This is our blog. Here we share news about the DATACTIVE team, events we host and organise, as well as updates on our regular lecture series.
The DATACTIVE Blog
[BigDataSur] Challenges and opportunities of studying big data in the Global South
December 3, 2018What are the challenges and opportunities of studying big data in the Global South? @lauramahrenbach and @katjamat examine the policy visions of big data in #Brazil, #India and #China and how we can improve understanding of them
Lonneke on Open Sourcing Open Source Intelligence
November 1, 2018In late September, I gave a talk in which she considered the connections between Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and data activism at the ‘DIGITAL CULTURES: Knowledge / Culture / Technology’ conference at Leuphana University Lüneburg. The presentation asked how OSINT might be understood through the prism of ‘data activist epistemologies’ … Read more
26 October: Noortje Marres and DATACTIVE in conversation on the social science scene today
October 22, 2018On 26 October, DATACTIVE hosts the philosopher and science studies scholar Noortje Marres to discuss and problematize the role of social science today. The DATACTIVE team will engage with Marres to discuss chapters of her book Digital Sociology: The Reinvention of Social Research. The exchange is expected to delve into … Read more
Organization After Social Media: orgnets and alternative socio-technical infrastructures
October 21, 2018by Lonneke van der Velden Last month, I was invited to be a respondent (together with Harriet Bergman) for the launch of Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter’s latest book, Organization After Social Media. The book is a collection of essays which re-interrogate the concerns and contributions of social movements and … Read more
DATACTIVE supports WOinActie
September 27, 2018DATACTIVE joins WOinActie’s week of protest and wants to publicly manifest its support to the struggle of students and staff. We stand against budget cuts, overwhelming workloads, and the neoliberalization of education. We demand adequate funding, less pressure on teachers and students and a model of university that privileges critical … Read more
Why we won’t be at APC 2018
September 19, 2018In October 2018, the Amsterdam Privacy Conference (APC) will be back at the University of Amsterdam. Two DATACTIVE project team members, Stefania (Principal Investigator), and Becky (PhD candidate), enthusiastically supported the conference as coordinators of the ‘Digital Society and Surveillance’ theme. The Data Justice Lab at Cardiff University submitted a panel proposal, which was successfully included. Regretfully, neither will take part in the conference: … Read more
Data Colonialism – the first article of the Special Issue on “Big Data from the South” is out
September 14, 2018Nick Couldry and Ulisse A. Mejias re-frame the Data from the South debate within the context of modern day colonialism: data colonialism; an alarming stage where human life is “appropriated through data” and life is, eventually, “capitalized without limit”. This essay marks the beginning of a series of articles under a … Read more
Welcome to DATACTIVE’s spinoff ALEX! An interview with fbtrex Lead Developer Claudio Agosti
September 10, 2018by Tu Quynh Hoang and Stefania Milan DATACTIVE is proud to announce that its spin-off ALEX project has been awarded a Proof of Concept grant of the European Research Council. ALEX, which stands in for “ALgorithms Exposed (ALEX). Investigating Automated Personalization and Filtering for Research and Activism”, aims at unmasking the … Read more
BigBang v0.2.0 ‘Tulip Revolution’ released
July 17, 2018DATACTIVE has been collaborating with researchers from New York University and the University of California at Berkeley to release version 0.2.0 of the quantitative mailinglists analysis software BigBang. Mailinglists are among the most widely used communication tools in Internet Governance institutions and among software developers. Therefore mailinglists lend themselves really … Read more
[blog] Growth for Critical Studies? Social scholars, let’s be shrewder
July 17, 2018Author: Miren Gutierrez This is a response the call for a critical community studies ‘Tech, data and social change: A plea for cross-disciplinary engagement, historical memory, and … Critical Community Studies‘ by Kersti Wissenbach and the first contribution to the debate ‘Can We Plan Slow – But Steady – Growth … Read more
[blog] Making ‘community’ critical: Tech collectives through the prism of power
July 2, 2018Author: Fabien Cante In her recent blog post, Kersti Wissenbach expresses her frustration with the field of “civic tech,” which, as she puts it, remains far more focused on the “tech” than the “civic.” This resonates with me in many ways. I write as someone who is possibly more of … Read more
[blog] Data by citizens for citizens
June 5, 2018Author: Miren Gutierrez In spite of what we know about how big data are employed to spy on us, manipulate us, lie to us and control us, there are still people who get excited by hype-generating narratives around social media influence, machine learning and business insights. At the other end of … Read more
[blog] Can We Plan Slow – But Steady – Growth for Critical Studies?
