Original Research Article

Big Data & Society

January–June: 1–13
“We called that a behavior”: The making ! The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/2053951720932200
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Madisson Whitman

Abstract
Predictive uses of data are becoming widespread in institutional settings as actors seek to anticipate people and their
activities. Predictive modeling is increasingly the subject of scholarly and public criticism. Less common, however, is
scrutiny directed at the data that inform predictive models beyond concerns about homogenous training data or general
epistemological critiques of data. In this paper, I draw from a qualitative case study set in higher education in the United
States to investigate the making of data. Data analytics projects at universities have become more pervasive and intensive
to better understand and anticipate undergraduate student bodies. Drawing from 12 months of ethnographic research at
a large public university, I analyze the ways data personnel at the institution—data scientists, administrators, and
programmers—sort student data into “attributes” and “behaviors,” where “attributes” are demographic data that
students “can’t change.” “Behaviors,” in contrast, are data defined as reflective of what students can choose: attending
and paying attention in class, studying on campus, among other data which personnel categorize as what students have
control over. This discursive split enables the institution nudge students to make responsible choices according to
behavior data that correlate with success in the predictive model. In discussing how personnel type, sort, stabilize, and
nudge on behavior data, this paper examines the contingencies of data making processes and implications for the
application of student data.

Keywords
Big Data, institutions, predictive modeling, nudge, higher education, student data

Introduction
explained to me and university stakeholders that the
predictive model only drew from “behavior” data—
Be more white. Be more male. Be wealthier. Those are what he described as “things students can change”—
the biggest correlations with success. It’s terrible, but and not demographic markers like race, gender, and
it’s the truth. socioeconomic status. Don, in telling me “the truth,”
suggested these demographic markers were accepted by
—Excerpt from interview with Don,1 a university stakeholders as not only immutable but also indicative
administrator of a student’s prospects for success.3
But despite the collectively understood disparities in
“The truth” was taken for granted among data sci- success, a focus only on the “things students can
entists, administrators, and programmers in their work change” serves to make demographic differences less
on predictive modeling using institutional data to obvious and integral to the university’s model of suc-
anticipate whether or not a student would graduate cess. Through the sociotechnical obscuring of demo-
within a four-year period. This observation came graphic data in predictive modeling and illumination
from Don, a long-time administrator at the university of data that instead highlight behaviors that correlate
who is engaged in the application of nudges2 derived
from the predictive model’s outputs. Sitting across a
table from me in the university’s student union, alert Department of Anthropology, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA
for eavesdroppers, he explained how he thought of
Corresponding author:
such inequalities as common but mostly unspoken Madisson Whitman, Purdue University, 700 W. State St., West Lafayette,
knowledge among faculty and administrators at the IN 47907-2050, USA.
university. Over the course of my fieldwork, he Email: mwhitma@purdue.edu
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2 Big Data & Society
with success, the likelihood of a student graduating in
four years appears more contingent on those behaviors
than demographic markers.
In this article, I explore an institutional shift from
reliance on demographic data to what administrators,
data scientists, and programmers at the university have
constructed as behaviors. Universities have long had
involvement in reshaping demographic categories
(Hanel and Vione, 2016), not only through admissions
processes that shape student bodies but also through
research conducted in association with institutions that
influence culturally held ideals about meritocracy
(Warikoo, 2016). As universities take a data-driven
approach to such ideals, they increasingly seek predic-
tive power, more context for enrollees and applicants,
inventive ways to produce knowledge about students,
and methods of sidestepping contentious issues around
inequality (Selwyn, 2015). In a departure from demo-
graphic data, which are solicited through self-reporting
and traditional markers of a student’s category mem-
bership, personnel tout behaviors as a better, more
neutral alternative. Automated data collection alleges
more consistency, standard instruments for gathering,
an expansive sample, and direct proxies. However,
I argue that in practice the making of new data—
behaviors—is no less fraught.
Making data
How do data become behaviors, and how do those
behaviors come to take the place of demographic
data in how the institution manages its student body?
In this essay, I build on critical data studies scholarship
(see Iliadis and Russo, 2016) by empirically demon-
strating not solely that data are made but also how
they are made. In doing so, I illustrate how actors at
the university discursively render data into types such
that demographic markers can seem removed from stu-
dent success.
Drawing from qualitative research I conducted at a
large public university in the United States, I argue that
by revising predictive modeling and nudging to focus
even more intensively on what they deem behaviors,
data personnel—data scientists, administrators, and
programmers—position students as subjects of nudges
responsible for their own success. The institutional
reframing of success in terms of “what students can
change” enables the institution to transfer the burden
of success away from itself and keep the tacitly held
knowledge of inequality out of the university’s visions
for predictive modeling.
To demonstrate how data personnel produce behav-
ior data in a way that enables the institution to mini-
mize the impact of demographic markers on success, I
first provide a brief overview of my research site and
predictive analytics in higher education in relation to a
larger landscape, the literature that underpins my anal-
ysis, and my methodological approach. I then address
the typing of data into behaviors and attributes, the
sorting of data into behaviors, maintenance of behav-
iors as accurate proxies, and nudging of students on
behaviors as processes that assist personnel in solidify-
ing behavior data.
