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DATACTIVE takes part in the launch of the Data Justice Lab at Cardiff University

Stefania Milan will represent DATACTIVE in the launch of the Data Justice Lab at the Cardiff University on the 17th of March 2017. More info, and a profile of the lab below:

Our financial transactions, communications, movements, relationships, and interactions with government and corporations all increasingly generate data that are used to profile and sort groups and individuals. These processes can affect both individuals as well as entire communities that may be denied services and access to opportunities, or wrongfully targeted and exploited. In short, they impact on our ability to participate in society. The emergence of this data paradigm therefore introduces a particular set of power dynamics requiring investigation and critique.

The Data Justice Lab is a new space for research and collaboration at Cardiff University that has been established to examine the relationship between datafication and social justice. With this launch event, we ask: What does social justice mean in age of datafication? How are data-driven processes impacting on certain communities? In what way does big data change our understanding of governance and politics? And what can we do about it? The Lab seeks to advance a research agenda that examines the intricate relationship between datafication and social justice, highlighting the politics and impacts of data-driven processes and big data. The lab is directed by Dr Lina Dencik, Dr Arne Hintz, and Dr Joanna Redden.

Becky Kazansky at IFF

Becky Kazansky is currently attending the Internet Freedom Festival in Spain, The Global Unconference of the Internet Freedom Communities. One can follow her adventures on Twitter.

About the Internet Freedom Festival

Since its beginning as the Circumvention Tech Festival in 2015, the Internet Freedom Festival (IFF) has grown into one of the largest, most diverse and inclusive gatherings in the Internet Freedom community.

Challenges to digital rights and online freedom expression have increased in reach and complexity, and so have the communities of practice which have grown and organized to address them. As the evolving Internet Freedom space explores and defines an identity as a community, several realities have become clear:

1. Online threats to human rights and freedom of expression affect us all
These issues have grown in sophistication and scope, with more and more closing spaces for open discussion of these obstacles both online and offline.

2. Networks of practice who address these threats are stronger now than ever before
So is the need to bring these networks together to learn from each other’s experience, to organize collective efforts that are more inclusive and better coordinated.

3. Opportunities for participants to set the agenda are few and far between
More often than not, participants in Internet Freedom community events must find space within a ready-built agenda to have the conversations they want, and need, to have.

4. Diversity of voice is fundamental to the health of a community.
A community with a truly comprehensive grasp of the complex challenges it faces is
possible only through inclusion of all voices – especially those typically underrepresented.

DATACTIVE lecture series: Elizabeth Losh

 

We are happy to announce that Elizabeth Losh will present on gender and technology in the discourse surrounding Hillary Clinton’s email scandal as part of DATACTIVE Speaker’s Series and in collaboration with the DMI’s data sprint. Please find the outline and bio below.

Date: 8 March, 15.30 – 17.00 in OMHP C0.17

 

I Did Not Have Text with that Server: 
Gender, Technology, and Digital Literacy in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Campaign

This presentation argues that the rhetoric surrounding failed U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s 2016 email scandals can be understood as a consequence of a particular confluence of gender and technology in which excessive digital privacy is represented as a feminized user choice and calls for digital transparency are presented in terms of masculinist norms. Using techniques from discourse analysis and the theoretical framework of feminist technology studies, Losh analyzes materials in the @realDonaldTrump Twitter archive, the Fox News website, the WikiLeaks database that indexes hacked emails from Hillary Clinton and John Pedestal, and FBI documents from the agency’s website. Additionally, it references visual culture depicting Clinton as a user of personal mobile devices in public places, where she is shown as a secretive technology user claiming privacy in the public sphere, and popular Internet memes that associated her email conduct with sexual impropriety and dishonesty about a lack of digital purity. This talk explores how a political official’s relationships to non-human servers, peripherals, and portable devices could be perceived of as potentially threatening to the sexual order and by extension threatening to political sovereignty.

Bio:
Elizabeth Losh is an Associate Professor of English and American Studies at William and Mary with a specialization in New Media Ecologies. Before coming to William and Mary, she directed the Culture, Art, and Technology Program at the University of California, San Diego. She is a core member and former co-facilitator of the feminist technology collective FemTechNet, which offers a Distributed Open Collaborative Course and part of the international organizing team of The Selfie Course.

She is the is the author of Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (MIT Press, 2009) and The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University (MIT Press, 2014). She is the co-author of the comic book textbook Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013) with Jonathan Alexander.

Talk with Stefaan Verhulst @NYU (GovLab) in March

The 2nd of March, we will have the opportunity to meet with Stefaan Verhulst, Co-Founder and Chief Research and Development Officer of the Governance Laboratory. Verhulst’s latest scholarship centers on how technology can improve people’s lives and the creation of more effective and collaborative forms of governance. Discussion topics might include:

Data Responsibility: How data originally collected for private purposes was exchanged for public ends: an act of data responsibility.

Data Collaboratives: Data Collaboratives are a new form of collaboration, beyond the public-private partnership model, in which participants from different sectors — in particular companies -  exchange their data to create public value.

 

bio

Stefaan G. Verhulst is Co-Founder and Chief Research and Development Officer of the Governance Laboratory @NYU (GovLab) where he is responsible for building a research foundation on how to transform governance using advances in science and technology. Specifically, he is interested in the perils and promise of collaborative technologies and how to harness the unprecedented volume of information to advance the public good.

Interview with Stefania Milan @CanalEuropa

Stefania Milan, PI of DATACTIVE, has been interviewed by Miren Gutiérrez as part of the Canal Europa live series. In this short lecture meeting, she introduces DATACTIVISM and the way in which research can question the role of big data in popular narratives. Originally aired February 7th, the entire interview can be watched on Canal Europa.

