Category: show on landing page

“Spotting Sharks”: new Working Paper by Jeroen de Vos

We are happy to announce the ALEX’s Competitor analysis, published as part of the DATACTIVE Working Paper Series, by Jeroen de Vos:

Vos, J. de (2019) “Spotting Sharks: ALEX’s Competitor analysis”, DATACTIVE Working paper series, No 2/2019 ISSN: 2666-0733.

(DOWNLOAD THE PAPER HERE)

Abstract
This paper summarizes the output of the competitor analysis for fbTREX conducted as part of the market research for the project Algorithms Exposed (ALEX). fbTREX is a browser plugin that allows harvesting publicly available data on the users Facebook timeline, and its development is currently hosted by the Algorithms Exposed initiative – an effort to facilitate repurposing personal social media data to allow the scaling of systematic empirical inquiry for academic, educational or journalistic purposes. The desk research is enhanced by several interviews and aims to: 1) create initial insights into existing potentially competing organisations; 2) analyse market potential present in a specific field; 3) situate the current understanding of fbTREX in the context of bringing a product to market; and 4) and help prioritize the next step. This research should be read as an intermediate product, which can provide valuable insights to both partners and competitors. Algorithm Exposed is funded by the ERC Proof of Concept grant [grant agreement number 825974].

About Algorithms Exposed
ALEX, a short-cut for “Algorithms Exposed. Investigating Automated Personalization and Filtering for Research and Activism”, aims at unmasking the functioning of personalization algorithms on social media platforms. From an original idea of lead developer Claudio Agosti, ALEX marks the engagement of DATACTIVE with “data activism in practice”—that is to say, turning data into a point of intervention in society. Link to the website.

About the DATACTIVE working paper series
The DATACTIVE Working Paper Series presents results of the DATACTIVE research project. The series aims to disseminate the results of their research to a wider audience. An editorial committee consisting of the DATACTIVE PI and Postdoctoral fellows reviews the quality of the Working Papers. The Series aims to disseminate research results in an accessible manner to a wider audience. Readers are encouraged to provide the authors with feedback and/or questions.

two new articles out

We are happy to announce the publication of two new open access contributions:

YouTube Algorithm Exposed: DMI Summer School project week 1

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. ytTREX allows you to produce copies of the set of recommended videos, with the main purpose to investigate the logic of personalization and tracking behind the algorithm. During the week, together with a number of highly motivated students and researchers, we engaged in collective reflection, experiments and analysis, fueled by Brexit talks, Gangnam Style beats, and the secret life of octopuses. Our main findings (previewed below, and detailed later in a wiki report) pertain look into which factors (language settings, browsing behavior, previous views, domain of videos, etc.) help trigger the highest level of personalization in the recommended results.

 

Algorithm exposed_ investigasting Youtube – slides

 

 

 

Facebook’s Anatomy, DMI Summerschool II.

Together with the Mercator working group, DATACTIVE had the pleasure of joining the DMI (Digital Methods Initiative) summer school to work on a special project: Facebook’s Anatomy. As a form of data-activism in-practice, this project was devoted to try and dissect the working mechanisms of the Facebook user interface, split into a more qualitative, visual language/psychological analysis of the front-end and a more quantitative analysis of the back-end. The analysis tried to track the ‘coming to life’ onboarding process, and the way in which users are gently nudged and persuaded to enter more personal data through explicit performative steps (think drop-down menus and text bars). This was measured against the role of language and colour/placement design formatting in this onboarding trajectory on the one hand. On the other, this sequence of events was matched with the growth of the data that is inferred from these explicit actions and implicit input (like IP-address, browser, operating system for instance).

Find the wiki documenting the research here.

Our tentative findings are presented using the slides below. This Facebook Anatomy project has sprung out of the minds of the Mercator working group and has been reworked into a DMI research print which accommodated 15 participants. DATACTIVE was represented by Guillen, Davide & Jeroen.

 

PRESENTATION_The Anatomy of Facebook (1)

 

Stefania at Science Foo

On July 12-14 Stefania will be at X in Mountain View, in Silicon Valley, as one of the invitees to Sci Foo. Science Foo is a series of interdisciplinary conferences organized by O’Reilly Media, Digital Science, Nature Publishing Group and Google. It is an “unconference focused on emerging technology, and is designed to encourage collaboration between scientists who would not typically work together”. Stefania plans to propose a session on ‘decolonizing data’.

Guillén at the Global Conference for Transparency Research 2019

Last week, Guillén was in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to present part of his PhD project on the sociotechnical obstacles faced by data/information activists in Mexico and the strategies they develop to overcome them. His talk, “Institutional Resistance to Datafication-from-below”, was part of the pannel “Civil Society Experiences”, in which researchers and practitioners from México, India and the UK reflected around how the legal frameworks of transparency are experienced by engaged citizens.

Below you can find the abstract of his presentation. Get in touch with him if you’d like to discuss!

Governmental transparency through Freedom of Information Laws has become a standard in modern liberal democracies. Although the connection between transparency and political accountability has been thoroughly questioned, research seems to confirm that access to public sector information is a key (albeit not sufficient) factor fostering citizen empowerment. However, a recent trend in Latin America, denounced by both practitioners and academics, consists of governments, who in paper state their support for transparency, implementing various kinds of strategies to hinder the process of accessing public sector information, curbing governmental transparency. While a considerable body of research on transparency’s performance in many countries around the world has focused on its drawbacks and challenges, and there is even a specific set of literature looking particularly at the factors that affect governmental responsiveness to FOI requests, the attention of scholars has mostly been set on what happens within institutions, while the experiences of politically engaged citizens have received less study. In this paper I chose a different path, focusing on how Mexican information activists experience and make sense of delays, denials and obstacles during the process of accessing Public Sector Information through the Freedom of Information Law. Thus, I attempt to switch the attention from the evaluation of transparency policies through indexes that measure the achievement of policy goals, to the embodied experience of the communities involved in policy performance.

Stefania at IAMCR in Madrid

On July 8-11, Stefania will be in Madrid for the annual conference of the International Association of Media and Communication Research (IAMCR). She will present some preliminary findings of her new research on feminist and postcolonial theories of change in data activism; participate in a roundtable on Big Data from the South, featuring Monika Halkort, Patricia Peña, Emiliano Treré, Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Meijas; take part in a roundtable on smart cities, in conversation with Matthew Bui (Annenberg at USC), and participate in the launch of ‘Hybrid Activism’ (Routledge, 2019) by Emiliano Treré.