Olivia: In 2019, the Mexican government officially recorded just over 1,000 feminicides. But one woman, working alone with a laptop and a map, found nearly 3,000. Jackson: Whoa, hold on. Three times the official number? From one person? That can't be right. That gap isn't just a rounding error; it's a canyon. Olivia: It’s a story of systemic failure and, more importantly, of radical resistance. It’s the central question at the heart of a powerful book we’re diving into today: Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action by Catherine D’Ignazio. Jackson: Catherine D’Ignazio… I know her work. She’s the Director of the Data + Feminism Lab at MIT, right? I remember reading she calls herself a "hacker mama." That’s a fantastic title. It suggests this book isn't just dry, academic theory. Olivia: Exactly. It’s deeply engaged, boots-on-the-ground scholarship. The book has been widely acclaimed in activist and academic circles for showing how data, which we often associate with corporations and surveillance, can be reclaimed as a tool for justice. Jackson: Okay, you have to tell me about this one woman. How does one person find three times more murders than an entire government? That’s where this story has to start.

Olivia: Her name is María Salguero. And her story is the perfect entry point into the book’s first major idea: the power of what D’Ignazio calls "counterdata." In 2016, María, a geophysicist by training, was horrified by the violence against women in Mexico and the state's apparent indifference. Official data was sparse, inaccessible, and clearly wrong. Jackson: But why was it so wrong? Was it just incompetence, or was it something more deliberate? Olivia: It’s a mix of things that the book calls "strategic ignorance." Sometimes cases are misclassified. A woman is murdered in a way that is clearly gender-related, but it’s just logged as a generic homicide. Sometimes the data is just not collected with any care. The state effectively says, "no data, no problem." So María decided to create the problem. She started a project called "Yo te nombro," which means "I name you." Jackson: I love that. "I name you." It’s already humanizing the work. So what did she actually do? Olivia: She dedicated hours every single day to a meticulous, grueling process. She scanned local news reports from all over the country, dug into obscure government websites, and even followed up on crowdsourced tips. For every single case she found, she plotted a point on a digital map. Jackson: That sounds like a monumental task. Olivia: It’s staggering. And she wasn't just plotting a dot. For each victim, she would log up to 300 different data fields in her spreadsheet. Jackson: Three hundred? What kind of details are we talking about? Olivia: Everything. The victim's name, her age, whether she was a trans woman, her relationship to the perpetrator, the method of killing, the status of the case in the judicial system, if there was organized crime involvement. She even pasted the full text of the news report into her database. She was building an archive of truth, one that the state refused to create. Jackson: Wow. I can't even imagine the mental and emotional toll of that. Spending your days immersed in the most horrific details of violence against women. Olivia: The book makes it clear that the emotional labor is immense. Activists like María have to take breaks for their own mental health. But the impact was undeniable. Her map became the largest, most accurate, and most publicly accessible dataset on feminicide in all of Mexico. Jackson: So who used it? Did it just stay on her computer? Olivia: No, this is the crucial part. It became an indispensable tool. Journalists used it to write informed stories. Nonprofits used it for their advocacy. Activists used it to plan protests. And most heartbreakingly, parents of victims would contact her, thanking her for making their daughters visible, for ensuring they weren't just forgotten by the system. Her data gave them a voice. Jackson: So her spreadsheet became a public utility, born out of one person’s refusal to accept the official silence. Olivia: Exactly. And she’s not alone. The book documents how this is happening all over the Americas. In Uruguay, Helena Suárez Val started a similar project. In the US and Canada, Indigenous-led groups like the Sovereign Bodies Institute are meticulously tracking cases of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit people, or MMIWG2, because federal agencies have failed to do so for decades. Jackson: It’s a pattern then. When the state looks away, the people who are most affected pick up the tools and start counting for themselves. Olivia: And that act of counting is profoundly political. It’s not neutral. It’s an accusation. It’s a form of protest that says, "Your numbers are a lie. We will build our own truth, and we will hold you accountable with it." This is the essence of counterdata. Jackson: It's incredible that one person's data can expose a government's failure. But the book's title has 'Data Feminism' in it. This feels like more than just counting. What happens after the data is collected?

