Efficient service provider or committed social reformer?: Government data storytelling around city data projects

In this study, we analyze city governments’ public presentations of their data-centered projects as a form of data storytelling and reveal how the documents adopt contrasting data presentation techniques to construct and activate two unique ideals of data-driven governance: urban service management and social reform . When reiterating the familiar narrative of data-drivenness as real-time monitoring and optimization of services, documents demonstrate accomplishments in numbers and keep most of the cities’ data work hidden from the public. In contrast, the emerging narratives of social reform suggest city governments as leaders committed to tackling structural injustices through data-driven approaches and invite the public to interrogate their data work through interactive, open-ended data visualizations. However, we argue that the increased visibility of government data and delegation of power to citizens signaled by the social reform narratives do not succeed in challenging the dominant epistemology or power hierarchy in data-driven regimes. Instead, the signaled values are leveraged to justify an ideal of entrepreneurial citizens in the documents which is still exclusionary. This finding suggests that scholars and civic societies take more nuanced approaches to demands for government transparency and accountability, as well as calls for more attention to the political effects of these mundane forms of data communication between governments and their constituents.