Research site
This qualitative case study draws from ethnographic
fieldwork I conducted at a large public university in
the United States across a 12-month period. Data per-
sonnel characterize the institution, which hosts roughly
30,000 undergraduate students, as at the forefront of
applying institutional data to success initiatives. As an
administrator told me, “no one’s ever done the data
mining like we’re doing the data mining,” alluding to
the university’s computational approach institutional
research (IR), expansive data infrastructures, and
vision for how data could revolutionize higher educa-
tion. At the time of its foray into predictive modeling,
the university was indeed unique for its repurposing of
wireless network usage data as a proxy for students’
whereabouts. Moreover, it has digitized much of its
institutional data. When I interviewed Henry, a data
scientist, he got up to go to his bookshelf and returned
with a massive binder, at least four inches thick. The
binder held a printout of deidentified, aggregated stu-
dent data, the precursor to what is now an online, inter-
active visualization.
M: Oh my god. Volume one of how many?
H: Uh, I want to say less than ten but more than two.
M: That’s a lot. That’s a lot of paper.
H: And they would do this every year. It would take
them from the time the data was available until, like,
December, just to be able to produce a book of this.
Now, when the data’s available, that [interactive visu-
alization is] updated the next day. So, like, that was the
world that they were living in, so, like, when you’re
living in that world, you don’t have time to do the
advanced stuff.
To be able to “do the advanced stuff,” the university’s
multiple information technology (IT) and IR offices
worked together on collecting and sorting data, espe-
cially computationally. Solicited by university admis-
sions through the application process, demographic
data, which include data such as high school ZIP
code, parental income, race, ethnicity, and gender,
are readily available for IR to incorporate into its stud-
ies of the institution and student body. While demo-
graphic data have long factored into many aspects of
Whitman
IR, the university has more recently sought other sour-
ces of data for quantifying and understanding its stu-
dent body. As it moves ahead in its foray into academic
predictive analytics, wherein it uses Big Data to predict
outcomes, from a student’s likelihood at graduation
within a four-year period to a student’s prospects at
getting an A or B in an individual class, the university
has moved away from demographic data into what
data personnel refer to as behavior data.
Predictive analytics: From higher education to a
broader landscape
The deployment of student data in higher education in
the U.S. is widespread and under varying degrees
of scrutiny, from the College Board’s short-lived
“Adversity Score”4 to growing concerns about student
privacy and dataveillance on campuses (Selwyn, 2015).
The datafication of universities and surge of predictive
analytics projects prompt questions about the future of
higher education and what roles universities play in
society.
Higher education is one area in which predictive
uses of Big Data are gaining momentum. While per-
sonnel who worked most closely with student thought
their work was exceptional among what they regarded
as controversial applications of data, such as predictive
policing, predictive analytics in higher education is
nonetheless situated within a broader landscape. For
example, during my fieldwork I was chatting with the
director of IT at the university in an elevator. After
hearing more about my research, he immediately
asked me about Black Mirror, the speculative
Channel 4/Netflix series exploring techno-dystopic
futures, and specifically referred to an episode about
social credit systems.5 When we met more formally
for an interview, he directly compared data at the uni-
versity to intensive, artificial intelligence-driven data
collection in healthcare and precision medicine,
noting what he deemed “the promise and the threat,
that massive quantities of data will “reveal things to
you that you don’t know about yourself,” both to a
person’s benefit and detriment.
While medicine was his immediate reference, the
university’s development of nudges was at its height
during revelations about the analytics firm Cambridge
Analytica using data problematically mined from
Facebook users to target prospective voters. Beyond
the manipulation of politics, John Cheney-Lippold
(2011, 2017) has identified the reordering of people
according to their social media data as a “new algorith-
mic identity,” in which data enable new ways to orga-
nize people, based on an affinity of clicks as opposed to
traditional social categories.
3
Data that correspond with people are ample and are
mobilized by institutions through predictive mecha-
nisms. “Data doubles,” or data that stand in for
people in systems and analytics, frequently outperform
them (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000; Raley, 2013). Gavin
JD Smith (2016), David Lyon (2003), and Cathy O’Neil
(2016) have all pointed out the potential destructive-
ness of proxies and data doubles when treated as
the people they represent: denied loans, extended sen-
tences, increased insurance rates, and lost job opportu-
nities, to name a few. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
(2018) writes that these data “absolve one of
responsibility . . . by creating new dependencies and
relations” in standing in for what is unknown or inac-
cessible. It matters which data become doubles, and
how those data become data in the first place. This
problem is evident in research and investigative report-
ing on predictive policing and risk assessment, in which
police departments take past events as predictive of
future activity (Brayne, 2017; Selbst, 2017), or where
algorithmically calculated scores are meant to indicate
the likelihood of recidivism (Angwin et al., 2016;
Benjamin, 2019). The translation of data into predic-
tions is not solely algorithmic; it is also wrapped up in
structural inequalities and notions about what society
is and ought to be (Eubanks, 2018). And so while the
work data personnel in universities do is not the same
as predictive policing, it occupies a similar imaginary6
in which what people will do is both possible to antic-
ipate and open to intervention.
Relevant literature
States and institutions have long sought to account for
and predict people and activities within them via data
collection (Scott, 1998). Data enable auditing practices
(Power, 1997; Strathern, 2000), the quantification of
people (Bouk, 2015; Desrosieres, 1998), and the calcu-
lation of risk (Hacking, 1990; Harcourt, 2007).
Quantification, especially commensuration, is constitu-
tive of people: quantification, as a social act, makes
what it purports to represent (Espeland and Stevens,
1998, 2008). As scholars in science and technology
studies (STS) have demonstrated, measuring and pre-
dicting are fraught social processes requiring invest-
ment and validation through institutional politics and
infrastructures (Porter, 1995; Star, 1999; Star and
Ruhleder, 1996). Processes of making data and their
infrastructures are frequently subject to what Susan
Leigh Star (1991) has called “deletion,” or the invisibi-
lizing of labor in scientific work. Such deletions have
been at the fore of research on scientific and techno-
logical practice and related institutions in STS, though
are less present in inquiries into higher education.
