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
[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