team – DATACTIVE

Our team

Stefania Milan

Stefania Milan is Associate Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and the Principal Investigator of the DATACTIVE project. Read more here & here. Follow Stefania on Twitter: @annliffey | email

Lonneke van der Velden

Lonneke van der Velden is a lecturer at the department of media studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her research deals with conceptualisations of internet surveillance and internet activism. She is also on the Board of Directors of Bits of Freedom. Keywords: internet surveillance, activism, open source intelligence, Science & Technology Studies | email

Davide Beraldo

Davide Beraldo is postdoc researcher at DATACTIVE and ALEX. He is currently working on investigating the effects of algorithmic mediation; understanding data activism from a social movement perspective; developing a methodology for the study of mailing list archives. Keywords: social movements, digital sociology, computational methods, algorithms, network analysis, complexity | email

Niels ten Oever

Niels ten Oever has designed and implemented freedom of expression projects in the Horn of Africa, the Middle East and Northern Africa, Brazil and Afghanistan and worked on global internet governance issues in ICANN and the IETF. Read more here. Follow Niels on Twitter: @conflictmedia. Keywords: digital civil-society, tactics, Internet imaginaries | email

Kersti Ruth Wissenbach

Kersti is an independent senior communication and policy consultant in the field of inclusive governance. She has been working on the intersection of technologies, communication and political change since the early 2000s. At DATACTIVE she researches community dynamics within the transnational civic tech community, with a focus on power dynamics related to the role technology in political participation.Keywords: civic tech, social movements, collective identity, power. | email

Becky Kazansky

Becky is a PhD candidate with the DATACTIVE project at the University of Amsterdam. She has a masters in Interactive Telecommunications from NYU, and was previously Lead Programme Researcher and a digital security trainer with Tactical Technology Collective. Keywords: privacy, cybersecurity, resistance, surveillance, data ethics, science and technology studies. Twitter: @pondswimmer. Read more here. | email

Guillén Torres

Guillén joined DATACTIVE to develop a project on how data mediates the interaction between organised citizens and the state. He has a background in Urban Studies and Sociology, and is a recidivist Actor-Network Theory enthusiast. Previously he worked for Control Your Government, a Mexican NGO focusing on Public Sector Information. | email

Jeroen de Vos

Jeroen de Vos is project manager at the University of Amsterdam. His work moves in between entrepreneurship and activism, and he employs both internet and market research methods to develop ideas, products and research. He graduated from the Research Masters Media Studies, and is currently involved in research both in- and outside university walls | email

Claudio Agosti

Claudio Agosti is a self-taught technician in digital security. Gradually with the political importance acquired by the internet, Claudio moved from the corporate security services in Human Rights in the digital sphere. Currently dedicated to the algorithm influence on the society. Keyword: cryptography, networking, challenge-the-monopolist, open data. My unnecessary internet-capitalism-bond on Twitter: @_vecna

Sander van Haperen

Sander van Haperen is postdoc fellow at DATACTIVE. He studies the development of social movements, with a particular interest in leadership, governance, and digital networks. His research advances computational methods, drawing on social media, complexity, and network analysis, as well as qualitative inquiry. Keywords: social movements; social media; governance; networks; computational methods.

Zhen Ye

Zhen Ye is a student assistant at DATACTIVE. She is currently enrolled in Media Studies as a Research Master student at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests focus on (gendered) digital labour on social media platforms. Keywords: platform studies, digital labour, cyberfeminism.

Tomás Dodds

Tomás is a PhD researcher at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. His research is concerned with how newsmakers are appropriating digital technologies and how these innovations are transforming the infrastructure, temporality and form of the newsmaking process. Keywords: journalism studies, media practices, digital technologies.