Canal Europa is proposed as an open space for the spreading of knowledge. A meeting point for artists, writers, scientists, and professionals in fields such as economy, medicine or political sciences, providing us with their knowledge, their reflections, the routes and the goals of their creativity.

[blog] Taking a look at institutional resistance to citizen empowerment

By 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 government data from U.S. institutions. In the comments section of ProPublica’s website, a reader captured the general feeling of the article as follows:

“To summarize: byzantine internal processes governed by antiquated laws operate with insufficient resources and no sense of urgency or accountability, and are shepherded by sometimes incompetent or dishonest public servants to produce documents that often have self-serving redactions or outright denials (sic)”.

This grim picture of the U.S. Government’s openness -with recent concerns related not only to Trump, but also Obama– is not an isolated case, unfortunately. Around the world, other governments have been accused by journalists and activists of discursively pushing openness forward, despite effectively making the use of government data difficult. For example, the Mexican government takes pride in having one of the most advanced transparency legislations, yet is currently discussing a new General Archives Law that will leave in the discretional and unaccountable hands of the Ministry of Interior the decision of what information should be preserved, and hence what data exists to be accessed. Moreover, the federal government is still struggling to make a buggy National Transparency Platform work, almost a year after it was presented as the main tool to guarantee Mexican citizens’ right to information. In the opposite side of the world, India’s recent public consultation to draft its License for Open Data use ended with a blatant disregard of the advice given by citizens, producing a regulation that does not offer any warranty against errors or omissions in the data held by the government, and transfers the liability for misuse to the citizens (instead of the data controller).

These examples point to the existence of a reactive process to citizen empowerment, in which some governments have found institutional ways to resist civil society’s access to data, hindering its ability to influence political processes. The research I will be conducting within the DATACTIVE project aims to locate empirically and frame theoretically this institutional reaction to citizen empowerment, to describe how it influences the configuration of the power relation between the State and citizens, and more broadly, how it affects the practice of data activism. To do so, I will start with a question originating in my own experience as an activist in Mexico: what if institutional resistance to public use of data is a political strategy, instead of the result of non-political flaws in the regulation related to Government Data?

By not taking for granted the State’s compromise to openness, I will explore whether the sociomaterial practices related to the production, dissemination and use of Government Data might make possible not only the empowerment of citizens, but also the State’s monopoly over some political issues which, according to the ideals of modern democracy, should be subject of collective discussion. The point of departure will be the work of proactive data activists who, while looking to mobilise Government Data to strengthen their attempts to influence public policy or oversee governmental action, have struggled to get the information they seek. In a second stage, I will look at how institutional actors deploy their resistance strategies, tracing the regulatory and material components involved in the process. Finally, I will develop a similar analysis over the strategies used by activists to counter institutional resistance. In the process, I hope to contribute to the study of the role played by data in configuring the power relation between citizens and the State in the age of Open Government, as well as helping to identify (and ideally produce) formal and informal mechanisms that activists can implement to keep rogue institutions under citizen control.

I am always interested in hearing about instances where public institutions do not follow through on their claims of making data effectively open and accessible to interested activists. If you have any examples or experiences, please drop me a line: guillen@data-activism.net

Report: Contentious Data and the Politics of Big Data for Activism

We are very happy to announce that the report from our September ‘Contentious Data’ workshop is ready for publication and circulation. The report is included below or can be downloaded here. Text continues below the report.

With special thanks all speakers, including Sandra Braman (Texas A&M University), Alison Powell (London School of Economics), Hisham al-Miraat (Digital Rights Morocco), Linnet Taylor (Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society), Dorien Zandbergen (University of Amsterdam), Jaromil/Denis Rojo (dyne.org), Geert Lovink (Institute for Network Cultures), and Stefania Milan (DATACTIVE Principle Investigator).

 

DATACTIVE_report_Contentious_Data

 

Contentious Data brings together scholars and practitioners to explore the politics of big data from the perspective of activism and civil society.

Contentious Data is sponsored by the European Research Council (ERC), the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies (ACGS), the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA), and the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR).

 

 

 

 

 

Meeting with Federico M. Rossi

Yesterday we had the honour to meet with Federico M. Rossi, Latin America expert with a particular research interest focus on the relational study of social movements – state dynamics, and on the historical analysis of strategy-making. He paid us a visit as part of his book tour through the Netherlands.

bio

Federico M. Rossi is a Research-Professor of CONICET at the School of Politics and Government of the National University of San Martín. Rossi received his PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. His work has been published in more than fifteen edited volumes, in Latin American Politics and Society, Latin American Perspectives, Social Movement Studies, Mobilization, International Sociology, Desarrollo Económico, and in América Latina Hoy, among others. He is the author of The Poor’s Struggle for Political Incorporation: The Piquetero Movement in Argentina (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and coeditor with Marisa von Bülow of Social Movement Dynamics: New Perspectives on Theory and Research from Latin America (Routledge-Mobilization Series, 2015).

Visiting scholar Dağhan Irak

For the second week of January, we have Dağhan Irak visiting us. He is here to acquire methodological knowledge on the use of data activism in new social movements around the world and share his own findings during his research on the issue. Moreover, he is currently advancing the paper titled: ““Can you spot a party-state on Twitter?” An exploratory study on Turkey’s AKP and its state apparatuses”.

bio
Dağhan Irak is affiliated with the University of Strasbourg. After having received his undergraduate degree in journalism, and Master’s degree in history, he worked as a journalist and a political social media analyst. He has currently been conducting a doctoral research on the online politicisation of football fans in Istanbul, using DMI-TCAT for data collection and Social Network Analysis. Irak has also published indexed articles and book chapters on the use of SNA to detect political polarisation and media concentration. His research interests are digital sociology, sociopolitics of media and sociology of sports.