On Monday the 5th of May, postdoctoral researcher on the Data Stories project Sam Mutter participated in a day of events on Community Action Archiving at the Usher Street Community Centre, Dublin. 

The event was hosted by Tom O’Dea (NCAD) in collaboration with the Liberties Community Development Project and the Community Action Tenants Union (CATU), of which Sam is a member. The day was attended by a mixture of artists, community activists (including those from CATU) and NCAD students on the Masters in Art and Social Action.

Led by fellow members of the CATU archiving group Tommy Gavin and Jazz Burns, Sam helped facilitate a workshop practicing cataloguing for the CATU digital archive, using sample materials produced by CATU and other related Irish housing activist groups. Activities involved using a draft intake form developed by the archiving group to catalogue different types of record, from campaign leaflets and social media content, to documents from CATU’s Ard Fheis (Annual General Meetings).    

In a pragmatic sense, the activity provided feedback to the archiving group on how the intake form and associated processes could be clarified or improved with a view to opening up this process to other members via their local branches. However, it simultaneously prompted discussions around the politics of sensitivity and redaction (especially in the current global political climate), and the importance of cataloguing in this context being a collective endeavour which wherever possible involves the creators, users and/or subjects of the data in question.

The CATU workshop joined a selection of other interesting events throughout the day. This included a talk from Josh MacPhee of Interference Archive, based in New York, a brainstorming session around the potential for a physical housing action archive to be established in Dublin, and artistic works from NCAD students made using and in response to materials from the South Inner City Community Development Association (SICCDA) archive. 

Common themes across these sessions included the challenge of creating archives as an accessible space of lively engagement through which communities would feel an attachment to memories and histories, and be inspired to collective action – as opposed to more traditional conceptions of archives as dusty rooms full of carefully indexed boxes. This in turn sparked conversations around the balance to be struck between engagement and preservation, and the question of how archives might be meaningful and useful at a time when community and cultural spaces are frequently fighting against threats of removal in favour of more financially valuable land-uses.   

These discussions will help to shape the CATU archiving group going forward, as well as feeding into the broader findings of the Data Stories project. 

Since January, our project has entered a new phase, launching a fresh series of case studies. While most of these are based in Ireland, we’ve broadened our scope to examine data practices at the European level. Given that Ireland must comply with EU data collection standards, we wanted to explore how European harmonisation shapes data production in Ireland, how data flows across borders, and the political and critical issues surrounding data practices. 

To investigate these questions, Juliette Davret travelled to Luxembourg in late April to meet with representatives from Eurostat and ESPON. At Eurostat, she met with the team responsible for short-term business statistics, and at ESPON, she connected with the team working on the Housing4All project. 

Before these meetings, she also spoke with representatives from Ireland’s Central Statistics Office (CSO). These initial conversations helped her understand how Irish statisticians prepare and submit data to Eurostat and highlighted potential areas of friction or challenge in meeting EU requirements. These insights proved valuable in framing the discussions in Luxembourg.

Meeting with Eurostat representatives shed light on the complexities of data processing and standardisation across EU member states. They discussed the challenges of aligning timelines, addressing national data specificities, and creating entirely new datasets. These obstacles reflect broader tensions between Eurostat’s centralised data strategy and the diverse realities of data production in different countries, in line with what we have observed within Ireland’s own data ecosystem. 

At ESPON, the focus shifted to the topic of housing affordability and the difficulties of developing coherent data narratives at the European scale. Juliette met with both a project manager and a data manager, which offered complementary perspectives. A key challenge discussed was the lack of harmonised datasets, particularly concerning issues like housing vacancies and income. These data gaps make comparisons more difficult and challenge the development of evidence-based policies. The urgency of improving housing data was a recurring theme, especially given the strong role that data-driven narratives play in planning and housing policy across Europe.

This field visit deepened our understanding of the broader European data landscape and how national and EU-level priorities overlap. It also emphasised the importance – and the difficulty – of building comprehensive, harmonised datasets to support effective and equitable policymaking.