4 Big Data & Society
Scholars addressing Big Data in educational con-
texts have largely explored its possibilities, testing out
in-classroom technologies, courses scaled up to enroll
unlimited students (such as massive open online
courses, or MOOCs) (see Jones et al., 2014), and pre-
dictive uses of data collected from learning manage-
ment systems (e.g. Blackboard, Canvas). As George
Siemens reports in mapping the field, learning analytics
is the use of data to improve learning (2013: 1382).
While learning can refer to any variety of educational
settings, learning analytics has expanded rapidly in
higher education, where such technologies are used by
universities to manage risk and understand student
bodies (Wagner and Longanecker, 2016).
Such projects, which typically draw from third-party
consultants or are developed in-house, have received
scrutiny as critics express concerns about universities
surveilling students (Harwell, 2019; see also Hope,
2016). While much of the learning analytics literature
explores the significance and effectiveness of specific
learning analytics initiatives, more recently scholars
such as Neil Selwyn have argued that “learning analyt-
ics needs to be critiqued as much as possible,” given the
potential to disparately impact students (2019: 11).
And learning analytics is critiqued. Scholars are
addressing effects on student data privacy (see
Ifenthaler and Schumacher, 2016; Rubel and Jones,
2016; Slade and Prinsloo, 2014; Sun et al., 2019).
Juliane Jarke and Andreas Breiter (2019) discuss how
education is changing with datafication, and Ben
Williamson (2017, 2018, 2019) has written extensively
about the implications of large-scale data collection on
students, both in and outside of higher education.
Other education scholars have interrogated the ethics
of learning analytics (Johnson, 2014; Slade and
Prinsloo, 2013) and prospects for just approaches
(Shahar and Harel, 2017).
Data analytics projects like that I discuss deploy
nudges in tandem with predictive outputs to suggest
to students how they can improve their graduation out-
comes and grade point averages (GPA). The nudging
that personnel use is aligned with Richard H Thaler
and Cass R Sunstein’s outline of nudges and “choice
architecture,” in which architects structure the “context
in which people make decisions” to “nudge” them
toward particular choices (2009: 3). Thaler and
Sunstein frame nudging as “libertarian paternalism,”
where people are ultimately capable of making their
own choices—a nudge is a mild intervention.
However, Karen Yeung argues that in contexts of Big
Data, the array of data and analytics dynamically
available to choice architects means that nudging is
“subtle, unobtrusive, yet extraordinarily powerful”
thanks to the magnitude and networks of data (2017:
119).
Some of the literature about learning analytics offers
strategies for how to more productively nudge stu-
dents, in which students are framed not just as consum-
ers but also active partners at universities who should
be accountable for their own success (Fritz, 2017; see
also Pascarella and Terenzini, 2005). The notion of
choice architecture in learning analytics rests on con-
ceptualizations of agency where students have unre-
stricted access to a full range of choices. This take on
agency is in contrast to social theorizing on agency, in
which actors work within and against constraints (see
Bourdieu, 1980; Ortner, 2006).
Some education scholars have commented on the
contradictions of deploying nudges in relation to
more liberal views of the purpose of education (see
Clayton and Halliday, 2017; Hartman-Caverly, 2019).
Jeremy Knox et al. explore a growing trend of educa-
tional institutions integrating datafied behavioral eco-
nomics approaches. They remark on the implications
of “[shaping] students’ choices and decisions based on
constant tracking and predicting of their behaviors,
emotions and actions,” noting the potential for dispa-
rate impacts (2020: 39).
Some of the appeal of Big Data, and why, perhaps,
it links up so well with the surge of behavioral econom-
ics in education, is rooted in pervasive and influential
“mythologies” of data as truthful and omniscient,
which critical data studies scholars have challenged,
recognizing data as partial and always already political
(Boyd and Crawford, 2012; Dalton and Thatcher,
2014). The promise of data is evident in institutional
data mining projects that endeavor to take the place of
self-reporting: data personnel understand data as more
direct proxies, comprehensive and accurate, or as Rob
Kitchin and Tracey P Lauriault put it, “exhaustive in
scope” and “fine-grained in resolution” (2014: 2). The
presumed neutrality of data enables them to seem prior
to interpretation, an incredible, “raw” resource that
can reveal insights about humanity (Boellstorff, 2013).
But data must be made. They do not exist as prior to
processing. Lisa Gitelman and Virginia Jackson (2013:
3) write that “data need to be imagined as data to exist
and function as such.” As I discuss herein, the discur-
sive work involved in creating data is ongoing and lay-
ered; it relies on a great deal of labor and
transformation. Nonetheless, data are treated by per-
sonnel as a stable, bounded entity, not unlike how the
engineers in Diana Forsythe’s (2001) work regarded
knowledge in programming expert systems. The ways
that personnel imagine behaviors and attributes mate-
rialize as data, and in turn those data shape how per-
sonnel produce and use those categories. Technologies,
as materialized discourses that reflect broader social
epistemologies, naturalize and crystalize concepts
(Suchman, 2007). In the case of data collection,
Whitman
technologies create the categories of people and activ-
ities they purport to measure, making them manage-
able (Foucault, 1972, 1977).