May 3, 2018Author: Charlotte Ryan (University of Massachusetts, Lowell/Movement-Media Research Action Project), member of the DATACTIVE ethics board. This is a response post to the blog ‘Tech, data and social change: A plea for cross-disciplinary engagement, historical memory, and … Critical Community Studies‘ written by Kersti Wissenbach. To maximize technologies’ value in … Read more
[blog] #Data4Good, Part II: A necessary debate
April 25, 2018By Miren Gutiérrez* In the context of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, fake news, the use of personal data for propagandistic purposes and mass surveillance, the Postgraduate Programme “Data analysis, research and communication” proposed a singular debate on how the (big) data infrastructure and other technologies can serve to improve people’s lives … Read more
Para exercer plenamente a cidadania, é preciso conhecer os filtros virtuais (Época Negócios)
April 11, 2018Stefania was commissioned an article by the Brazilian business magazine Época Negócios. In sum, she argues that “estar ciente dos elementos que moldam profundamente nossos universos de informação é um passo fundamental para deixarmos de ser prisioneiros da internet”. Continue reading the article in Portuguese online. Here you can read the original … Read more
[blog] Critical reflections on FAT* 2018: a historical idealist perspective
April 11, 2018Author: Sebastian Benthall, Research Scientist at NYU Steinhardt and PhD Candidate UC Berkeley School of Information. In February, 2018, the inaugural 2018 FAT* conference was held in New York City: The FAT* Conference 2018 is a two-day event that brings together researchers and practitioners interested in fairness, accountability, and transparency in … Read more
[blog] Cloud communities and the materiality of the digital (GLOBALCIT project, EUI)
April 4, 2018This invited blog post originally appeared in the forum ‘Cloud Communities: The Dawn of Global Citizenship?’ of the GLOBALCIT project (European University Institute). It is part of an interesting multidisciplinary conversation accessible from the GLOBALCIT website. I wish to thank Rainer Baubock and Liav Orgad for the invitation to contribute to the debate. … Read more
[blog] Tech, data and social change: A plea for cross-disciplinary engagement, historical memory, and … Critical Community Studies
March 29, 2018Kersti R. Wissenbach | March 2018 It has been a while since I first got my feet into the universe of technology and socio-political change. Back then, coming from a critical development studies and communication science background, I was fascinated by the role community radio could play in fostering dialogue … Read more
[blog] Facebook newsfeed changes: Three hypotheses to look into the future
March 27, 2018Image: Vincenzo Cosenza In this blog post, DATACTIVE research associate Antonio Martella is looking forward to the consequences of Facebook’s news feed modifications as result of larger corporate policy changes. He investigates and discusses implications through three hypotheses: 1) the divide between the attention-rich and the attention poor will grow … Read more
BigBang hackaton in London, March 17-18
March 16, 2018This weekend the DATACTIVE team will be joining the IETF101 hackathon to work on quantitative mailing-list analysis software. The Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF) is the oldest and most important Internet standard setting body. The discussions and decisions of the IETF have fundamentally shaped the Internet. All IETF mailing-lists and output documents are publicly available. They represent … Read more
[blog] Internet Archive and Hacker Ethics: Answers to datafication from the hacktivist world
February 23, 2018Guest author: Silvia Semenzin This blogpost looks into the Internet Archive as a case-study to discuss hacktivism as a form of resistance to instances of control on the Internet and the use of data for political and commercial purposes. It argues hacktivism should not only be considered a social movement, … Read more
Big Data from the South: The beginning of a conversation we must have
October 16, 2017by Stefania Milan and Emiliano Treré On July 15, 2017 in Cartagena, Colombia, about fifty between academics and activists got together to imagine how ‘Big Data from the South’ would look like. Organized with little resources and much enthusiasm by the two of us* and preceding the annual IAMCR conference … Read more
[blog] Hopes and Fears at SHA2017
August 29, 2017Authors: Davide & Jeroen A few weeks ago, a contingent of the DATACTIVE team attended SHA (Still Hacking Anyway), the periodic worldwide hacker camp hosted in the Netherlands. The great variety of people hanging around included IT pen-testers, system administrators, activists, developers, advocacy groups, journalists -and, of course, hackers. Around … Read more
[blog] Big Data and Civil Society: Researching the researchers
July 3, 2017In 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 … Read more
[blog] Techno-Galactic Software Observatory
June 25, 2017Author: 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 … Read more
[blog] A RightsCon2017 Post-Mortem: Hot in the digital rights agenda
April 12, 2017On March 29-31, three brave members of the DATACTIVE team—Davide, Guillen and Stefania, respectively—descended on the lively city of Brussels to attend RightsCon 2017. The RightsCon Summit Series, organized by the US-based non-governmental organization Access Now, is a yearly event bringing together digital rights activists and practitioners with the tech … Read more
[blog] Communication and Activism – a research visit to the Center of Social Movement Studies
April 7, 2017By Kersti R. Wissenbach, March 2017 This week I returned to the beautiful city of Florence to spend several months with the Centre on Social Movement Studies (COSMOS) located at the Institute of Humanities and Social Science at Scuola Normale Superiore. It is my second visit to the institute and … Read more
[blog] The politics of network graphs
March 22, 2017Author: Jeroen de Vos, humanities scholar, entrepreneur and research assistant at DATACTIVE. How do the graphs above differ? With their different colors, layouts and visual densities, they seem to each adhere to their own unique network. However, as an image they consist of the same kind of materiality: a network plotted … Read more
[blog] Taking a look at institutional resistance to citizen empowerment
February 10, 2017By Guillén Torres (Image copyright: Bob Mankoff) To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in July, 2016, ProPublica, a U.S. nonprofit newsroom, published a long essay titled Delayed, Denied, Dismissed: Failures on the FOIA Front, in which several journalists detailed their frustrating experiences when requesting … Read more
New logo – new design!
August 25, 2016Just 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 … Read more
Introducing DATACTIVE
October 8, 2015We are DATACTIVE, a research project and a research collective exploring the politics of big data broadly defined. We take a critical look at massive data collection, privacy and surveillance | social movements, activism and internet activism | internet infrastructure, cybersecurity and their governance | open data and civic tech … Read more