DATACTIVE

In 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

by 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

Author: 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

Author: 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

By 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

Author: 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

Kersti 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

This 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

by 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

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 … Read more

On 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

Author: 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

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 … Read more