Author: Jeroen

DATACTIVE at SHA2017

Many of the DATACTIVE people are attending SHA [Still Hacking Anyway], taking place from the 4th until the 8th of August in Zeewolde (NL). You can often find us hanging out around at the Technopolitics village.

About SHA 2017

SHA2017 is an international non-profit outdoor hacker camp/conference taking place in The Netherlands in 2017 on August 4th to 8th. It is the successor of a string of similar events happening every four years: GHP, HEU, HIP, HAL, WTH, HAR and OHM. Similar events are EMF 2016 in the UK, CCC Camp in Germany.

The camp is organized for and by volunteers from and around all facets of the international hacker community. Knowledge sharing, technological advancement, experimentation, connecting with your hacker peers and of course hacking are some of the core values of this event.

DATACTIVE at the DMI Summer School 17 on the accessibility of open data portals

From the 3rd until the 7th of July, Guillen, Umberto, and Jeroen of the DATACTIVE team participated in the Digital Methods Initiative Summer School 2017. They conducted a one-week research around the question as to how to assess accessibility of government-facilitated open data portals. Just a glimpse of the final report (to be published soon on the DMI wiki):

“Open Data Portals are one of the main ways in which data users and data providers interact. The goal of this project was to identify mechanisms to assess the accessibility of Data Portals using Digital Methods. The project was particularly focused on tracing alternative voices to the ubiquitous celebration of Open Data, for two reasons: on the one hand, searching for contestation by both users and developers was considered as a good starting point to locate the shortcomings of Data Portals, and on the other, we were interested in identifying what elements of the critical discourse about the Open Data phenomenon (such as that built by Jo Bates) could be specifically connected to Data Portals.”

For more information, please find the presentation on the topic.

[blog] Big Data and Civil Society: Researching the researchers

In March-May 2017, I had the opportunity to join the DATACTIVE project as a research trainee, at the Media Studies Department of the University of Amsterdam. I first met the DATACTIVE team during the 2015 Winter School of the Digital Method Initiative (also at the Media Studies Department, UvA). At the time, we worked on tracing social networks through leaked files, and I very much appreciated the methods they use, and the great care they put into privacy consideration when dealing with people’s data. For these reasons, when I got the opportunity to enroll in a research traineeship abroad as part of my PhD project, I decided to go back to Amsterdam.

My research activities within DATACTIVE focused primarily on monitoring and reviewing the scope of and methods used by other research lab dealing with big data and civil society. More specifically, the aim of this research was to try and understand in which way DATACTIVE can learn from the research projects in question. This task lies at the exact intersection of the DATACTIVE research goals and my own skills and interests. My background bridges across political communication and Big Data: I completed a master in Big Data Analytics & Social Mining at the University of Pisa only some weeks before traveling to Amsterdam.

I analyzed about 23 projects from seven research labs, exploring a multitude of interesting methodologies and theoretical frameworks. It was sometimes challenging for me to deal with the many different aims, methods, and point of views represented in these different projects, but I had the possibility to familiarize myself with tools and methods used in other research labs. In what follows, I provide an overview of the most interesting findings, however hard it might be to do justice to all of them!

What have I studied?

1. Thanks to the Share Lab projects (The Share Foundation located in Serbia) I learned about the importance of meta-data, and how detailed information about people can be retrieved just exploring fragments of data, like mail headers or browsing internet histories (Metadata Investigation: Inside Hacking Team, Browsing Histories: Metadata Explorations).

2. Another research from Share Lab showed how Facebook algorithms work to match people with ads (Human Data Banks and Algorithmic Labour), and how an electoral campaign can be manipulated and dominated on the web (Mapping and quantifying political information warfare).

3. Analyzing projects developed with the CorText platform (set up by LISIS a research project located at Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée in Paris) showed how text can be elaborated upon in a free and easy way to perform a more complex analysis. It can do for instance semantic networks analysis in a bunch of scientific articles (Textdrill), topic extraction and clusterization from newspaper articles (Pulseweb), or geographical clusterization through text analysis (GeoClust).

4. Forensic Architecture (Goldsmiths, University of London) exemplifies how videos, photos, interviews and other kind of (social) data retrieved on the web, could be useful to reconstruct the “truth” in hard-to-reach war scenarios such as the Al-Jinah Mosque case (in which they performed an architectural analysis of a building destroyed in a US Airstrike in Syria on March 16th 2016), MSF Supported Hospital (in which researchers, asked by MSF, tried to understand which national air force, between Russian or Syrian, carried the airstrike), and Rafah: Black Friday in which Forensic collaborated with Amnesty International to reconstruct war operations in Gaza during 1-4 August 2014. It was emotionally challenging to read the reports while keeping an academic distance. This was the case, for instance, in the reconstruction of “the left to die boat” case, a vessel left to drift in the middle of the Mediterranean sea in which sixty-three migrants (seventy-two in total) lost their lives, or the report on what happens in the Saydnaya prison in Syria in which witnesses reported abuses and tortures. These are only some examples of what I encountered during my research.

