Can You Trust the Story? Thinking Critically with AI and NYC Open Data

Can you trust the story that data tells about your city? In this 60-minute online workshop, participants will explore a curated slice of NYC’s 311 Service Requests dataset to see how everyday complaints become “data” about neighborhood life, services, and problems. Together, we’ll ask whose experiences appear in the dataset, what gets counted or left out, and how those choices shape the stories we tell with civic data.

Led by Dr. Cecilia Dones, a researcher and strategist whose work bridges data, social science, and AI transformation, the session is designed for curious New Yorkers with no technical background required. After a brief guided tour of a 311 data snapshot, participants will work in small groups on Zoom to pose questions of the data and then use a simple AI text tool to generate short headlines or summaries. Groups will annotate and critique these machine-written “stories,” examining what the AI emphasizes, what it omits, and how context and bias influence its interpretations.

This workshop is ideal for residents, educators, community organizers, public servants, and anyone interested in building data literacy and AI literacy as civic skills. Participants will leave with practical questions they can bring to any AI-generated account of civic life and a clearer sense of why human judgment remains essential when machines translate public data into narratives.