Category: show on landing page

Guillén at the WTMC Summer School

This year, the Netherlands Graduate Research School of Science, Technology and Modern Culture summer school focused on Ethnography, Digital Objects, and STS, under the guidance of Christine Hine. The yearly event takes place in the quiet former convent of Soeterbeeck, in Ravenstein, which is now a conference center of the Radboud Universiteit.

The goal of the Summer School was to reflect around how can researchers produce knowledge from digital objects, and what challenges does ‘The Digital’ imply for the methods of Social Sciences. The event consisted of a series of lectures by Christine Hine, who has developed extensive work on digital ethnography, and other STS scholars: Vlad Niculescu (Erasmus University Rotterdam), Nishant Shah (ArtEZ School of the Arts), Justus Uitermark (University of Amsterdam), Karin Wenz (Maastricht University), and Sally Wyatt (Maastricht University / Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences).

In addition to that, some of the attendees presented their own PhD research spanning a wide array of subjects, from period tracking apps, to mobility experiments, passing by digital patient records and The People’s Internet. I presented my work on Digital Shatter Zones: digital spaces in which public sector information and open data is made available without necessarily being accessible. You can see the slides here.

 

DATACTIVE at the ECPR conference, Oslo

Davide, Kersti and Stefania are attending the annual conference of the European Consortium for Political Research in Oslo (September 6-9), reconnecting with their political and social science souls.

The three of them will take part in the panel exploring “the next stage of digital activism. Reviewing Practices and Concepts in the Era of Datafication”, organized by Stefania. Davide will present an excerpt of his PhD thesis, entitled “Contentious Branding. Occupy and Anonymous between the Connective and Collective”. Kersti will present two papers, “Governance from the Grassroots: Digital Activism for Government Accountability” and “Accounting for Power in the Big Data Era: The Meaning of Collectivity in Datafied Societies”. Stefania, too, will present two papers, a snapshot from her work “Towards a Socio-Technical Theory of Political Agency in Datafied Societies” and “Political Agency, Digital Traces and Bottom-up Data Practices”, soon to appear in the International Journal of Communication.

Becky at 4S conference in Boston

Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), 2017
Boston, Massachusetts, August 30 – September 2, 2017

 

STS (In)Sensibilities

If sensibility is the ability to grasp and to respond, how might we articulate the (in)sensibilities of contemporary technoscience? How, similarly, can we reflect on the extent and limits of our own sensibilities as STS scholars, teachers, and activists? The conference theme invites an open reading and exploration of how the world is made differently sense-able through multiple discourses and practices of knowledge-making, as well as that which evades the sensoria of technoscience and STS. Our aim is that the sense of ‘sense’ be read broadly, from mediating technologies of perception and apprehension to the discursive and material practices that render worlds familiar and strange, real and imagined, actual and possible, politically (in)sensitive and ethically sensible. Find the detailed program here.

 

Becky presents ‘Calculating & Countering Surveillance Risks: Translations in Practice’

With the proliferation of digital surveillance, how to act under the presumption of monitoring and tracking has become a central subject of concern to civil society. The responsibility of the ‘surveillance subject’ extends to the ability to anticipate the likelihood of one kind of security threat over another; to apply risk management strategies to determine the appropriate course of action in fearful and uncertain circumstances; and to own responsibility for the impacts of any ensuing threats. With the risks of emerging phenomena like the ‘internet of things’, ‘smart cities’, intelligent autonomous systems, and preemptive security, the responsibilities placed on chronically under-resourced civil society actors are greater than ever. This paper investigates the practices civil society actors and affiliated technical communities turn to in order to calculate and counter these emerging risks, using translations and boundary objects as an analytical lens to understand security in practice.

The paper draws upon my doctoral research, which bridges surveillance studies and STS approaches to the study of risk, security, and information infrastructures, including the work of Michel Callon and John Law (2005) on calculative practices and Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star on ‘boundary objects’ and ‘boundary infrastructures’(1989; 1999), with the work of critical data and critical security scholars such as Louise Amoore and Claudia Aradau.