But this was not a solitary research endeavor. Being involved in all the DATACTIVE discussions, meetings, conferences, and reading groups over the period of three months shed new light on qualitative research in context of “data activism”. For example, we discussed how to code activists’ interviews in terms of research aims and coding methods.

Thanks to the DATACTIVE experience and to the analysis of some projects (i.e. The Snowden Disclosures, Technical Standards, and the Making of Surveillance Infrastructures, Marginalisation, Activism and the Flip Sides of Digital Technologies), I better learned the importance to take care of personal data, and pay more attention to the multiple sides of technologies, which we often take as a black box. I have also reflected extensively on how digital technologies could be of help to a broad range of research activities, starting from simple tasks to perform complex “counter” analysis that allows understanding how the global financial system works (Corpnet, University of Amsterdam) or how a more equal and collaborative economy could be developed (Dimmons, Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, Open University of Catalonia). I am also convinced that all these research and outputs should be known and shared also beyond academia, not only among scholars, for their ability to speak to the world we live in.

I think that the experience and knowledge gained in this research traineeship will definitely add up to my PhD work: entering such a huge field of research has indeed broadened my own perspective on political communication and Big Data. Finally, I really appreciated being part of the DATACTIVE research team and being exposed to their collaborative way of working, and I really enjoyed the cultural and life experience in. I hope to come back.

See you soon.

about Antonio Martella

Antonio is a PhD student at the Political Science Department of the University of Pisa. His research project is focused on political leaders, populism, and social media. He graduated in Business communication and human resource policy and has a postgraduate master in “Big Data Analytics & Social Mining” by the University of Pisa along with the CNR of Pisa.

Featured image: Edward Snoweden WIRED magazine cover on news stand 8/2014 by Mike Mozart of TheToyChannel

Lonneke contributing to the Tertium project in the Volkskrant

On the 17th of June Lonneke contributed to the ‘Oplossers’ (‘solutioners’) series in the Volkskrant which is a Dutch journalistic project by Tertium in which scientistst are asked to reflect upon contemporary societal issues. The question was about ways for democratising the internet. In her piece, she suggested several interventions around alternative data infrastructures.

[blog] Techno-Galactic Software Observatory

Author: Lonneke van der Velden

 

Early June Becky and I participated in the Techno-Galactic Software Observatory, an event organised by Constant, a feminist art and technology collective in Brussels. It was a great event, in which theoretical insights from the philosophy of technology and software studies were combined with practical interventions which ended in an exhibition.

The event aimed to critically interrogate all kinds of assumptions about software and software knowledge. We discussed how software relates to time, spatializations, perspectives, and the hierarchies implied in ways of looking. The last day of the event was a ‘walk-in clinic’ in which visitors could get ‘software-critique as service’ at several ‘stations’.

The project I participated in was file-therapy. Departing from the Unix-philosophy that everything consists of a file (a program is a file, an instruction is a file, etc.), our desk would take people’s problems, understand them in their property of a file. Next, we would transform these files into other file types: visual data or music files.

We would not offer solutions. The idea was that our visitors, by being confronted with their new visualised or sonified file, could start developing a new relationship to this file. For example, one person would have a problem with her PhD-file: it was a big Word-file full of references and therefore difficult to handle. Working in it becomes a hassle. But listening to the transformed file is rather meditative. The other station in the room would criticise the reductionist ´file-formatted’ vision of the world, and in that way, we set up a dialogue about how computers format our lives.

 

hoij

A comparison of the various problematic files

The observatory was a great event and a learning experience at the same time. Please read other people’s experiences too 🙂

 

About constant

Constant is a non-profit, artist-run organisation based in Brussels since 1997 and active in the fields of art, media and technology.
Constant develops, investigates and experiments. Constant departs from, feminisms, copyleft, Free/Libre + Open Source Software. Constant loves collective digital artistic practices. Constant organises transdisciplinary worksessions. Constant creates installations, publications and exchanges. Constant collaborates with artists, activists, programmers, academics, designers. Constant is active archives, poetic algorithms, body and software, books with an attitude, cqrrelations, counter cartographies, situated publishing, e-traces, extitutional networks, interstitial work, libre graphics, performative protocols, relearning, discursive infrastructures, hackable devices.

Keynote: Stefania at the Data Power conference 2017

Stefania Milan will be one of the keynote speakers at the Data Power conference, june 22nd & 23rd, 2017, a two-day, international conference organized by Carleton and Sheffield universities.

Data Power 2017 follows the successful 2015 conference, held in the UK. The conference focuses on critical questions about data’s power, reflecting on the social and cultural consequences of data becoming increasingly pervasive in our lives. From the internet of things to smart cities, from surveillance to global finance, data (and data infrastructures) shape our lives, as information is generated, collected and analysed through the apps we use, in ways that are both obvious and imperceptible: black-boxed algorithms and opaque systems are used to profile and sort us, direct our spending and travel, and monitor our actions.

