Stefania Milan, Annalisa Pelizza (University of Twente) and Francesca Musiani (CNRS) organised a track at 4S/EASTT (european association for the study of science and technology) on “Materialising Governance by Information Infrastructure” and gave a joint presentation “Embedding rules and values in information technology infrastructure: A reflection”. Lonneke van der Velden presented at 4S/EASTT on Open Source Intelligence as a form of data activism.
Just in time for the Contentious Data kick-off workshop on September 15, we are happy to announce that DATACTIVE has a new logo! The design is by Federica Bardelli and Carlo De Gaetano, who explain the concept as follows:
“A word (DATACTIVE) is a data point that can be encrypted, hidden and disguised – both in its shape and meaning. It is also and action of communication, a statement of resistance and awareness.
In reference to the lo-fi printing/photocopy techniques of the 70’s punk fanzines and to the recent rediscovery of that visual language by the new wave of experimental design clusters (see: Metahaven) we scanned the word DATACTIVE as an action of re-appropriation of meaningful data. Moving the printed word on the scanner multiple times generates new shapes, new distortions, meaning the active and evolving nature of both DATACTIVE objects of study and therefore of DATACTIVE itself.”
If you like the design by Federica Bardelli and Carlo De Gaetano, please check out their portfolios here and here.
Coming up on September 15, 2016!
C
ontentious Data is the kick-off event of the DATACTIVE project.
How do people resist corporate privacy intrusion and government surveillance by means of technical fixes? How does civil society take advantage of the possibilities for civic engagement, advocacy, and campaigning provided by the availability of the so-called ‘big data’?
We are an interdisciplinary research project hosted at the Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. DATACTIVE investigates citizens’ engagement with massive data collection. It originates from the observation that, with the diffusion of big data, citizens become increasingly aware of the critical role of information in modern societies. This awareness nurtures new social practices rooted on data and technology, which we term ‘data activism’. By increasingly involving ordinary users, data activism is a signal of a change in perspective and attitude towards massive data collection emerging within the civil society realm.
Contentious Data will bring together scholars and practitioners to explore the politics of big data from the perspective of activism and civil society.
Speakers include Sandra Braman (Texas A&M University), Alison Powell (London School of Economics), Hisham al-Miraat (Digital Rights Morocco), Linnet Taylor (Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society), Dorien Zandbergen (University of Amsterdam), Jaromil/Denis Rojo (dyne.org), Geert Lovink (Institute for Network Cultures), and Stefania Milan (DATACTIVE Principle Investigator).
Contentious Data is sponsored by the European Research Council (ERC), the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies (ACGS), the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA), and the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR).
Learn more about our speakers and the final programme here:
Brochure-DATACTIVE-EVENT-for-speakers-finalRegistration
The workshop is public and free of charge, but seating is limited so please register in advance by filling this form:
[rsvp]
Stefania Milan and Miren Gutierrez gave a workshop at Hirikilabs, 16 July, San Sebastian: “Big data, citizens and data activism”.
Hirikilabs is a laboratory for digital culture and technology working on the social, critical, creative and collaborative use of technology. As a space for experimentation and prototyping it proposes activities related to the digital world, collaborative creation and citizen initiative and does so in the context of an international production centre for contemporary culture such as Tabakalera.
The DATACTIVE team will organise the second week of annual Digital Methods Summer School at the University of Amsterdam from July 4 – 8, 2016. We will lead three projects on digital methods for mailing lists, mapping the civil tech landscape and the evolution of digital security tools. The results of our work will be shared on this blog in the following week.
The theme of this year’s Digital Methods Summer School is “Only Connect? A Critical Appraisal of Connecting Practices in the Age of Social Media”. The second week will be entirely dedicated to data activism.
With the diffusion of big data, citizens become increasingly aware of the critical role of information in modern societies. Today’s world is awash with data. Never before have we created such a quantity of data by and about people, things, and their interactions. While this data has captured the imagination of governments and corporations alike, people are also increasingly responding to this new technological landscape.
From open data initiatives to privacy enhancing technologies, a growing number of people are developing new tools and practices in response to massive data collection and availability. People take advantage of the possibilities of data for civic engagement, advocacy, and campaigning (pro-active data activism). At the same time, people resist its harms through the development and use of encryption and free and open source alternatives to centralised software and online services (re-active data activism). Data activism is a signal of a more general change in perspectives and attitudes towards massive data collection. For more see data-activism.net.