Societal discourses of data draw upon mythologies
of data and so seem like a neutral means of revealing
order intrinsic to society, although social theorists have
demonstrated that ordering processes are a means
through which actors make society (Bowker and Star,
1999; Jasanoff, 2004; Latour, 1990). In data technolo-
gies, ordering processes make the subjects of ordering
ready to be taken up in a system, scaled, standardized,
predicted, and nudged (Cheney-Lippold, 2011; Raley,
2013; Stark, 2018). I take the conditions of ordering in
the form of discourse as a fruitful focal point to look at
how data personnel as actors give shape to data: how
they make sense of the institution, their social contexts,
and their ideas about data are part of the data technol-
ogies they design and implement.
Methods
In this qualitative case study, I used a combination of
interviewing and participant observation in university
IT and IR offices in which personnel render students
into data. I interviewed 30 data personnel using semi-
structured techniques in interviews lasting 60–
90 minutes, and I conducted follow-up interviews with
five key interlocutors who worked most closely with
deploying the model and constructing nudges
(Bernard, 2011). These personnel primarily included
data scientists, developers, and IT administrators, but
also network architects and stakeholders involved in
developing predictive outputs for students.
Much of the participant observation of my field-
work took place in meetings. Meetings covered a
range of topics, from monthly development updates
to explanations of technical details of the predictive
model to workshopping nudges to debates about
what data mean. Meetings were places where multiple
teams came together, data scientists painstakingly
explained the mechanics of modeling or qualified
results, programmers explained why they arrived at a
particular form of nudging, and administrators nixed
nudges and passed along institutional memories of data
sources. In these spaces, personnel discursively chal-
lenge and solidify not only the technical dimensions
of modeling but also the data that inform it (see
Brown et al., 2017; Sandler and Thedvall, 2017). The
constraints and limits personnel face become evident in
such spaces, where their ideas are curbed by the top-
down vision of the current university administration or
where they must execute a stage of development over
which they are not in total agreement owing to rapidly
approaching deadlines and desire to receive
the approval of stakeholders. Their institutional
5
entanglements operate as a check on what they under-
stand as choices available to them.
Although this article is informed by participant
observation, I mostly utilize interviews in my analysis
because they function as a central space for actors to
map out a sociotechnical imaginary of data technolo-
gies at the university. In interviews, actors articulate
their work and their visions for predictive projects so
that modeling is integrated into such an imaginary, in
what Sheila Jasanoff has described as “collectively
held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed
visions of desirable futures” (2015: 4; see also Jasanoff
and Kim, 2009). The top-down discursive organizing of
data that occurs before, during, and after modeling,
especially in the context of interviewing in which per-
sonnel are asked to provide an account of modeling
and nudging, is critical to the formation of an imagi-
nary of predictive technologies. As Nick Seaver (2017:
8) has observed in his ethnographic approach to algo-
rithms, “interviews do not extract people from the flow
of everyday life, but are rather part of it.” Interviews
enable personnel to imagine the concepts on which
their projects hinge.
I transcribed and coded interviews and field notes in
NVivo, a qualitative analysis environment. As
Foucault (1972, 1977, 1978) has elucidated, discursive
practices make the categories they describe, rendering
them measurable, governable, and here, nudgeable.
I identified where personnel defined data, explained
to me or to each other what a data type meant to
them, or decided which data could function as proxies
for students. I focused on moments in interviews in
which personnel speak, define, and sort behavior data
into a fixed category (see Wood and Kroger, 2000).
This analysis illuminates personnel’s implicit and
explicit delineations about what data are and
what they represent, along with how personnel
thought data ought to be classified (Strauss, 2005).
Interviewing, transcribing, and coding all helped me
to make sense of the conceptual work involved in han-
dling institutional data. Because I began my fieldwork
well after modeling began, interviews helped me to
reconstruct narratives of decision-making about data
sources, modeling, and nudging.
I have structured my findings to reflect a chronology
of data processing. However, because some of this
work occurs simultaneously, I also conceptually order
findings, layering them on top of a foundational con-
cern with demographic data and an imperative to
nudge.
I begin with the problem of removing demographic
data from modeling, which prompted personnel to
think about data in terms of types (i.e. attributes and
behaviors). I then explore the work of sorting the avail-
able data at the institution into a category of behaviors
6 Big Data & Society
and assigning proxies. By maintaining data as accurate
proxies, personnel help behavior data begin to hold
together. Finally, the solidification of a category of
behaviors enables personnel to nudge students. I con-
clude by discussing the implications of making institu-
tional data.
Typing data into “attributes” and “behaviors”
The typing of data was the result of conscious attempts
from data personnel to nudge students not only effec-
tively but also fairly. In one of my first interviews with
Don, I sat in his office, across from him again over his
cluttered desk, and asked him to recount some of the
early decision-making in model development. He had
been involved in the original design of the model and
determining which data should be incorporated into
it. Don summed up one of the key decisions
regarding data:
And what we found initially was that all the standard
things that you would guess correlate with student suc-
cess that students can’t change were the big drivers:
race, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, what
high school they came from, certain kinds of grades,
whatever. Well, students can’t do anything about any
of that. So, the idea was to take a look and see, well, is
there other stuff that seems to correlate.
The notion of “behaviors” emerged from efforts by
personnel to avoid utilizing traditional indicators of
success and instead look at other data that could be
predictive of graduation within a four-year period.
