Data Poems

By Thamer Linklater

Welcome to the Research for Social Change Lab’s Data Poem series. These are a combination of black out and found poetry made using the interview transcripts of the unhoused folks we interviewed the summer of 2022. These are the same interviews used to create the Park Stories zine collection.  

This series focuses on the stories of the people and the challenges they face like inaccessible services, relationship breakdowns, mental health, trauma, and jail, in a different way than in the zines. In writing the poems, I also played with the relations between the interviewer and the interviewee, the interview structure, and the identities of the interviewees. My goal was to explore the complex nature of our work at the lab and dive deeper into the themes that arose in our research.  

The Building from Experience team has always been unconventional in the way we do our work. We do have journal articles, presentations, and reports but we also find creative ways to create and disseminate our work. We started our project with an arts-based workshop, where we came across the idea of black out poetry and found that we enjoyed the poetic form. We also decided to create zines. So, this is another form of our academic creativity!  

Before you dive into the work, there are some thematic things that I would like to explain. I did add or remove punctuation or switch words for clarity. Other than these slight changes, these words come straight from the unhoused folks we interviewed. Of the utmost importance is confidentiality. So, names, service providers, and program titles are blacked out. The beginning of the poems are formatted with the title, date, and run time at the top. The interviewer and their questions are italicized to avoid confusion. The time stamps with the blacked-out words are straight from the transcripts. I chose these formats to highlight that these are interviews and to explore the relationship between the interviewee and the interviewer. These are people who have trusted us with their words and their stories. As a researcher, I have a responsibility to the people I interviewed: to treat them and their stories with respect, to abide by confidentiality, and to use their narratives in the way we promised. Finally, we collected demographic information from each interviewee. At first, I had the data at the top but wanted to avoid perpetuating stereotypes and to challenge people's views of unhoused people. This way, people have no conception of the person behind the story until the end.  

There are two poems that do not fit the conventions I described above: ‘feeling the way I am’ and ‘What We Need.’ I formatted them differently for a few reasons. First, the interviews and the stories were different from the others. I wanted to highlight that these are unique people with different views on their stories and the challenges of the housing and homeless system. Second, the themes did not fit with the narrative of the poem it came from. After cutting them out and pasting them to a different document, I noticed that the excerpts have similar themes that fit nicely together.  

I hope you enjoy reading these and that they challenge you like they have challenged me. To read the poems, click on the buttons below.