The research is done through participant observation, document analysis, and extensive semi-structured interviewing, crossing national boundaries in order to trace transnational interactions. The paper draws upon document analysis of different risk and threat modeling frameworks, and data from interviews conducted with privacy engineers, human rights defenders, activists, and security industry professionals.

 

About 4S

The Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) is an international, nonprofit scholarly society founded in 1975. 4S fosters interdisciplinary and engaged scholarship in social studies of science, technology, and medicine (a field often referred to as STS). Membership in the society is open to anyone interested in understanding developments in science, technology, or medicine in relation to their social contexts.

[blog] Hopes and Fears at SHA2017

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 3.300 attendants, 100 gigabit (!) of bandwidth, 320 talks, mixed with lights, music, artifacts of all kind -and a fair amount of drinks- contributed to characterize the gathering as a concrete embodiment of the hackers’ ethos of ‘work&play’.

We had the chance to attend dozens of talks and debates; to participate in the activity of the Technopolitics village TSJA; to interview dozens of participants; to give our own talk on mailing list analysis; to engage in chats, activities, and drinks with plenty of people.

Eager to trigger discussion, we asked ourselves: with this great group of people, why not conduct a small informal survey in the evening hours, exploiting the generally relaxed atmosphere characterizing this moment of the day?

Assisted by a bottle of vodka (to lure into the discussion the more reluctant ;-), we walked around in order to harvest peoples’ “hopes and fears” related to the inexorable process of datafication. After Jonathan Gray, we understand datafication as “[a way] of seeing and engaging with the world by means of digital data” (2016). Its political relevance descends by the fact that “data can also actively participate in the shaping of the world around us” (ibid.). Activists, advocates, techies, hackers and interested citizens are more and more concerned both with the threats and the opportunities that the transformation of every aspect of reality into data brings along. What do people fear the most? What is (if any) their biggest hope?

It is interesting to notice that quite often people would at first have a puzzled reaction: ‘What do you exactly mean?’ and ‘isn’t there a neutral-answer option?’ were frequent instinctive responses. However, while not yet completely fleshed out for the purpose of a poll, the question worked well as a trigger for small discussion and, in many cases, people would then start to recognize quite some fears and hopes they bring, engaging in animated conversations with us.

The fears of SHA participants seem to circulate very much around the general topic of control, and that of prediction mechanisms in relation to algorithms. Pessimistic answers include the recognition that “[those] who control communication (infrastructure) control society”, denote a strict concern for “[people] predicting the wrong answer (or the wrong things)” and the fear “to be categorized” and a to experience a “lack of control over data collection”. The hopes, instead, largely insisted on how blockchain technologies, open data, and hacking might contribute to a more decentralized (and thus controllable-from-below) world.

It must be said that (quite unexpectedly), the hopes outnumbered the fears. To be fair, whereas blunt optimism doesn’t seem to find roots in this community, we have to register some hopeless reactions, as the one whose only hope is that we run out of metal on our planet (and whose fear is that the mining industry might outsource to Mars…).

Overall, the theme of (lack of) control over peoples’ own lives seems to be the red thread. Data (as Kranzberg’s law on technology reminds us) are not good nor bad in themselves -but neither neutral, since who, when, how, and for what purposes gain control over them determines their oppressive or liberating potential. In other words, ‘big data’ are political issues, and people at SHA are much aware of that.

To conclude, two methodological notes. The term ‘datafication’, despite sometimes obscure to the respondents and overly-general for the quite structured question, worked well as a floating signifier to trigger people into discussion about the topic. The vodka, instead, would have worked better with some orange juice next to it -lesson learned.

 

If you wanna look it up yourself, here is a transcript of both fears and hopes:

Fears on datafication:

  • who controls the communication (infrastructure) controls society
  • centralization will limit knowledge and sharing until control over the population is complete
    lack of control over data collection
  • fascism
  • even if algorithms are neutral, the data they work with are biased
  • to be categorized → filter bubble
  • predict the wrong answer (or the wrong things)
  • self-fulfilling prophecy as a service
  • advancement of face recognition techniques
  • people do not question algorithms
  • they start mining metals on Mars
  • genocide

Hopes on datafication:

