While preparing for the final project, one of the biggest concerns was how to incorporate a humanistic perspective into my project, as I have been familiar with the social science perspective. Especially, I have analyzed various crime data and demographic statistics since I started my doctoral program. However, I hardly ever doubted the validity and credibility of most data because the government and institutional agencies collected them.

I have learned that a continuous question about what the story underlying the data was and where the data came from was at the center of critical thinking. Especially, while I prepared for my final project, I re-read Drucker’s Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display (2011) and re-thought its meaning. The two sentences below in the conclusion of the piece inspired me:

The abandonment of interpretation in favor of a naïve approach to statistical certainly skews the game from the outset in favor of a belief that data is intrinsically quantitative – self-evident, value neutral, and observer-independent.

I am suggesting that we rethink the foundation of the way data are conceived as capta by shifting its terms from certainty to ambiguity and find graphical means of expressing interpretative complexity.

First, these two sentences directly criticized how I have been doing statistical analysis. Second, the argument above provided helpful guidelines on my attitude when dealing with data in my future project. Of course, as a doctoral student, it would be nearly impossible to create an alternative to the massive amount of crime data collected by government and research institutions. However, I think that maintaining critical eyes will significantly impact selecting and analyzing data and interpreting the results.

What I have done so far was reading numerical data and statistics and interpreting the result superficially, such as “the crime rate increases in certain communities,” “illicit drug use influences the crime,” and “the low level of self-control is the cause of the crime.” I do not think this way is sufficient for me as a doctoral student and a would-be researcher. In addition to the technical abilities to handle data and run software programs, I should have a keen eye to find and analyze serious problems underlying our society, such as discrimination, inequality, and alienation. For example, there are many issues that I can research from a different perspective what I have done so far: 1) why criminals choose to commit crimes, 2) why crimes are concentrated in a particular community or area, 3) what events in their life-courses make them criminals, and 4) some become criminals, and some do not even though they are under similar circumstances.

In sum, it is crucial to take the data actively rather than take them as given. One of the important lessons learned in Drucker’s reading and this class is that it is essential to have a critical perspective, be intellectually curious, and ask “why” continuously.