence of men. However, some strategies did have a noticeable impact on giving women access to powerful positions in the film industry. These included simply ensuring women get to work on a second project. Currently, around 70% of film workers are “one and done”, exiting the industry after a single film. She also recommended policies that prevent the formation of all-male creative teams, which are still common.

Knowledge transfer and mobilization are core to Verhoeven’s approach to research. At the University of Alberta, she established the Centre for the Analysis of Relational Data, an environment for students and a global network of researchers to develop new evidence-based approaches to social justice.

Verhoeven also builds and develops new archival knowledge platforms like the Humanities Networked Infrastructure (HuNI), pronounced like “honey.”

“HuNI is an attempt to democratize and radically open information systems to multiple perspectives,” Verhoeven says. “It basically says the world is a multiverse, and it’s rich and complex and it changes.”

HuNI allows users to search across silos of information and then reorganize collections of records into new relationships in order to represent the world as they see it, or want to see it. Verhoeven describes this work as “repairing the archive,” because it democratizes what was once a top-down system of organizing and preserving information.

Verhoeven sees her analysis of large-scale cultural datasets and building of archival research platforms as two sides of the same coin in the fight against gender inequity.

“The data is pretty clear that we are not going to achieve gender equity in the Canadian film industry in my lifetime,” she says. “That’s why we try and preserve and perpetuate knowledge, so that future generations don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel.”

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Keywords

• Information systems
• Gender equity
• Film industry
• Democracy
• Algorithms
• Cultural datasets
• Policy
• Social inequality
• AI development