  • we run out of metal atoms to share all the data
  • 42
  • blockchain as a technology of socialism
  • societies move in waves like everything in life. Future will require revolution
  • the democratization of mapping data
  • balancing power through open data
  • people learn to question algorithms like they do with politicians
  • new generations will be more aware and hack more
  • It will prove mankind is hopeless
  • helps with daily life
  • that the data is used to solve problems of society
  • it’s just a hype
  • they (doing it) notice they are themselves getting fucked by categorization and negative impact on their lives
  • decentralization through blockchain tech will give us the freedom to reclaim control over communication infrastructures

 

References

Gray, Jonathan (2016), “Datafication anddemocracy: Recalibrating digital information systems to address broader societal interests”, Juncture, Volume 23, ISSUE 3

‘Big Data y la Imaginación Sociológica’ in Bogotá, Colombia

On August 8, 2017, Stefania will give a talk at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia, with the title ‘Big Data y la Imaginación Sociológica. Estudio de datos, activismo de datos y periodismo de datos. Su importancia para los estudios en comunicación”. The event will take place at the Auditorio, Centro Ático, at 9am.

DATACTIVE at SHA2017

Many of the DATACTIVE people are attending SHA [Still Hacking Anyway], taking place from the 4th until the 8th of August in Zeewolde (NL). You can often find us hanging out around at the Technopolitics village.

About SHA 2017

SHA2017 is an international non-profit outdoor hacker camp/conference taking place in The Netherlands in 2017 on August 4th to 8th. It is the successor of a string of similar events happening every four years: GHP, HEU, HIP, HAL, WTH, HAR and OHM. Similar events are EMF 2016 in the UK, CCC Camp in Germany.

The camp is organized for and by volunteers from and around all facets of the international hacker community. Knowledge sharing, technological advancement, experimentation, connecting with your hacker peers and of course hacking are some of the core values of this event.

DATACTIVE presents ‘Big Data from the South: From media to mediations, from datafication to data activism’ (July 15)

big_data_south

DATACTIVE is proud to present ‘Big Data from the South/desde el Sur’, a one-day conference interrogating the mythology and universalism of datafication and big data from an epistemology of the South perspective. The event is co-organized with Emiliano Trerè (Scuola Normale Superiore), and sponsored by DATACTIVE with Fundacion Karisma (Bogotà, Colombia). Critical scholarship has exposed how big data brings along new and opaque regimes of population management, control, and discrimination. Building on this scholarship, the pre-conference engages in a dialogue with traditions that critique the dominance of Western approaches to datafication that do not recognize the diversity of the Global South. Moving from datafication to data activism, this event will examine the diverse ways through which citizens and the organized civil society in the Global South engage in bottom-up data practices for social change as well as resistance to “dark” uses of big data that increase oppression and inequality.

Special thanks go to Guillen Torres (DATACTIVE) and Carolina Botero (Fundacion Karisma) for the organizational support, to Amparo Cadavid (Uniminuto) and the local committee of IAMCR and Universidad Tecnological Bolivar for making the space available.

