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
Art as data-activism
September 16, 2021The second day of the DATACTIVE closing workshop, hosted online by SPUI25, focused on artistic responses to datafication and mass data collection. The DATACTIVE team has interviewed many civil society actors from the field of digital rights, privacy, and technology activism. Artists take part in this field, but often they… Read more
Niels’ research featured in the New York Times
April 30, 2021TL;DR: have a look at the piece in the New York Times that covers Niels’ work. During the research Niels did for datactive, which culminated in his thesis and a recent paper in New Media & Society, he actively participated in the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF). The IETF is one… Read more
BigBang Sprint at IETF110 Hackathon
February 16, 2021When: March 1-3, 2021 The BigBang project will be working on improving its tool for mailinglist analysis at the IETF 110 Hackathon. BigBang is an open source research project that studies collaboration and contention in digital infrastructure projects and governance institutions. We do this by combining data science techniques with… Read more
DATACTIVE protests lack of ethical review in the UvA-Huawei collaboration
October 16, 2020DATACTIVE, together with Bits of Freedom, the Data Justice Project and many individual scientists, signed the Funding Matters statement that protests the collaboration of a project at the University of Amsterdam and the Vrije University with Huawei. While collaboration with companies is not problematic per se, it is important that… Read more
[blogpost] Teaching Students to Question Mr. Robot: Working to Prevent Algorithmic Bias in Educational Artificial Intelligence
August 6, 2020Author: Erinne Paisley Introduction With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, classrooms around the world have moved online. Students from K-12, as well as University-level, are turning to their computers to stay connected to teachers and progress their education. This move online raises questions of the appropriateness of technologies in… Read more
[BigDataSur] Data activism in action: The gigantic size and impact of China’s fishing fleet revealed using big data analytics and algorithms
June 2, 2020Author: Miren Gutiérrez As we grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic, another crisis looms over our future: overfishing. Fishing fleets and unsustainable practices have been emptying the oceans of fish and filling them with plastic. Although other countries are also responsible for overfishing, China has a greater responsibility. Why is looking… Read more
[BigDataSur] The Challenge of Decolonizing Big Data through Citizen Data Audits [3/3]
May 14, 2020Author: Katherine Reilly, Simon Fraser University, School of Communication Data Stewardship through Citizen Centered Data Audits In my previous two posts (the first & the second), I talked about the nature of data audits, and how they might be applied by citizens. Audits, I explained, check whether people are… Read more
WomenonWeb censored in Spain as reported by Magma
May 13, 2020Author: Vasilis Ververis The Magma project just published new research on censorship concerning womenonweb.org, a non-profit organization providing support to women and pregnant people. The article describes how the major ISPs in Spain are blocking womenonweb.org’s website. Spanish ISPs have been blocking this website by means of DNS manipulation, TCP… Read more
[BigDataSur] The Challenge of Decolonizing Big Data through Citizen Data Audits [2/3]
May 7, 2020A First Attempt at Citizen Data Audits Author: Katherine Reilly, Simon Fraser University, School of Communication In the first post in this series, I explained that audits are used to check whether people are carrying out practices according to established standards or criteria. They are meant to ensure effective… Read more
[BigDataSur] The Challenge of Decolonizing Big Data through Citizen Data Audits [1/3]
April 30, 2020Author: Katherine Reilly, Simon Fraser University, School of Communication A curious thing happened in Europe after the creation of the GDPR. A whole new wave of data audit companies came into existence to service companies that use personal data. This is because, under the GDPR, private companies must audit their… Read more
[BigDataSur] Data journalism without data: challenges from a Brazilian perspective
April 28, 2020Author: Peter Füssy For the last decade, data journalism has attracted attention from scholars, some of whom have provided distinct definitions in order to understand the changes in journalistic practices. Each one of them emphasizes a particular aspect of data journalism; from new forms of collaboration to open-source culture (Coddington,… Read more
[blog] I quattro nemici (quasi) invisibili nella prima pandemia dell’era della società dei dati
April 25, 2020by Philip Di Salvo, Stefania Milan originally published on Il Manifesto, 24 April 2020 Big Data e Covid. La pandemia sta facendo emergere fenomeni e caratteristiche della società dei dati che, in circostanze di emergenza come quelle di queste settimane, rischiano di concretizzare quelli che—fino a poco fa—potevano essere considerati… Read more
[blog] The true cost of human rights witnessing