Find her closing presentation on Data-logies: The conditions of possibility for democratic agency in the datafied society

Stefania joins panel on Challenging surveillance activism in a datafied world at Ryerson University

Stefania Milan will join a panel discussion on activism around issues of Data and Surveillance on June 19. The event is hosted by the Global Communication Governance Lab and sponsored by the Ryerson School of Creative Industries, in Toronto, Canada.

To attend the event, please subscribe at Eventbrite. Panelists include:

Arne Hintz, Senior Lecturer, School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University
Stefania Milan, Associate Professor of New Media and Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam
Evan Light, Assistant Professor, Glendon College, York University

About the speaker series

The CREA T.O. Speaker Series invites leading global thinkers to Toronto to discuss their new books and cutting edge experiences with the Ryerson Community and wider public.

Stefania at the Summer Seminar “Surveillance in the Big Data Era”

On June 21st, Stefania will deliver a lecture at the Surveillance Studies Summer Seminar of the Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario on June 15-21.

Surveillance in the Big Data Era

This year’s theme is Surveillance in the Big Data Era. Big Data practices mean that personal data are no longer collected for certain limited, specific and transparent purposes. Rather, Big Data jumps ahead, obtaining bulk data before determining their actual and potential uses and mobilizing algorithms and analytics to predict and intervene before behaviours, events and processes are set in train. Preemptive approaches are a bureaucratic incentive to over-collect data in security and law enforcement. At the same time, promises abound that real-time data analytics will transform aspects of retail, manufacturing, health care and public sector organizations. Some promises may be fulfilled, but what will this mean for democratic freedoms, privacy and the role of information in contemporary life? Bruce Schneier has also suggested that ‘Big Data’ be considered like ‘Big Oil’ or ‘Big Pharma’ – as a political economic category, a key part of what Shoshana Zuboff is calling ‘surveillance capitalism.’ Together, Big Data and Surveillance are transforming our personal, social, cultural, political, economic and ecological worlds, and there is an urgent need for this to be addressed in every sphere and at every level.

 

Keynote: Stefania on digitalisation and doctoral education at the EUA-CDE conference

June 15, Tallinn,  Stefania Milan will be the keynote speaker at the 10th conference of the European University Association/Council for Doctoral Education (the organisation of universities and national rectors’ conferences in Europe), dedicated to “Digitalisation: A game changer for doctoral education?”.

Her session is entitled ‘Digitalisation of Society, the Role of Universities and its Impact on Doctoral Education and Research’. More specifically, she will reflect on “the role of universities in accompanying society in addressing the challenges of digitalisation and on the more specific issues facing doctoral schools as they seek to integrate digital approaches. How can universities provide doctoral candidates with the digital skills they need to advance their research and their careers?”. For more info see the website of the EUA-CDE.

About the EUA-CDE Annual Meeting

The 10th edition of the EUA-CDE Annual Meeting highlights the impact of digitalisation on the role and practice of doctoral education. Societies in general, and universities in particular are facing a transformation brought by the proliferation of digital technologies. For universities, this requires considering the impact of digitalisation on their different missions and doctoral education has an essential role to play given the crucial role of doctoral candidates and early-stage researchers in ensuring the base for knowledge production in the digital era.

The meeting will highlight different perspectives on the changing role of doctoral education in the context of digitalisation, offering concrete examples across different disciplines to show how doctoral schools are adapting their practices to keep up with digitalisation. Doctoral candidates and early-stage researchers find themselves at the forefront of the digital transformation of research and the skills they acquire will be essential for their future careers, be they in academia or in key positions in other fields. The meeting will also explore how universities can develop policies to support and guide young researchers in their endeavours in a coherent and responsible manner.

“Big data ¿para qué?”: Stefania at ImpactHub Donostia

“Big data”, ¿para qué?. No te pierdas a Stefania Milan (@annliffey), invitada del Programa Experto “Análisis, investigación y comunicación de datos” de la Universidad de Deusto, el lunes 5 de junio, de 18:00 a 19:30 en el espacio Impact Hub, Donostia de Tabakalera. ¿Qué son los big data y cómo se usan? ¿A quién pertenecen? Estamos en una sociedad “datificada”, es decir, casi toda nuestra actividad, tanto offline como online, se traduce en grandes volúmenes de datos y metadatos, que son almacenados y analizados en tiempo real por gobiernos y grandes corporaciones. Muchos entre los primeros lo hacen para darnos mejores servicios públicos y protegernos, pero también vigilarnos y perpetuarse en el poder; los segundos pretenden mejorar sus productos y responder a las necesidades individualizadas de las personas, pero también quieren aumentar sus beneficios. Sin embargo, existen otros usos de las infraestructuras de datos. La sociedad civil está cada vez más utilizándolas para generar cambio social y discursos alternativos. Os animamos a participar en un interesante debate con Stefania Milan –una experta en tecnologías de los movimientos sociales de la Universidad de Amsterdam—sobre los retos y las oportunidades que presentan los big data.