Check out the program, and stay tuned for the next steps in this exciting and much needed conversation.
Preliminary Program
Note: the asterisk denotes video presentations
 9:30 Welcome by Emiliano and Stefania
10:00 Panel 1: Big Data from the South: Case Studies and Experiences
+ Data Activism as an Ongoing Civic Enactive Critique on Big Data and Software User/Developer Divides. Offray Luna and Carlos Barrenche (mutabiT/HackBo, Javeriana University)
+ #NiUnaMenos: Data Activism from the Global South. Jean-Marie Chenou. Carolina Cepeda (Universidad de los Andes/Pontificia Universidad Javeriana)
+ Between Data Activism and Data Sovereignty: Contesting a Civic Internet at the Periphery and the Case of Brazil’s ‘Marco Civil da Internet’. Guy Hoskins (University of Toronto)
+ Data Activists Foster Accountability for the Haze-related Health Risk in Southeast Asia. Ana Berti Suman (Tilburg University) [*]
+ Big Data in Law Enforcement: An examination of use sentiment analysis in social media monitoring in India. Amber Sinha and Hans Verghese Mathews (The Centre for Internet and Society) [*]
12:00 Panel 2: Critical Perspectives
+ Consequences of Open Data and Transparency Policies in Brasil: How the Open Data Movement is Generating Inequality and Harnessing Citizen Privacy. Cristiana de Oliveira (State University of Campinas)
+ Los Datos o La vida. Jabobo Nájera, Paola Ricaurte, Jesús Robles (Enjambre Ditigal/Tecnológico de Monterrey)
+ [Big]Data, Power and the North-in-South: The Curious Case of Australia. Angela Daly and Monique Mann (Queensland University of Technology)  [*]
+ Fostering Awareness about Online Trackin in Media and Health Sectors. Towards a Cleaner Web-ecosystem. Claudio Agosti and Joana Varon (OTF/Coding Rights)
13:30 Lunch Break
14:30 Panel 3: Conceptual Work
+ Contributions to Think an “(Urban) Humanitarian Data Activism” from the South. Virginia Brussa (Universidad Nacional de Rosario)
+ Decolonizing Communication. Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejías (London School of Economics/State University of New York)
+ Technical Futures, Digital Memory and Networked Time at the Periphery. Anita Say Chan. (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
+ Tropicalizing Surveillance: How Big Data Policing “Migrated” from New York to São Paulo. Claudio Altenhain (Universität Hamburg/ELTE Budapest)
16:30 Panel 4: Interrogating Methods and Epistemologies
+ Who Will Pay for the Wall? Twitter, Donald Trump and Mexico: a Big Data Approach. María Elena Meneses, Alejandro Martín del Campo and Hector Rueda (Tecnológico de Monterrey)
+ Technopolitcs and Recent Global Social Movements in Spain and Portugal: Data, Activism and Epistemologies from the South. Jesus Sabariego, José Candón Mena and David Montero (Centro de Estudos Sociais, Portugal/Universidad de Sevilla, España)
+ Mixed Perspectives for the Analysis of Digital Cultural Objects: A Tour Around Mexico City in Instagram. Gabriela Sued and Paola Ricaurte (Tecnológico de Monterrey)
+ How Iranian Green Movement Activists Perceive and Respond to Online Repression. Ali Honari (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) – TBC
18:00 Conclusions
Drinks

DATACTIVE at the DMI Summer School 17 on the accessibility of open data portals

From the 3rd until the 7th of July, Guillen, Umberto, and Jeroen of the DATACTIVE team participated in the Digital Methods Initiative Summer School 2017. They conducted a one-week research around the question as to how to assess accessibility of government-facilitated open data portals. Just a glimpse of the final report (to be published soon on the DMI wiki):

“Open Data Portals are one of the main ways in which data users and data providers interact. The goal of this project was to identify mechanisms to assess the accessibility of Data Portals using Digital Methods. The project was particularly focused on tracing alternative voices to the ubiquitous celebration of Open Data, for two reasons: on the one hand, searching for contestation by both users and developers was considered as a good starting point to locate the shortcomings of Data Portals, and on the other, we were interested in identifying what elements of the critical discourse about the Open Data phenomenon (such as that built by Jo Bates) could be specifically connected to Data Portals.”

For more information, please find the presentation on the topic.

[blog] Big Data and Civil Society: Researching the researchers

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 the time, we worked on tracing social networks through leaked files, and I very much appreciated the methods they use, and the great care they put into privacy consideration when dealing with people’s data. For these reasons, when I got the opportunity to enroll in a research traineeship abroad as part of my PhD project, I decided to go back to Amsterdam.

My research activities within DATACTIVE focused primarily on monitoring and reviewing the scope of and methods used by other research lab dealing with big data and civil society. More specifically, the aim of this research was to try and understand in which way DATACTIVE can learn from the research projects in question. This task lies at the exact intersection of the DATACTIVE research goals and my own skills and interests. My background bridges across political communication and Big Data: I completed a master in Big Data Analytics & Social Mining at the University of Pisa only some weeks before traveling to Amsterdam.

I analyzed about 23 projects from seven research labs, exploring a multitude of interesting methodologies and theoretical frameworks. It was sometimes challenging for me to deal with the many different aims, methods, and point of views represented in these different projects, but I had the possibility to familiarize myself with tools and methods used in other research labs. In what follows, I provide an overview of the most interesting findings, however hard it might be to do justice to all of them!