April 16, 2020Author: Alexandra Elliott – Header image: Troll Patrol India, Amnesty Decoders Witnessing is widely accepted as an established element of enforcing justice, and recent increase in accessibility to big data revolutionizes this process. Data witnessing, now, can be conducted by remote actors using digital tools to code large amounts of… Read more
[BigDataSur] A widening data divide: COVID-19 and the Global South
April 3, 2020COVID-19 shows the need for a global alliance of experts who can fast-track the capacity building of developing countries in the business of counting. Stefania Milan & Emiliano Treré The COVID-19 pandemic is sweeping the world. First identified in mainland China in December 2019, it has rapidly reached the four… Read more
[BigDataSur] Cuba y su ecosistema de redes después de la revolución
April 3, 2020Por: Yery Menéndez García y Jessica Domínguez. En Cuba la información, la comunicación y los datos son “recursos estratégicos del estado” [1] y “asunto de seguridad nacional” [2]. En la práctica, pero también en la mayoría de los documentos normativos del país, queda establecida la propiedad estatal sobre el capital… Read more
[blog] Catching a Glimpse of the Elusive “Feminist Drone”
March 31, 2020Author: Erinne Paisley Introduction Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV or “drones”) are increasingly being used for military, governmental, commercial and personal purposes (Feigenbaum 267; Estrada 100). This rapid increase in drone use raises new questions about how this technology reinforces certain social and political inequalities within its own structure, function, and… Read more
[blog] Show me the numbers: a case of impact communication in FLOSS
March 17, 2020Author: Jeroen de Vos, header image by Ford Foundation This blog post will explore the potential of repurposing impact assessment tools as a means to leverage funding problems in Free and Libre Open Source Software by making explicit the role they have in crucial public digital infrastructure. Two key concepts… Read more
Lonneke at KCL
February 12, 2020Today, Lonneke is at KCL to present in Jonathan Gray’s data activism course. The talk is about researching data activism “behind the scenes”: concepts, methods and how to handle research data. After the talk, the students will investigate air pollution data activist projects. Image: “Air Quality Egg” by Smart Citizens. Read more
[BigDataSur] El Sur Global podría nacionalizar sus datos
February 7, 2020Por Ulises Alí Mejías (An English version of this article appeared in Al Jazeera on December 2019) Introducción Las grandes empresas de tecnología están extrayendo datos de sus usuarios en todo el mundo, sin pagarles por éstos. Es hora de cambiar esta situación. Abstract Big tech corporations are extracting data from… Read more
[BigDataSur] Inteligencia artificial y soberanía digital
February 4, 2020Por Lucía Benítez Eyzaguirre Resumen La autonomía que van logrando los algoritmos, y en especial la inteligencia artificial, nos obliga a repensar los riesgos de la falta de calidad de los datos, de que en general no estén desagregados y los sesgos y aspectos ocultos de los algoritmos. Las cuestiones de… Read more
Magma guide release announcement
January 31, 2020January 29, 2020 By Vasilis Ververis, DATACTIVE We are very pleased to announce you that the magma guide has been released. What is the magma guide? An open-licensed, collaborative repository that provides the first publicly available research framework for people working to measure information controls and online censorship activities. In it,… Read more
[BigDataSur] How Chilean activists used citizen-generated data to fight disinformation
January 20, 2020by Tomás Dodds Introduction For over 80 days now, and with no end in sight, Chile has been in the grip of waves of social protests and cultural manifestations with tens of thousands of demonstrators taking to the streets across the country. For many, the upsurge of this social outburst has… Read more
[blog] Why Psychologists need New Media Theory
January 16, 2020by Salvatore Romano I’m a graduate student at the University of Padova, Italy. I’m studying Social Psychology, and I spent four months doing an Erasmus Internship with the DATACTIVE team in Amsterdam. It’s not so common to find a student of psychology in the department of Media Studies;… Read more
Off the Beaten Path: Human rights advocacy to change the Internet infrastructure
December 5, 2019Report on Public Interest Internet Infrastructure workshop held at Harvard University in September 2019 by Corinne Cath-Speth and Niels ten Oever Introduction Surveillance-based business model[s] force people to make a Faustian bargain, whereby they are only able to enjoy their human rights online by submitting to a system predicated on human… Read more
Lonneke at NISA
November 21, 2019Today Lonneke will present on Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) as Public Practice, at the Netherlands Intelligence Studies Association. Our advisory board member Ron Deibert will be one of the keynote speakers, and will speak on The Coming Dark Age in Global Cyberspace! Read more
Everyday Data: a Workshop Report
November 5, 2019By Becky Kazansky and Guillen Torres Intro On September 15th 2019, DATACTIVE held a one-day workshop following on the heels of the Data Power conference in Bremen, Germany. We were kindly hosted by the Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKIi) of the University of Bremen. Over this day,… Read more