When data personnel explain what goes into the pre-
dictive model, they divide the data neatly into two
major categories: “attributes” and “behaviors.” They
define attributes as fixed categories, the “standard
things” that students “can’t change.” These categories
are made up of demographic data, where data on
parental income and high school ZIP code are indica-
tors of socioeconomic status. Universities collect data
on race, ethnicity, and gender in standardized forms,
whether through college applications or through
reporting mechanisms in university systems. Data per-
sonnel treat attributes as outside of the model’s pur-
view because while they correlate with graduating in
four years, they are not actionable. For example, per-
sonnel cited that a student cannot retroactively attend a
different high school. Moreover, while a student could
transition while in college and change gender markers
in university systems or might experience socioeconom-
ic mobility, data personnel would not construct nudges
to instruct them to do so. Therefore, data personnel
regard attributes as off limits in making
recommendations, and they were quick to assure me
that they would never do such a thing.
By drawing boundaries around attributes, data per-
sonnel attempt to seal them off and open up other types
of data for usage. The discursive and computational
effects of relegating some data as attributes are that
those data, and the students who provide them,
become stable entities. That is, by treating demograph-
ic data as attributes that are frozen—everything a stu-
dent “can’t change”—personnel remove those data
from an ongoing conversation about what they can
use in the model. The differing experiences students
have on campus that interlock with their race and
socioeconomic status, for example, are no longer part
of data projects because personnel define them as fixed.
Computationally, when some data become attributes,
data scientists no longer include them in the predictive
model: demographic data, characterized as attributes,
do not factor into calculating the likelihood of gradu-
ation in four years.
The effect of framing some data as attributes that
are off limits for nudging is not that they are perma-
nent, but instead that personnel cannot nudge students
to change them. Will, an administrator who helped to
develop the model, explained to me that the sidelining
of attributes prompted data personnel to look for other
factors involved in success at the university:
So, since we’re pulling in all this data at the same time
and dropping it into the algorithm, obviously there are
a number of things that are highly predictive of student
success on campus. Their academic preparation before
they come into campus. Their GPA while they’re
at [the university] obviously is highly predictive.
Socioeconomic status things. Demographic markers.
But they’re all things that either because it’s too late
in the game, we can’t tell a student, “Boy, it would have
been great if you would have studied harder in high
school.” And we certainly can’t tell a student on a
demographic or socioeconomic thing, we can’t say,
“Hey, it’d be good if you weren’t so poor.” There’s
nothing a student can do with that. Even though it
does put ‘em in a higher risk category. So we took
those things that were malleable by the students.
Things like, how much time they were spending on
campus. Whether they were a proxy for whether we
believed they were paying attention in class by how
much data they were downloading in a class.
Instead of nudging on attributes, data personnel have
constructed nudges about “things that were malleable”
and that the university collects and monitors. For
example, while a student’s past grades do factor into
predicting how a student will perform in an individual
course in terms of calculating the likelihood of getting
Whitman
an A or B, those “things” are not malleable because it is
in the past. In nudging, personnel instead focus on
correlations between what is malleable and GPA or
getting an A or B in a course. In the model, such var-
iables include engagement with learning management
systems and class attendance (derived from network
activity), where more posting on discussion boards
and downloading of course materials correlate with
higher GPAs.
Malleability, however, is not a given: it has to be
translated into a behavior. Will refers to data down-
loaded in class as a potential proxy for paying atten-
tion, where the data on downloading are available for
data personnel to match up with a behavior. The ques-
tion is not if downloading data is a proxy but rather if
it is a reasonable proxy for paying attention. The data
available for modeling predate the model itself. Data
on students’ downloading habits in class were original-
ly collected for the maintenance of network infrastruc-
tures, but personnel have repurposed them as a proxy
for attention. Data on downloading were not always
behavior data.
Massive amounts of data are available to data per-
sonnel, and it is not self-evident what is a proxy for
what, nor was it apparent to me if a hard line between
attributes and behaviors existed for personnel. I asked
Don how data personnel went about distinguishing
between attributes and behaviors. He first depicted
behaviors as what was left after attributes were removed:
We tried to be blind to all of those, and only look at
behaviors. Only look at different numbers we had that
were indicators of behavior. Behavior could be grades
you made in your prior classes, here at [the university].
It could be how many credit hours you’re taking, it
could be where you’re living, it could be, any of these
things that you have control over, we’ve just clumped
them all into the behaviors bin.
When I asked how he and other personnel decided
what students had control over, he explained that the
distinction came down to choice:
I guess that we assume that what [students] did in the
course of the day, they had control over. Right, so they
chose whether they were gonna eat or not . . . they chose
the gym or not, being on campus or not . . . They chose
living where they chose to live. I think they have some
say in that . . . So it seemed to me that any time that
they had an opportunity to make a decision about what
they were going to be doing, we called that a behavior.
While it may seem obvious that “behavior” indicates
what a student does or does not do, the invocation of
choice and what a student “has control over” is central
7
to nudging. By regarding behaviors as always dynamic,
personnel minimize—even unintentionally—the con-
straints that students face through assuming that stu-
dents have an enormous amount of agency in
structuring everyday life.
The focus on behaviors defines students both as rad-
ical agents and as nudgeable subjects who would ben-
efit from behavioral recommendations based on their
data, which include spending more time on campus,
attending class, attending supplemental instruction ses-
sions, and registering for courses earlier. Predictive out-
puts are meant to be engaged with, not just observed.
The implication that students can act on predictions
and improve their prospects for success is contested
among data personnel at the university. In general, per-
sonnel, particularly those who worked closely with stu-
dents, wanted nudges to have an encouraging vibe that
motivated students to act on nudges and incorporate
behavioral changes into their daily lives. However, data
scientists in team meetings cautioned against giving
students false hope. They argued that the likelihoods
they modeled are accurate enough that spending more
time on campus would not impact the predicted out-
come enough to make a substantial difference in the
space of a semester. While personnel are not in agree-
ment about the potential effects of nudging and some
are torn about its utility, the notion remains that stu-
dents are responsible for their outcomes.
