DATACTIVE

DATACTIVE is proud to announce the publication of a new peer-reviewed article, co-authored by Stefania Milan with Annalisa Pelizza and Yoren Lausberg of the “sister” project Processing Citizenship (ERC no. 714463). It is open access and can be found following this link. Abstract. The COVID-19 pandemic confronts society with a… Read more

Stefania spoke to a journalist of the Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation magazine, on ‘digital wellbeing’, data literacy and emerging data gaps. Sometimes it can seem like we’ve uploaded our whole lives to the internet: bank accounts, social media posts, dating profiles, work emails – it’s all out there… Read more

What’s the current state of India’s gig economy? This article explores the precariousness of gig work and the surveillance practices introduced during the pandemic, and details the newly introduced Social Security Code which covers platform workers. by Titiksha Vashist & Shyam Krishnakumar   The COVID-19 pandemic has accentuated the rise… Read more

We are very happy to host for the first time a podcast in our series ‘COVID-19 from the Margins’/BigDataSur. The world we want is a 30′ podcast created by three students at the University of Amsterdam in the framework of the course Digital Activism taught by Lonneke van der Velden,… Read more

The Battle for the At-Risk Group: The Impact of Covid-19 on Elderly People and People with Disabilities in Digital Germany People with disabilities and elderly people are not a homogeneous group – whether in how they experience datafication in a wealthy country such as Germany nor in how Covid-19 effects… Read more

Durante la pandemia i lavoratori e le lavoratrici essenziali sono stati i soggetti più vulnerabili. Questo articolo discute come la sorveglianza introdotta per limitare il COVID-19 molto probabilmente sarà normalizzata nel contesto post-pandemia. by Laura Carrer and Riccardo Coluccini   COVID-19 has shown how essential workers, while fundamental to our… Read more

We are thrilled to announce the publication of the collection “COVID-19 from the Margins: Pandemic Invisibilities, Policies and Resistance in the Datafied Society”, edited by Stefania Milan, Emiliano Treré (Cardiff University) and Silvia Masiero (University of Oslo) for the Theory on Demand series of the Institute of Network Cultures! The… Read more

Stefania Milan and Emiliano Treré, co-founders of the Big Data from the South Research Initiative, have contributed a piece entitled ‘Latin American Visions for a Digital New Deal: Towards Buen Vivir with Data‘ to the essay collection ‘A Digital New Deal. Visions of Justice in a Post-Covid World‘, edited by… Read more

By Niels ten Oever At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, people wondered whether the internet infrastructure would be capable of handling the increase in data traffic. When many people started working, streaming, and following the rapidly unfolding news on social media from home, many expected this would strain on… Read more

By Nic Bidwell & Sol Luca de Tena Many rural communities in Africa have characteristics that are neither represented by data about COVID-19, nor addressed by public health information designed to help people protect themselves. This does not mean to say that rural inhabitants are unaffected by information designed for… Read more

By Vukosi Marivate, Elaine Nsoesie & Herkulaas MVE Combrink   COVID-19 is a unique event that has shaken the world. It has disrupted the way we live, how we work, and what we think. Across Africa, the arrival of COVID-19 also drew attention to the continent. We have had to… Read more

By Philip Di Salvo The COVID-19 pandemic has been a prism and an amplifier for anything data. It has exposed underlying issues that require the attention of academics, activists, journalists, and policy makers. Health emergencies are enormous stress tests for civil rights and freedoms, and for the platforms through which… Read more

By Arianna Cortesi, Claudia Magnani, Roberto Romero, Paula C.P. Silva, Sueli Maxakali, Isael Maxakali, Ana Maria R. Gomes OtherSkies, an OAD/IAU-funded project, tackles these questions by collecting native narratives, chants, and myths about the sky that have never been written down and recorded before, in collaboration with researchers of the… Read more

By Alex Gekker & Anat Ben-David With the rapid unfolding of the COVID-19 global pandemic, Israel was one of the first states outside East-Asia to impose involuntary surveillance measures as a means to combat the virus. Crucially, the government utilized the country’s permanent state of exception to bypass the parliament… Read more

By Donna Cormack & Tahu Kukutai There are estimated to be more than 300 million Indigenous people in the world, spanning every continent, each with diverse histories and socio-political contexts. The shared experiences of imperialism and colonialism have profoundly impacted Indigenous peoples’ health and well-being, producing enduring disparities in most territories. COVID-19 has sharpened… Read more

