Counting Up: Designing Agonistic Data Collection in the Court Room

This paper details an activist court-watching campaign to collect data during eviction hearings, working with a tenant's rights organization and a legal aid group. Our work provides a thick description of compiling an agonistic data practice that studies up, fleshing out the conception brought forth by previous scholars. We describe this project's planning, implementation, results, and challenges to demonstrate how designing data production can affect fairness and accountability in the courtroom. From our account, we offer insights for scholars wishing to contribute to data activism projects: to focus on designing data production not data products, to look for affective potential within messy data, and to shift epistemic burdens onto those who may benefit more from the data.