Data activism emerges at the intersection of the social and technological dimensions of human action. This raises the question: how are we to understand and study this phenomenon? We think that it is important to experiment with methods. We want to investigate how people make use of data and interact with the socio-technical infrastructures that enable their circulation. This is especially relevant, since these are often complex, proprietary and opaque. For this purpose, we want to test and refine research approaches that enable the study of technological practices and infrastructures. This can involve configurations of digital methods and ethnographically informed traditions bridging media studies, science and technology studies (STS), informatics, and anthropology.
Civic Technology has become a popular term over the past years. Whilst there is no clear definition of the term, the wider civic tech scene spans from business-oriented tech start-ups towards (digital) social and political activist groups. However, attention is often disproportionately directed towards creation of tools and technologies at the expense of the development of other capacities needed to pull them to work in the service of social and democratic goals.
In this project we will apply various digital methods in order to explore the fabrics of civic tech in the digital.
For this project we will trace changes in the chat application ecosystem try to understand the evolution of their design.
The Big Bang tool can be used to study collaborations in mailing lists and on github. We want to use this tool to study the composition and development of the ICANN community. Are there different socio-technical imaginaries, across different ‘generations’ of users? Which words or phrases are used at what time? To what extent have conversations about rights spread from civil society discourse to the more general ICANN (industry-related) discourse?
The DATACTIVE team hosted the second week of the Digital Methods Summer School at the University of Amsterdam, 27 June – 8 July 2016.
Individual team members initiated three projects:
Evolution and sustainability of digital security tools
Exploring the fabrics of civic tech on digital media
Digital methods for mailing lists analysis: Exploring the ICANN community
Stefania Milan presented at the annual conference of the international communication association Communication through Power, Fukuoka, Japan – 9-13 June 2016.
Organizers: Stefania Milan (U of Amsterdam), S.Milan@uva.nl
Date: Friday, June 10; 9:30 – 10:45
Location: Akane, Fukuoka Hilton
Description: Citizens are increasingly aware of the critical role of informationas the new fabric of social life. This awareness translates into new forms of civic engagement andpolitical action that go under the rubric of ‘data activism’. Data activism embraces a variety of sociotechnical practices that in different forms, from the local to the transnational level, and from different points of departure take a critical perspective towards massive data collection.Data activismtakes big data both as a challenge to civil rights, and a novel set of opportunities for social change; itleverages technological innovation, and software in particular, for political or social change purposes.Activiststakeinformation as a constitutive force in society capable to shape social reality (Braman, Change of State, 2009).
Up to now, little has been said about the relation between the organized civil society and big data. Scholars have focused their attention on individual forms of resistance to computer–enabled data collection, or on the role of business actors in enabling massive data collection. However, the dimension of collective action, the shaping role oftechnology and software environments, and the impact of big dataon the civil society’s ecosystem andthe related action repertoires, among others,remainlargely unexplored.
The goal of this blue sky workshop is to brainstorm an interdisciplinary, multi-method research agenda for big data from the perspective of the (organized) civil society, around and beyond the notion of data activism. Expected outcomes include structured notes for a research agenda touching also upon epistemological, methodological, and ethical concernsof studying big data and massive data collection from a grassroots perspective, as well as the creation of a network of interested individuals working on the interplay between big data and the civil society broadly defined. The workshopbuilds on the experience of the DATACTIVE research project and collective based at the Department of Media Studies of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands (https://data-activism.net).
Stefania Milan was invited to give a talk at the Zentrum für Medien-, Kommunikations- und Informationsforschung (ZeMKI) of the University of Bremen, as part of the research seminar series ‘Digital Traces’, investigating media change and its relation to datafication. She spoke about ‘Datafication and Civic Participation: The Emerging Epistemic Culture of Data Activism’, June 2, 2016.
Frederike Kaltheuner talked to the Dutch news website RTL Z about Facebook’s alleged censorship of conservative news in the trending category. Read it here: “Hoe Facebook voor zijn gebruikers bepaalt welk nieuws ze zien”
Stefania Milan and Becky Kazansky presented at the 7th biennial Surveillance & Society conference in Barcelona, April 21-23, 2016. Stefania talked about “Data activism as an emerging epistemic culture within civil society”, Becky about “Instrumentalising Risk to Conduct Surveillance and Defend Against it: the Risk Calculation Practices of Cybersecurity Actors and Human Rights Defenders”.
