The latest edition of CURSOR – a cyberfeminist micro magazine - includes a piece on “data not found”.

Supported by the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2), the “in the archives” issue explores practices and politics of collecting, classifying and counter-archiving through contributions on social media photo dumps, beach rocks, anti-racist zines, femcel memes, cybernetic diagrams, online estate agent photos, alternative calendars and more.

You can get a limited edition print copy here and find it online here.

Thanks to Livia Godaert for editing, Bea Woolner for design, Maya Ellen Hertz for coordination - and all at CURSOR for the opportunity to share this work. 💜

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data not found

“I have been trying, for about the last twenty years, to link the following three dimensions: lived experience, technologies […], and silences.” – Susan Leigh Star

“‘Missing data sets’ are the blank spots that exist in spaces that are otherwise data-saturated. Wherever large amounts of data are collected, there are often empty spaces where no data live.” – Mimi Ọnụọha

“data not found” is an evolving dataset of datasets that were sought but not found on government data portals around the world.

The project archives unsuccessful requests for data from official sites around the world, surfacing what kinds of datasets are and are not made public, and what questions are and aren’t possible to answer with them.

Rather than assuming a top down, one-size-fits-all view about what data should exist and be made available—or about what counts as a “data gap”—this project draws on feminist science and technology studies to reconsider how data becomes missing as relational and situational processes.

The unsuccessful data requests reveal some of the ways that data matters. They invite reflection and imagination in considering what data is created and made public, why and for whom.

This piece draws on research for Public Data Cultures (Polity, 2025). More about the project can be found at datanotfound.jwyg.org.