Olivia: That’s the perfect question, because it leads us to the book's most profound contribution. D’Ignazio argues that these activists are pioneering a whole new approach she calls "restorative/transformative data science." It’s a vision of data that goes far beyond just counting. It’s about using data to heal, to remember, and to fight back. Jackson: Restorative and transformative. Those are powerful words, but they sound a bit abstract. What does that actually look like in practice? Olivia: The book breaks it down into five key actions, which I think of as the five 'R's: Repair, Remember, Reframe, Reform, and Revolt. Each one shows how data can be turned into a different kind of tool. Jackson: Okay, I like a good framework. Let's start with 'Repair' and 'Remember.' How can a spreadsheet repair anything or remember anyone? Olivia: Let's take 'Remember' first, because there's a story from Uruguay that perfectly illustrates it. A project called 'Cortar el hilo,' or 'Cutting the thread.' Two textile artists, Alejandra García and Marby Blanco, took the data from Helena Suárez Val's feminicide registry—basically, a spreadsheet of names. Jackson: The activist you mentioned earlier. Olivia: The very same. The artists put out a call for volunteers. Twenty-seven women and non-binary people signed up. Each person was given a piece of linen, red thread, and the name of one woman who had been killed in 2019. Their task was to embroider that woman's name. Jackson: Wow. So they’re physically, materially connecting with a victim. Olivia: Precisely. The goal was for each embroiderer to learn about the woman she was commemorating, to feel a connection, to ensure her memory was carried forward by another person. It’s an act of profound empathy. Then, the artists stitched all these individual embroidered pieces together into a single, continuous scroll. It was almost 30 feet long. Jackson: A 30-foot-long memorial. What did they do with it? Olivia: They unrolled it in a major public square in Montevideo. It was this massive, beautiful, and heartbreaking river of red thread and names, physically occupying a public space. It stopped people in their tracks. It transformed abstract data—a list of names—into a collective, public act of mourning and remembrance. It forced people to confront the scale of the loss in a way a number on a screen never could. Jackson: Ah, so it's about refusing to let these women be just a number in a spreadsheet. The embroidery project... that gives me chills. It's turning data into a physical act of remembrance. That’s what she means by data as memory. Olivia: Exactly. It’s creating what the book calls "counterhegemonic memory"—a memory that fights against the official erasure of these lives. And that connects to 'Revolt.' Data isn't just for quiet memorials; it's for loud protest. Jackson: Give me an example of data as revolt. Olivia: In Mexico City, a group of artists and activists called Colectiva SJF decided to do something monumental for International Women's Day. They used a web-scraping tool to pull the names of thousands of feminicide victims from years of news articles—data very similar to what María Salguero collects. Jackson: So they had a massive list of names. Olivia: A massive list. And in the pre-dawn hours, they and over two hundred women painters descended on the Zócalo, the main square in the heart of Mexico City. Using four-foot-tall stencils, they began painting the names of the victims directly onto the vast concrete plaza. Jackson: No way. They painted the names on the ground of the most important public square in the country? Olivia: Hundreds of them. Spiraling out from the center in bright pink and purple paint. When the masses of protesters arrived later that day, they were literally marching on a foundation of names, chanting slogans that echoed the lives lost right beneath their feet. It was an incredibly powerful fusion of data, art, and protest. The data provided the names, and the revolt gave them a voice that shook the capital. Jackson: And the government? They couldn't have been happy about that. Olivia: The next morning, government workers were sent out to try and erase the names. But their scrubbing just left these huge, ghostly white smears, which in a way became an even more powerful symbol of the state's attempt to silence and erase, and the persistence of the memory. Jackson: That’s an incredible story. So we have data as memory, data as revolt. What about 'Reform'? Does this data actually lead to new laws? Olivia: It absolutely can. This is often the slowest, most grinding work. The book highlights the Grupo Guatemalteco de Mujeres, the Guatemalan Group of Women. For decades, they fought for the state to recognize feminicide. The government kept saying, "We can't act, there's no data." So, starting in 1996, the group began producing the data themselves. They went to morgues, they pieced together police reports. It was painstaking. Jackson: The same pattern again. Olivia: The same pattern. And after more than a decade of relentless data collection and lobbying, they won. In 2008, their data was a key factor that pressured the government to pass a law that officially defined and criminalized femicide in Guatemala. Their counterdata literally reformed the country's legal code. Jackson: So a spreadsheet, in the right hands and with enough persistence, really can change the law. That’s a huge leap from just data entry. Olivia: It is. And it shows that this work, this restorative/transformative data science, operates on every level—from the personal healing of a family who sees their daughter's name remembered, to the public revolt in a city square, all the way to the halls of government.

Jackson: This is all so powerful. It completely changes how I think about data. It’s not just this cold, objective thing. It’s a weapon, a memorial, a tool for care. But what's the big takeaway here? Is the message that we all need to become data activists? Olivia: I think the book is careful to say that's not the message. Not everyone can or should start a spreadsheet tracking atrocities. That’s a specific calling that requires immense fortitude. The deeper insight is a profound reframing of what data is and what it's for. It’s a challenge to the dominant, Silicon Valley model of data as a resource to be extracted for profit or control. Jackson: Right, it’s an alternative vision. Olivia: It’s a fundamentally different vision. It’s data rooted in community, in care, in justice. It’s about using these tools, which were often born from systems of power and control, and bending them towards liberation. The author, D'Ignazio, has this great line where she says she has a 'hacker sensibility'—a belief that just because technology was birthed from colonial violence or militarism doesn't mean it can't be used for resistance. Jackson: I love that. Bending the master's tools to dismantle the master's house, so to speak. Olivia: Precisely. And the ultimate goal is not just to get better at counting. The book ends with this incredibly moving point. One of the activists, Geraldina Guerra Garcés from Ecuador, told the author that this work is not about counting the dead. It is about defending life itself. Jackson: Wow. Olivia: Another activist, Laura Hernández Pérez, said their dream isn't to prevent violence, but to "eradicate all of the violences." The ultimate goal of all this counting is to build a world where this counting is no longer necessary. Jackson: A world where the spreadsheet can finally be closed. That’s a much more hopeful and radical vision than I expected. It’s not about managing the problem; it’s about ending it. Olivia: And that vision is what transforms data from a simple record of tragedy into a tool for imagining and building a more just world. It makes you wonder, what important truths in our own communities are being ignored simply because no one is counting them? Jackson: That's a powerful question. And it’s a question that applies far beyond this specific, tragic issue. It’s about what we choose to make visible, and what we allow to remain in the dark. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Find us on our social channels and share what this conversation sparked for you. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.