What happens if we try to read a dataset not just as a technical object, but as a cultural and political artefact? As a condensed expression of the ideologies, extractive logics, and computational imaginaries that structure machine learning?

The Future of Good Decisions project’s Connal Parsley is teaming up with Machine Listening (Sean Dockray, James Parker and Joel Stern) to explore this question at the 2025 Festival of Para-Academia (FOPA) in Melbourne.

In the session we will attempt to read and misread a dataset together. The dataset in question, the PTC-SemEval20 corpus, was compiled to train machine learning systems to detect “propaganda” in news articles. It comprises hundreds of texts, each annotated against fourteen alleged propaganda techniques. How do we read something as clunky as a dataset? Especially one that claims to detect propaganda? What might it reveal about the propaganda of machine learning itself? How can we read with and against the compliance theatre of corporate dataset auditing? What kind of institution, or para-institution, might sustain such practices of critical, aesthetic, and speculative reading? This workshop forms part of ongoing research toward a “Dataset LARP,” a live action role-play in which participants collaboratively design and perform an alternative dataset audit. Here, role-playing becomes a way of inhabiting and interrogating the positions that datasets assume: Who gets to read? Who gets to annotate? Who is rendered legible? Who isn’t? And who writes the future prefigured by the dataset? We’ll explore how collective reading and role-playing might offer para-academic methods for auditing, reimagining, and reconfiguring the dataset form.

FOPA is a timely Melbourne-based critical initiative that builds 'platforms, vehicles and events to grow knowledgable publics'. More information about FOPA is here: https://fopa.info

This year's theme is 'Institutional Drift, Value at the Threshold' and it couldn't be a better fit for the Future of Good Decisions Project, which takes a practical and participatory approach to rethinking government decision-making design and evaluation paradigms for human-AI decision systems.

A range of ticketing options for the 3-day day festival can be found here: https://events.humanitix.com/host/fopa

And tickets and program specifically for day 3 (10am - 6pm) are available here: https://events.humanitix.com/fopa-2025-day-3