Papers

CONTESTED: How Data Is Defined, Gathered, and Owned

Daniel Keinan · Companion paper to FADEAWAY · Written for "Theories, Methods, and Experiments in Art and AI" (Columbia University, Dr. Emily Spratt) · August 2026 · 14 pages, PDF

An NBA statistic is made the way an artwork is: someone chooses the instant, the subject, and where the definitions are drawn. The league publishes the picture while withholding the choices. The paper follows those choices through home-scorer bias in the box score, the three incompatible official meanings of "contested," the 89-day public tracking window and its closure, the Sportradar/Second Spectrum and Hawk-Eye agreements, player data rights under the NBA and NFL collective bargaining agreements, and Refik Anadol's Living Memory: Messi.

Keinan, Daniel. "CONTESTED: How Data Is Defined, Gathered, and Owned." Companion paper to FADEAWAY, 2026. https://dkdan10.github.io/papers/CONTESTED_Daniel_Keinan.pdf