By Jelke Bosma, Eva Mos & Niels van Doorn Things are bad right now and they will probably get worse in the future. Once the global pandemic caused by COVID-19 is finally under control, the afterlife of this public health crisis is likely to have a devastating impact on our… Read more

“Please show your Health Code.” Almost all public places in China have posted such requests at the entrances nowadays. Health Code, a three color-based application, is rolled out to control people’s movements and curb the coronavirus’s spread. A local government then proposed a Gradient Health Code to rank citizens based… Read more

by Angela Daly   COVID hit at a febrile time more generally for the United Kingdom in the context of its exit from the European Union and ongoing issues over the devolved nations, particularly Northern Ireland with its land border with the Republic, and Scotland, both of which had voted… Read more

On 17 September 2020, the policy blog Ideas for India published a study reporting on rates of domestic violence and cybercrime during India’s lockdown, which started on 23 March. The study shows that domestic violence complaints have increased by 131 percent in May 2020 in districts with the strictest lockdown… Read more

Header photo by Alan Santos/PR by Nicolo Zingales When it comes to COVID 19 deaths, Brazil is the second hardest hit country in the entire world (reaching almost 130.000 at the time of writing). This may be surprising to those who remember that, when the new Corona virus made its… Read more

By Gargi Sharma with contributions from Aaron Martin Tilburg University The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped how social, economic, and political power is created, exerted, and extended through technology. Through case studies from around the world, a new book from the Global Data Justice project analyzes the ways in which technologies… Read more

Author: Andrea Medrado This post, published in two parts (FIND PART ONE HERE), reports on a panel session which took place at the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) annual conference, among four initiatives involved with community media responses to COVID-19. Members of the four initiatives, based in… Read more

Header photo references: Vahid Salemi – Associated Press. LA Times. Authors: Hossein Kermani and Maria Faust This article argues that Instalive is not only a channel for personal communication; it also functions as an alternative TV in restrictive contexts with limited access to free and independent media. Therefore, in this… Read more

Authors: Massimo Ragnedda and Maria Laura Ruiu The COVID-19 crisis has been shown to highlight existing forms of socio-economic inequality across the world’s Souths. This article illustrates the reinforcement of such inequalities in the United Kingdom, showing the heightened vulnerability of minorities and marginalised citizens and proposing a response based… Read more

In a world in constant evolution, Latin America is probably the region where the COVID-19 pandemic has most changed the way we communicate as a society, and technology is at the core of this change. This post reviews the cases of Argentina and Brazil as examples to illustrate how the… Read more

When EU leaders discuss the coronavirus Recovery Fund at the upcoming meeting of the European Council on Friday, some persistent European stereotypes will accompany negotiations. by Luiza Bialasiewicz This article was first published on OpenDemocracy on July 13, 2020.   The on-going debates regarding the coronavirus Recovery Fund that will form… Read more

This article addresses the role of data in efforts to contain the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa. Drawing on multiple state examples, it discusses the ethical questions posed by datafied public health surveillance and the importance of harmonising national data protection systems.   By Oarabile Mudongo COVID-19 presents a dynamic overtone… Read more

COVID-19 from the Margins was launched at the beginning of May 2020 as a multilingual blog platform, with the aim to give voice to narratives on the pandemic from social groups and individuals invisibilized by mainstream coverage and policies.. Two months down the line, we reflect on the core threads… Read more

by Marie Petersmann and Anna Berti Suman Adapted from Petersmann, M. and A. Berti Suman, Sensing COVID-19 and Climate Change. Environmental Law Blog, May 2020. Over the past weeks, a plethora of articles explored the relations between the COVID-19 crisis and the climate catastrophe by framing the former as an opportunity to learn lessons… Read more

This article addresses the importance of WhatsApp during COVID-19 times in Argentina. It analyzes the use of WhatsApp amidst informal and institutional actors and the bridges it has built for interacting, communicating and creating communitarianism. by Raquel Tarullo* Circles of friends, members of sports clubs, parents associations and work colleagues… Read more

At a time when the World Health Organization and other government officials say “do stay at home!”, which home does the LGBTQ+ community has the option to stay in? This article illuminates the struggles lived by the LGBTQ+ community during the COVID-19 crisis, also illustrating some of the initiatives taken… Read more

While the government limits access to information, data activists are consolidating and structuring COVID-19 data for open access.   by Peter Füssy While healthcare workers fight the coronavirus pandemic with drugs and ventilators, journalists and data activists try to tackle the infodemic with numbers and visualizations. In Brazil, it is… Read more