Sorting data: Assigning data to categories
Data do not automatically fall into categories of attrib-
utes and behaviors; rather, they are assigned and are
products of discursive moves. As I discovered, the types
of data that comprise a student body are multiple, as
are their uses and sources. They serve several institu-
tional offices simultaneously and outlive the original
intentions behind them.
As a way to demonstrate the array and possibilities
for sorting, I arrange types of data in loose sets in
Table 1. The data I include in the table are general
categories that I have derived from interviews, docu-
mentation from an external review, and administrators’
conference presentations about the model. The table
lists data that the model does not incorporate, such
as demographic data, but I add such data to show
how the kinds of data that data scientists have de-
siloed are put in conversation with other data sources.
The assignment of meaning to data in the model,
while not arbitrary, is not strictly linked to data sour-
ces. That is, the data could align with other interpreta-
tions and proxies, and personnel indeed mobilize them
for purposes other than their initial use. In my table,
I have created three columns and labels to reframe data
in terms of how the institution makes and collects them
8 Big Data & Society
Table 1. Arrangements of data incorporated into initial data mining and predictive modeling.
Self-reported Infrastructural
 Gender  Network logs (device geolocation,
 “Race/ethnicity” timestamps, duration)
 Parental income  Network activity
 Standardized test scores  Card swipes (dorm access, dining halls, gym)
 High school ZIP code
 High school GPA
ZIP: zone improvement plan; GPA: grade point average.
rather than what personnel either offer up as attributes
and behaviors or large, unsorted lists of variables
decontextualized from sources. I use “self-reported”
to describe data that students provide to the
institution, typically through the college application
process or in campus systems. The data I organize in
“infrastructural” data are data created through the
everyday operations of the university. Finally, I use
“accumulated” as a group for data that students gen-
erate as they move through the university in terms of
enrollment, grades, and coursework.7 The table is not
exhaustive; rather, I aim to depict that data at the uni-
versity are multiple and extensive.
The primary data that personnel position as indica-
tive of behavior are network logs, which personnel use
because they describe them as the best available proxy
for behavior. For this, data personnel have repurposed
data originally collected by IT to monitor the health and
usage of campus WiFi networks. Network logs contain
data about time, date, and duration of a student’s use of
the WiFi network, along with which routers they con-
nect to and some general information about browsing
activity. Because students must log in to the WiFi net-
work using unique accounts administered by the univer-
sity, they are associated with their WiFi use.
In an office similar to Don’s but in the IR office,
I asked Jenny, an administrator involved with data gov-
ernance at the university, how she and personnel decided
to use network logs as a proxy for attendance. She
explained how personnel came to use network data:
And how we ended up on network logs, you know, it’s
just having the right people that are thinking, you
know, probably someone picked up their phone and
was like, “Hey, I just connected to the WiFi, right.”
It’s like, oh, yeah! The WiFi, right. If we want to make
the model better, what kind of data, when you think
about behaviors, would you want to include, and then
you just start thinking, how might you get that data.
In this example, Jenny maps out the steps for me to
describe how the development team decided to use net-
work logs. The team wanted data on class attendance,
Accumulated
 GPA
 Enrollment (registration status,
courses, grades)
 Degree plan
 Learning management systems
 Historic grade distribution
but they could not get it because not all faculty take
attendance in their classes or in consistent formats. In
the absence of data collected specifically to track atten-
dance, network logs seemed to the development team
like a reasonable substitute in that logs can indicate
where a student’s device is. Network logs became a
proxy for a student’s physical presence on campus
because personnel appropriated data the institution
was already collecting to serve as more than indicators
of network traffic and reliability.
Will formulated the leap from attendance to net-
works differently, recalling his early involvement in
institutional data collection. He talked about moving
from surveys to Big Data. To him surveys were a prob-
lematic proxy for campus engagement.
And you give [a survey] to the students at the end of the
year and. . .it would measure how integrated you were
to the campus and what your commitment was to it. Or
we’d use the NSSE survey, which is the National
Survey of Student Engagement, where you’d say, like,
“Over the last semester, on average, how many hours a
week did you study? How many hours a week did you
meet with professors outside of class? How many hours
a week did you meet with your peers outside of class?”
Those kinds of things. And these were relying on self-
report surveys, often after the fact, to measure that
level of engagement and integration. And what we pro-
vided, in the [model], was nope, here’s an actual behav-
ioral marker where we can truly see how much time a
student spent on campus.
In Will’s description, network logs are behavioral
markers: they are not only where a student is but also
what a student does. That rendering of network logs as a
proxy for behavior makes the logs a proxy for the stu-
dent. Will makes a discursive move that prioritizes auto-
mated data collection over self-reported surveys.
Notably, in his description, surveys are “after the fact,”
while automated data collection is live and thus does not
pull from unreliable memories or potentially amended
self-reporting responses. Moreover, network logs are
“an actual behavioral marker where we can truly see.”
Whitman
The allure of Big Data as a replacement for surveys
is that the interpretation is invisible, so smoothly
deployed that data are the behaviors. Even as person-
nel talk about proxies and readily acknowledge that
network logs unevenly record data owing to outages,
network overcrowding, and poor connections, the dis-
cursive framing and subsequent treatment of data as
“actual” enable data to start to hold together as behav-
iors. Students become data and their data possess more
veracity than the students themselves.