Niels at ECREA: Infrastructures and Inequalities: Media industries, digital cultures and politics
October 22, 2019The European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) organized a workshop about Infrastructures and Inequalities. Here Niels presented his recent work on an experiment to inscribe legal and ethical norms into the Internet routing infrastructure. The conference helped to further concept of infrastructure, that continues to gaining traction in the… Read more
Niels at Kyiv Biennial on architecture, protocols, routing, power, and control
October 22, 2019The topic of the Kyiv Biennial this year is ‘the Black Cloud’. The title reminiscences the contaminated cloud that traveled over Europe after the Chernobyl disaster and invites us to reflect on the role of technology. At the Kyiv Biennial, the critical media scholar Svitlana Matviyenko organized a two-day symposium… Read more
YouTube Algorithm Exposed: DMI Summer School project week 1
July 19, 2019DATACTIVE 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
Lonneke interviewed by nu.nl
June 8, 2019Today it is 70 years ago that the book 1984 by George Orwell was published. I was interviewed by nu.nl about the relevance of 1984 for today’s society. (The piece is in Dutch: ‘Zeventig jaar na 1984: Zo actueel is de roman van George Orwell.’) Image by Gordon Johnson from… Read more
Stefania at the Summer School on Methods for the Study of Political Participation and Mobilization, Florence
June 2, 2019On 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
fbTREX reaction to Facebook collaboration
May 14, 2019Research associate Claudio Agosti argues the need for independent critical research in a reaction to the news that Facebook is opening its door to scholars for academic research. The statement on the EU19 tracking exposed project website portrays why academic research should not be delimited by corporate conditions for research only; we should… Read more
Lonneke at Amsterdam Law Forum Conference
May 10, 2019Lonneke 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’. Read more
Constructing Technological Sovereignty
April 4, 2019By Lonneke van der Velden, DATACTIVE A couple of weeks, ago a part of the DATACTIVE team attended the book launch of the Dutch translation of ‘Technological Sovereignty’ at the Hackerspace TechInc in Amsterdam. The main talk at the book launch was given by one of the authors of the book,… Read more
HTTP workshop hosted by DATACTIVE
April 1, 2019This 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
Subversion in Vienna
March 21, 2019Niels ten Oever held a talk on the subversion of equality and freedom of users in the Internet architecture at the Privacy and Sustainable Computing Lab of the Vienna University of Economics and Business. The talk built on a mixed methods analysis of the Internet architecture and its technical governance,… Read more
Thinking global while also acting local: DATACTIVE and the Amsterdam digital agenda
March 21, 2019The 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
#JustPublished! “Accounting for power in transnational civic tech activism (…)” by Kersti Wissenbach
March 13, 2019Fresh from the DATACTIVE press: Kersti Wissenbach introduces the concept of ‘acting within’ to contemporary media practice approaches on the intersection of communication and social movement studies. She argues for the need to take distance from pre-assigned indications of exclusion and builds on the de-westernisation discourse of communication scholarship in… Read more
Open Source Intelligence
March 11, 2019Lonneke 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
[bigdatasur] Jitihada La Ughaibu Afrika
February 1, 2019By Duncan Kinuthia, Ford/Media Democracy Fund Tech Exchange Fellow at Research ICT Africa >>> if your Swahili is not good enough, check out the English translation! <<< Watumizi wa mtandao Afrika wanazidi kuongezeka katika kusaka ughaibu kwenye mtandao. Hii imehamasishwa na ripoti za hivi majuzi za ukiukaji wa uaminifu na faragha wa… Read more
[BigDataSur] The African quest for anonymization
January 14, 2019The 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). Read more
Announcing the Magma project
January 8, 2019By Vasilis Ververis, DATACTIVE Magma aims to build a scalable, reproducible, standard methodology on measuring, documenting and circumventing internet censorship, information controls, internet blackouts and surveillance in a way that will be streamlined and used in practice by researchers, front-line activists, field-workers, human rights defenders, organizations and journalists. In recent years,… Read more
A year in review
January 2, 20192018 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
Civic resistance to environmental failures from the South (of the North…): The AnalyzeBasilicata initiative
December 14, 2018By Anna Berti Suman – Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT) During the Workshop ‘Big Data from the South: Towards a Research Agenda’, we discussed how the ‘South’ is much more than a geographical connotation. The South exists every time a person is discriminated, basic services are denied,… Read more
[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 Read more
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