Narrator: In Mexico, the official government count for feminicide—the gender-related killing of women—was just over one thousand in 2019. But one woman, an activist named María Salguero, knew that number was a lie. Working from her home, she meticulously scanned news reports and crowdsourced tips, logging each case onto a digital map. Her count for that same year was nearly three times higher: 2,900. Salguero’s map, which she called Yo te nombro (I name you), wasn’t just a dataset; it was an act of defiance against state negligence and a memorial for lives the government refused to properly count. This powerful, solitary act of data collection is part of a global phenomenon that challenges our very understanding of what data is and who it serves.

In the book Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action, author Catherine D’Ignazio pulls back the curtain on this world of grassroots data activism. She reveals how individuals and collectives across the Americas are meticulously documenting violence to challenge official narratives, demand justice, and ultimately, defend life.

Narrator: The work of activists like María Salguero begins with a fundamental problem: a gaping void where official data should be. Around the world, governments systematically fail to collect, maintain, or release accurate information on feminicide. This isn't an accident; it's a form of structural inequality D’Ignazio calls "strategic ignorance." When there is no data, there is no problem to solve. This official silence allows states to avoid accountability for gender-related violence.

In response, a global movement of "counterdata" production has emerged. When institutions fail, civil society steps in. These are often small nonprofits, journalists, academics, and individuals who take on the immense emotional and practical labor of documenting what the state ignores. For example, in Mexico, the discrepancy between Salguero's count of 2,900 feminicides and the government's 1,006 in 2019 exposed the scale of state underreporting. This work is not just about correcting a number; it’s about making the invisible visible and proving that a crisis exists, forcing a conversation that institutions would rather avoid.

Narrator: The act of counting feminicide is never a neutral observation; it is inherently political. D’Ignazio argues that these activists are producing "counterdata"—data created to challenge power and expose injustice. This practice has a long and powerful history. In 1895, the journalist and activist Ida B. Wells published A Red Record, a pamphlet that meticulously tabulated statistics on the lynching of Black Americans. She didn't have access to official records, which were biased or nonexistent. Instead, she painstakingly gathered her data from the reports of white mainstream newspapers, using the oppressors' own records to expose their lies and the true, horrific scale of racial violence.

Modern feminicide data activists are the direct inheritors of this legacy. By systematically documenting cases, they transform individual tragedies into evidence of a widespread, structural pattern. They are not simply observing what exists; they are deliberately crafting political visibility for concepts like "feminicide" to name a problem that society has refused to see. This act of counting asserts that these lives matter and that their deaths are not isolated incidents but symptoms of a deeply rooted system of patriarchal and colonial violence.

Narrator: From her research with these activists, D’Ignazio develops a new framework she calls "restorative/transformative data science." This approach stands in stark contrast to mainstream data science, which often prioritizes objectivity and scale while ignoring context and humanity. Instead, this activist-led model is grounded in care, memory, healing, and justice. It has two goals: restoration, which means restoring rights and dignity to those harmed, and transformation, which means dismantling the structures that produce violence in the first place.

This framework is built on a four-stage workflow observed in activist practices. It begins with Resolving, where activists analyze power and decide to count. It moves to Researching, the often-grueling work of finding cases in news reports and social media. The third stage, Recording, is where the deep ethics of this work become clear. For example, the Alianza Feminista in Ecuador evolved their data spreadsheet from just four variables to over eighty. They added fields for ethnicity, gender identity, and whether a victim was pregnant, not just for better analysis, but to honor the full humanity of each person. The database becomes a memorial. The final stage is Refusing and Using data, where information is strategically communicated to create change.

Narrator: Perhaps the most profound insight from the book is the central tension activists navigate: they must simultaneously use data and refuse it. They use the formal language of data—numbers, charts, and statistics—because it confers legitimacy and is a powerful tool to challenge power. At the same time, they refuse to let data reduce human lives to "cold numbers." They constantly re-center the human stories behind the statistics, reminding the world that "they are not numbers, they are lives."

D’Ignazio identifies five ways activists deploy data to enact this refusal of violence: 1. Repair: Using data to support families, like the Brazilian project Uma por Uma, which tells each victim's story to ensure they are not forgotten. 2. Remember: Creating public memorials, like the art project Cortar el hilo, where women embroidered the names of victims on a 30-foot scroll. 3. Reframe: Challenging media narratives, as Agencia Presentes does by documenting hate crimes against LGBTI+ people to counter biased reporting. 4. Reform: Pushing for legal change, like the Grupo Guatemalteco de Mujeres, whose decades of data collection led to Guatemala passing a law defining feminicide. 5. Revolt: Mobilizing for public protest. In 2020, the Colectiva SJF used data to paint the names of over 200 feminicide victims across Mexico City's central square, the Zócalo, transforming the heart of the nation into a massive, temporary monument to the dead and a demand for justice.

Narrator: D’Ignazio doesn't just document this movement; she participates in it. The book details her own project, Data Against Feminicide, which co-designs digital tools with activists. This work explicitly rejects the "hero story" of a brilliant academic swooping in with a high-tech solution. Instead, it models a humble, collaborative approach. The project team developed tools like a browser extension that helps highlight key information in news articles, aiming to reduce the emotional labor and time activists spend on their work.

However, this process revealed deep challenges. An early machine learning model designed to find relevant news articles worked for general feminicide cases but completely failed for groups monitoring violence against Indigenous and Black women. The systemic biases in media reporting meant these cases were invisible to the algorithm. This forced the team to redesign their models with intersectionality at the core, proving that for technology to serve liberation, it must be built in solidarity with, and be accountable to, the most marginalized communities. It also highlighted the immense challenge of sustaining such tools, as academic and funding structures prioritize novelty over the long-term maintenance that real-world movements require.

Narrator: Ultimately, Counting Feminicide reveals that this global movement is not truly about counting the dead. As one activist told the author, "it is about defending life itself." The data is a tactic, a humble but essential tool in a much larger, collective fight to restore dignity and eradicate the root causes of violence. The book powerfully argues that data science is not a magic solution to social inequality; in fact, the demand for "more data" is often a delay tactic used by those in power.

Catherine D’Ignazio’s work puts data science in its proper place: not as a master solution, but as a servant to social movements. It challenges us to ask a critical question: In a world saturated with data, whose stories are we counting, whose are we ignoring, and how can we use the tools of information not just to describe the world, but to build a more just one?