Maintaining data as accurate proxies
The assignment of behaviors to data, and vice versa,
requires investment. While I conducted my fieldwork, I
had access to the campus WiFi network and through
an interface with the predictive model, could see a visu-
alization of my network logs. I kept a personal account
of my campus whereabouts and compared it against
the network logs. I consistently found chunks of miss-
ing time, incorrect geolocations, and overall an inaccu-
rate picture of my time on campus.
I brought the disparity in data up to data personnel,
who were either intrigued or unsurprised depending on
their proximity to working with the data. Some even
joked with me about how their own network logs made
it look like they were never at work. Personnel know
that network logs are not a neat substitute for the time
a student spends on campus. Network outages aside,
competition for network access and brevity of connec-
tion might prevent a student’s device from registering.
Moreover, connecting in the first place requires a stu-
dent to have a WiFi-enabled device. Missing data
abound, for many reasons.
Nonetheless, personnel at the university maintain
network logs as an inventive and actual proxy for
behavior. I asked Henry, a data scientist working on
the predictive model, about absent data, citing my net-
work logs, and he explained that personnel have to
move forward without those data:
If stuff’s missing, I mean, there’s nothing you can do
about it. You just have to hope, and in most cases this
is the case, that there is a uniformity to it. So either the
whole day is missing, that’ll sometimes happen. That’s
fine. Because there’s enough of the data to pick up the
slack there . . . Most of the variables that I’ve made deal
with that elegantly . . . If I just don’t have a certain
amount of the data, I don’t say that there was a class
session at all. I just say there wasn’t one. So, for a
percentage of absences, like, it’s not going to affect it
at all. Otherwise, for missing data, the hope is that it’s
sufficiently random that for any machine learning pur-
pose, it will not matter that it is missing. Because any-
thing that is sufficiently small and random won’t have
9
an impact on the prediction. That may or may not be
true, but it’s an assumption that we have to make
because we don’t have a lot of choice.
In Henry’s explanation, some proxies are maintained
out of necessity. Discrepancies have a technical solu-
tion that can maintain the integrity of the overall proj-
ect. The alternative is that if the proxy falls apart, the
model becomes compromised. While missing data sug-
gest that institutional Big Data are not consistently
complete or comprehensive, data scientists suggested
that those data do not matter. Nick, another data sci-
entist, responded similarly when I asked him about
missing data, he said that as long as the sample is pre-
sent, the missing data have “minimal effect” on the
predictive outputs. Technically, the missing data may
not influence modeling outputs. However, I include
missing data because of Henry’s explanation that “it’s
an assumption” crucial to modeling. As becomes clear
in the way that personnel act on proxies, the entire
intervention the institution tries to make with the
model rests on consistent support for data as proxies
for behavior.
Nudging on “behaviors” and promoting self-
regulation among students
The discursive separation of attributes and behaviors
allows for personnel to treat behaviors as actionable,
and it enables a more data-driven form of institutional
management of students. By making something called
behavior and making it legible through data proxies
that minimize gaps between data and what they pur-
port to measure, the institution can track students and
monitor them. Ultimately, the university uses these
data to formulate a narrative of success that maps
onto behavior. Following such moves, the institution
can relocate where the possibilities for success reside.
Through the assignment of behaviors to data, the
category of behaviors holds together. The formation
of a category of behaviors allows students to become
subjects of modeling and nudging. By reconceptualiz-
ing network logs and activity as behavior, personnel
effectively produce behavior that they can nudge,
whereas before the deployment of the predictive
model, the university could not nudge students based
on what were primarily demographic data, now it can
via behaviors.
In this case, the institution mobilizes behaviors as a
means to encourage students to self-regulate and make
responsible choices that move them toward graduation.
Owing to the discursive maneuvering enacted by per-
sonnel, data classified as behaviors become directly tied
to students and their activities, as illustrated by Will’s
description of data as “an actual behavioral marker.”
10
Akin to how Wendy Nelson Espeland and Mitchell
Stevens (1998) have discussed quantification as similar
to a speech act, data as a metric for behavior become
student behaviors.
Correlations, even as personnel insist they are just
that, seem causal in nudges because of the implication
that students could improve their likelihoods of success
by adhering to particular behaviors. The model of a
student presented in nudging is one who attends all
classes, spends time on campus outside of class,
engages with student organizations, does not browse
the internet in class, visits office hours, and so on. If
students want to succeed, they should match the model
and attune their choices to the behaviors that correlate
with success. In an automated manner, the model and
related nudging reflect student data onto students, sig-
naling that they are continuously documented and
brought into a system of recommendations.
Because attributes are removed from the model and
nudging, the reliance on behaviors suggests that stu-
dents’ choices are at the heart of their success at the
institution. Because demographic data are not incorpo-
rated into the predictive model at all, success is linked
with behaviors and students’ choices. The purposeful
presentation of data to students encourages students to
internalize those data and act on them. As such,
responsibility now rests on the students to take hold
of their success. The visualizations of certain kinds of
data—namely data students ought to use to inform
their everyday decision-making—and obscuring of
demographic data place the burden of responsibility
and success on students. By minimizing the role that
race, class, and gender play on graduation outcomes,
the institution, through the model, can present behav-
iors as major factors in the likelihood of a student grad-
uating within four years. If students do not attend
class, a low GPA is a consequence of that decision.