What have I studied?

1. Thanks to the Share Lab projects (The Share Foundation located in Serbia) I learned about the importance of meta-data, and how detailed information about people can be retrieved just exploring fragments of data, like mail headers or browsing internet histories (Metadata Investigation: Inside Hacking Team, Browsing Histories: Metadata Explorations).

2. Another research from Share Lab showed how Facebook algorithms work to match people with ads (Human Data Banks and Algorithmic Labour), and how an electoral campaign can be manipulated and dominated on the web (Mapping and quantifying political information warfare).

3. Analyzing projects developed with the CorText platform (set up by LISIS a research project located at Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée in Paris) showed how text can be elaborated upon in a free and easy way to perform a more complex analysis. It can do for instance semantic networks analysis in a bunch of scientific articles (Textdrill), topic extraction and clusterization from newspaper articles (Pulseweb), or geographical clusterization through text analysis (GeoClust).

4. Forensic Architecture (Goldsmiths, University of London) exemplifies how videos, photos, interviews and other kind of (social) data retrieved on the web, could be useful to reconstruct the “truth” in hard-to-reach war scenarios such as the Al-Jinah Mosque case (in which they performed an architectural analysis of a building destroyed in a US Airstrike in Syria on March 16th 2016), MSF Supported Hospital (in which researchers, asked by MSF, tried to understand which national air force, between Russian or Syrian, carried the airstrike), and Rafah: Black Friday in which Forensic collaborated with Amnesty International to reconstruct war operations in Gaza during 1-4 August 2014. It was emotionally challenging to read the reports while keeping an academic distance. This was the case, for instance, in the reconstruction of “the left to die boat” case, a vessel left to drift in the middle of the Mediterranean sea in which sixty-three migrants (seventy-two in total) lost their lives, or the report on what happens in the Saydnaya prison in Syria in which witnesses reported abuses and tortures. These are only some examples of what I encountered during my research.

But this was not a solitary research endeavor. Being involved in all the DATACTIVE discussions, meetings, conferences, and reading groups over the period of three months shed new light on qualitative research in context of “data activism”. For example, we discussed how to code activists’ interviews in terms of research aims and coding methods.

Thanks to the DATACTIVE experience and to the analysis of some projects (i.e. The Snowden Disclosures, Technical Standards, and the Making of Surveillance Infrastructures, Marginalisation, Activism and the Flip Sides of Digital Technologies), I better learned the importance to take care of personal data, and pay more attention to the multiple sides of technologies, which we often take as a black box. I have also reflected extensively on how digital technologies could be of help to a broad range of research activities, starting from simple tasks to perform complex “counter” analysis that allows understanding how the global financial system works (Corpnet, University of Amsterdam) or how a more equal and collaborative economy could be developed (Dimmons, Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, Open University of Catalonia). I am also convinced that all these research and outputs should be known and shared also beyond academia, not only among scholars, for their ability to speak to the world we live in.

I think that the experience and knowledge gained in this research traineeship will definitely add up to my PhD work: entering such a huge field of research has indeed broadened my own perspective on political communication and Big Data. Finally, I really appreciated being part of the DATACTIVE research team and being exposed to their collaborative way of working, and I really enjoyed the cultural and life experience in. I hope to come back.

See you soon.

about Antonio Martella

Antonio is a PhD student at the Political Science Department of the University of Pisa. His research project is focused on political leaders, populism, and social media. He graduated in Business communication and human resource policy and has a postgraduate master in “Big Data Analytics & Social Mining” by the University of Pisa along with the CNR of Pisa.

Featured image: Edward Snoweden WIRED magazine cover on news stand 8/2014 by Mike Mozart of TheToyChannel

Lonneke contributing to the Tertium project in the Volkskrant

On the 17th of June Lonneke contributed to the ‘Oplossers’ (‘solutioners’) series in the Volkskrant which is a Dutch journalistic project by Tertium in which scientistst are asked to reflect upon contemporary societal issues. The question was about ways for democratising the internet. In her piece, she suggested several interventions around alternative data infrastructures.