With Brazil becoming the hotspot for the COVID-19 pandemic, Uber drivers in the country have to choose between putting their wellbeing at risk and giving up their main source of income. But is there anything new about this? We spoke to three Uber drivers in Belo Horizonte to find out.… Read more

What happens when the digital city encounters large-scale disasters and pandemics like COVID-19? This article analyzes the case of São Paulo, Brazil, to illustrate how the pandemic contributes to emphasize a broad spectrum of inequalities. In the largest metropolis in Latin America, the population lives with a strong disparity of… Read more

COVID-19 lays bare the nuances of a society undergoing digital data transformation in nearly every field of human activity, from its most beneficial to its most disturbing aspects By Philip Di Salvo and Stefania Milan This post was first published on Open Democracy on June 8, 2020. [read in Italian]… Read more

by Erinne Paisley During the COVID-19 global pandemic, we have all had to make signification adjustments to our daily lives. One of these is reading more news. This news contains an endless stream of data and it has been up to government bodies, health organizations, and journalists to sort through this… Read more

Does the COVID-19 pandemic mark the birth of a new form of biopolitics? The Latin American case shows important departures from Europe and the United States, both in the adoption of surveillance technologies and in the types of biopolitical control enacted through them. by Silvio Waisbord and María Soledad Segura… Read more

The Peruvian tragedies are manifold. This blog post directs attention to one in particular related to the matter of counting during the pandemic. Although most of the debate focuses on how governments count the infected and the deceased, this post reflects on how the Peruvian state counts the living to… Read more

The uncertainty of the pandemic has turned into an opportunity for the implementation of technological solutions to complex issues rather than an occasion to deploy coherent decision-making processes. During the social and economic crisis caused by COVID-19, the National Development Office of Colombia, set up an unconditional funding transfer system… Read more

[EN] Mother’s Day is the symbolic anniversary for the Mexican desaparecidos’ mothers. During that occasion they protest and show their anger and pain in front of the institutions and national and international public opinion. This posts highlights their efforts to reaffirm the need for justice and truth during the coronavirus pandemic,… Read more

by Javier Sánchez-Monedero (Data Justice Lab)[EN] After weeks of debate on the implications of contact-tracking applications to fight COVID-19, there is an urgent need to interrogate their effectiveness and social impact beyond privacy and data protection issues. The recent proposal by Google and Apple imposes a model of governance of… Read more

by Javier Sánchez-Monedero (Data Justice Lab) Originally published in El Salto Diario [EN] After weeks of debate on the implications of contact-tracking applications to fight COVID-19, there is an urgent need to interrogate their effectiveness and social impact beyond privacy and data protection issues. The recent proposal by Google and… Read more

by Teresa Villaseñor Antes del Covid-19, México ya sufría otra epidemia que durante el 2019 reclamó miles de vidas: los feminicidios. ¿Qué están haciendo las mujeres mexicanas para visibilizar la violencia de género en tiempos de cuarentena? English abstract. As the COVID-19 virus spreads across Central America, another pandemic remains under… Read more

What does the Covid-19 crisis say about the Russian state’s digital power, and the challenges it poses to public freedoms? By Olga Bronnikova, Françoise Daucé, Ksenia Ermoshina, Francesca Musiani, Bella Ostromooukhova, Anna Zaytseva Originally published in French on The Conversation France on April 29, 2020, under a Creative Commons BY-NC… Read more

The COVID-19 pandemic requires reconsidering the relationship between data and invisible populations as a form of de facto civil inclusion. While most forms of data management of populations are problematic, under which conditions would counting be just? Annalisa Pelizza and Yoren Lausberg, Processing Citizenship research program, University of Bologna Stefania… Read more

by Philip Di Salvo, Stefania Milan  originally published on Il Manifesto, 24 April 2020 Big Data e Covid. La pandemia sta facendo emergere fenomeni e caratteristiche della società dei dati che, in circostanze di emergenza come quelle di queste settimane, rischiano di concretizzare quelli che—fino a poco fa—potevano essere considerati… Read more

COVID-19 shows the need for a global alliance of experts who can fast-track the capacity building of developing countries in the business of counting. Stefania Milan & Emiliano Treré The COVID-19 pandemic is sweeping the world. First identified in mainland China in December 2019, it has rapidly reached the four… Read more