Thus, the constraints around choices become invis-
ible. The university and its existing inequalities start to
vanish because success is placed in the hands of stu-
dents. Social climate problems, structural barriers,
issues of belongingness, and resource shortages disap-
pear. A student cannot cite external factors in this
model of success dominated by behaviors. The result
is a shift in a locus of responsibility, wherein nudging is
meant to give students tools to manage themselves and
regulate their own behavior based on insights they
ought to draw from their data.
Conclusion
One of the aims of this article is to demonstrate how
data become behaviors, based on a collective decision
to avoid attributes in modeling and nudging, those
fixed demographic markers that “can’t change.” The
Big Data & Society
remaining data are then sorted by personnel into
behaviors based on what is available and fits within a
mold of what personnel understand students to “have
control over.” Personnel stabilize data as accurate
proxies by explaining and accounting for inconsisten-
cies. Data further solidify as personnel make them act
through nudges that direct students to match behaviors
correlated with success. The discursive separation of
behaviors and attributes allows the university to pin
success on behaviors, or everything that a student
appears to have a choice in. At a time when the use
of demographic data in higher education is ever
fraught, behavior data seem full of promise to univer-
sities as a step toward the meritocratic ideals of higher
education. However, as I have shown, behavior data
are not a neutral alternative, and what students “have
control over” is not self-evident.
As I sat in his noisy, shared office, Nick, one of the
data scientists, responded to my question about where
he thought predictive modeling in higher education was
headed with an answer about what he felt was more
pressing. He thought that nudging had a long way to
go, and that the information in nudging needed to be
more useful to students.
My theoretical framework is a very traditional eco-
nomical perspective which could be way wrong . . . but
it doesn’t mean that it’s not useful. The theory is that
every person chooses optimum behavior for him or
herself, based on the constraints, his ability, his resour-
ces, his information. He cannot do anything about the
first and second, but he maybe can do something about
the third.
The purpose of modeling and nudging is to give stu-
dents that information so they can “choose optimum
behavior.” But when both the information and the
behaviors are more contingent and rooted in the imag-
inative discourse of personnel than in inherent differ-
ences in data, how should students relate to their data?
The use of behavior data to nudge students and
inspire a regime of self-regulation prompts questions
about behavior data not only as a more accurate sub-
stitute for demographic data but also as a source of
knowledge about students. As this article demon-
strates, making behavior data is a contingent process.
Data proxies and data doubles do not acquire form
naturally. They must be made, and they are made by
actors under institutional constraints and imaginaries
alike.
The other aim of this article is to identify processes
of making and sorting data as problem spaces. If data,
students, and behaviors are imprecisely matched and
subject to institutional pressures and sociotechnical
limitations, how should those data be understood,
Whitman
especially in the context of nudging where actors put
them into play? To refer back to the emergence of what
Cheney-Lippold (2011, 2017) has called the “new algo-
rithmic identity,” in which what people do is more rep-
resentative of who they are than more traditional
concepts of social categories, what happens when
behavior data are just as fraught as demographic data?
As predictive analytics become more widespread in
areas beyond education, such as policing and sentenc-
ing, finance, healthcare and medicine, and social media,
it is necessary to illuminate the data that underpin pre-
dictions, not just technically but sociotechnically. The
everyday, frequently mundane processes that make
data, proxies, and data doubles hold together are sub-
ject to deletion, which allows for the linkages between
data and people to appear seamless. They are not.
Understanding how those data come together and
how they stabilize is a continuing task for critical
data studies, and one that I explore in the context of
higher education.
Acknowledgements
Sincere thanks to Zoe Nyssa, Evelyn Blackwood, Kendall
Roark, and Geneva Smith for reading previous drafts and
offering insightful feedback. Earlier iterations of the manu-
script benefitted tremendously from comments from Sheila
Jasanoff and engagement with Fellows in the Program on
Science, Technology and Society at Harvard University. I
am grateful for fellowship support from Purdue University.
I also wish to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their
generous and constructive comments.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial sup-
port for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article: Purdue Research Foundation research grant.
Notes
1. All names in this text are pseudonyms.
2. See Thaler and Sunstein (2009). Nudges are arrangements
of suggestions meant to prompt people to make particular
choices. In the case of predictive modeling in higher edu-
cation as discussed in this essay, nudges are recommenda-
tions developed out of the modeling results intended to
influence students to make certain choices. For example,
if the model indicated a student was unlikely to get an A or
B in a particular course, the student would receive mes-
saging prompting them to go to class or manage their time
more effectively.
11
3. “Success” is consistently defined by university administra-
tors and staff as graduation within four consecutive years.
4. The “Adversity Score” drew from 31 measures of socio-
economic status to indicate the level of adversity an indi-
vidual high school student faced (see Belkin, 2019;
Washington and Hemel, 2019). This score, a tool for col-
lege admissions, was meant to contextualize an applicant
as a way to account for inequality in access to resources.
The Adversity Score was eventually dropped, though the
College Board maintains a dashboard.
5. Black Mirror, series 3, episode 1: “Nosedive.”
6. I use “imaginary” in alignment with how Jasanoff and
Kim (2009: 120) have described sociotechnical imaginaries
as “‘collectively imagined forms of social life and social
order reflected in the design and fulfillment of nation-
specific scientific and/or technological projects.”
7. These “accumulated” data contain a great deal of activity.
For example, enrollment data includes the time between
the opening of registration and when a student actually
registered, along with the time between the start of a
semester and when a student registered for the class.
Learning management system data consist of how a stu-
dent is using that system: when a student engaged with
course materials relative to other students, and the
amount of times a student posted to discussion boards.
ORCID iD
Madisson Whitman https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0936-
1358
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