DATACTIVE

DATACTIVE participated in the first week of the Digital Methods Initiative summer school 2019 with a data sprint related to the side project ALEX. DATACTIVE’s insiders Davide and Jeroen, together with research associate and ALEX’s software developer Claudio Agosti, pitched a project aimed at exploring the logic of YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, using the ALEX-related browser extension youtube.tracking.exposed. … Read more

On June 4, Stefania gives a lecture on ethical issues in social movement and political participation research at the Summer School on Methods for the Study of Political Participation and Mobilization, in Florence, Italy. The school is organised by the ECPR Standing Group on Participation and Mobilization and the Dipartimento … Read more

Lonneke is presenting on data activism and Open Source Investigations in a panel on Law & Technology. It is at the 2019 Amsterdam Law Forum  Annual Conference on Technology & International Law at the VU university. Afterwards there is a panel on ‘The Facts of Emerging Technologies’.

This week, the fourth HTTP Workshop is taking place in Amsterdam, hosted by DATACTIVE in the University of Amsterdam. This event gathers people who work on and use the Web’s protocol to talk about how it’s working, what needs improving and where it might go in the future. As such, … Read more

The municipality of Amsterdam published its Digital Agenda in which it presents its ambitions to become a free, inclusive, and creative digital city. Amsterdam is grounding its ambitions on the early experiences with networking technology in the Netherlands, after which the agenda was called: The Digital City (De Digitale Stad). … Read more

Lonneke presented preliminary work on Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) at the Amsterdam Platform for Privacy Research meeting. It is part of an ongoing study into how OSINT takes place “in the public” by citizen journalists and activists, what kind of methods are being used, and what kind of epistemologies play … Read more

The key objective of the research project is to shed light on the practice of using VPN as a data anonymization tool in Eastern Africa, by both individual users and for non-profit organizations (NPO).

2018 has been a good year for DATACTIVE. We take the opportunity of the turn of the year to review what we accomplished and what remains to do. We advanced with data collection, and are almost done. Just to mention one, we are close to 200 interviews, and the material is extremely rich. We organized two … Read more

What 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

On 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

DATACTIVE 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

Nick 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

DATACTIVE 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

Author: 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

Author: 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

Stefania 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

This 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

Image: 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

Guest 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

Authors: 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

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 … Read more

By 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

By 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

We 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