"Starting in 2019, Ọnụọha began working closely with Patrick Ball, a statistician with the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, to investigate the bodies of 95 Black people discovered in a grave in Sugar Land, Texas, where Ọnụọha was raised. These people were victims of the convict-leasing program of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in which Southern states allowed former plantations and private companies to use inmates for harsh forms of labor."
"Ọnụọha built a machine learning model to estimate the likelihood and locations of other unexcavated convict-leasing mass burial sites. With a team of researchers, she began collecting data on such sites from archives, community databases, and oral histories before feeding it to the AI. Now she is displaying the results of her findings in Ground Truths, a video for the Vienna Secession show."
A Brooklyn-based multimedia artist centers work on the absences within datasets and the ways those absences perpetuate racial injustice. The artist collaborated with a human-rights statistician to investigate 95 Black bodies found in a Sugar Land, Texas grave tied to the convict-leasing system. A machine-learning model was developed to estimate likely locations of other unexcavated convict-leasing burial sites by combining archival records, community databases, and oral histories. Results were presented in a video titled Ground Truths. Earlier projects made invisible datasets visible by exhibiting empty folders labeled with categories of missing information.
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