Former team members

Frederike Kaltheuner

Frederike Kaltheuner is a PhD researcher with the DATACTIVE project at the University of Amsterdam. She holds an MSc from the University of Oxford, is a 2016 Transatlantic Digital Fellow and also works as a technology reporter. Twitter @fre8de8rike More here. Keywords: knowledge, algorithms, predictive analytics, ethics

Jonathan Gray

Jonathan’s research focuses on the politics of open data and public information. In addition to his role on the project, he is Director of Policy and Research at Open Knowledge. More about him can be found at jonathangray.org and he is on Twitter at @jwyg. Keywords: open data, public data, public information, data infrastructures, STS

Mahsa Alimardani

Mahsa has been doing research and work on Internet controls, policies and digital security in Iran for the past 4 years. She is currently finishing her Research Masters degree in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam while doing research with DATACTIVE. She is also the Iran editor for Global Voices. Follow her @maasalan. More here. Keywords: censorship, digital security, MENA social movements, information controls

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. Keywords: populism, political leaders, social media, big data.

Lara AlMalakeh

Lara AlMalakeh has finished a masters in Comparative Cultural Analysis from the UvA with a special focus on documentaries of the Syrian conflict. She received a postgraduate in Theory and Practice of Translation from City University London and a Bachelor in Fine Arts from Damascus University. She is an Arabic editor in Global Voices, and her interests include human rights, digital rights, equity in technological representation and youth awareness on digital exposure.

Umberto Boschi

Umberto Boschi is currently enrolled in New Media and Digital Culture at the Utrecht University as a MA student. He has a BA in Philosophy from the University of Pisa. His research interests vary from Blockchain technologies to the imaginary of Open Data. You can contact him at u.boschi(at)students.uu.nl or find him on twitter: @vmbrt

Fabien Cante

Fabien is interested in media as contested infrastructures of city life. His PhD work was grounded in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire; he hopes to continue asking what datafication means in an African metropolis. In addition to academic work, Fabien is comms officer for the Migrants’ Rights Network and active in neighbourhood struggles in South London. Keywords: media infrastructures, power, race, informality.

Tu Quynh Hoang

Tu Quynh Hoang is currently studying towards a Research MA in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests include cybersecurity, digital publics and their infrastructures. Keywords: open data, media infrastructures, digital governance. Contact: mail[at]tuquynhhoang[dot]com

Sérgio Barbosa

Sérgio Barbosa is a PhD Candidate in “Democracy in Twenty-First Century” at the University of Coimbra and currently an Erasmus+ Student at the University of Amsterdam. His research explores the role of WhatsApp for activism and social mobilization and focuses mainly on the following subjects: Digital Activism, Political Participation, Resistance, WhatsApp. With DATACTIVE, he is working on a project of the ethical guidelines to research WhatsApp groups.

Sophie Toupin

Sophie Toupin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. Her research examines the relationship between communication technologies and revolutionary movements in the context of African liberation struggles. Some of her publications can be found here: https://mcgill.academia.edu/SophieToupin Keywords:Infrastructure,Resistance,Decolonial Feminism,Revolutionary Communication.

Salvatore Romano

Salvatore is our new Erasmus intern, he is in his final year of the Social Psychology master at the University of Padova in Italy. He is interested in the social effects of negative political campaigns and aims to combine both machine learning and natural learning processes for research purposes.

Research Associates

Sebastian Benthall

Sebastian is a Core Developer of BigBang, an open source toolkit for studying communications data built on Scientific Python. He has a B.A. Cognitive Science from Brown University, is a PhD Candidate at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Information, is Research Fellow at both the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech and the New York University, where he studies how large-scale data collection systems can be engineered to preserve personal privacy.

Silvia Semenzin

Silvia Semenzin is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Milan. She is currently researching hacktivism and hacker ethics and is interested in the influence that digital technologies have on political action, public debate and citizens’ mobilization as instruments for democracy.

Miren Gutiérrez

Passionate about human rights, journalism and the environment (with a weakness for fish), and optimistic about what can be done with data-based research, knowledge and communication. Prof. at the University of Deusto and Research Associate at the Overseas Development Institute. @gutierrezmiren. Keywords: data activism, human rights, enviroment, climate change

Hisham Almiraat

Hisham Almiraat is the founder of the Digital Rights Association, Morocco and former Advocacy Director at Global Voices. He has written extensively about human rights issues in the MENA region. His work covers issues of freedom of expression and privacy rights. Twitter @almiraat Keywords: mass surveillance, interception, psychological impacts, privacy

Corinne Cath

Corinne J.N. Cath recently graduated from the Oxford Internet Institute as an MSc student. She has a BA in anthropology and an MA in International relations from the University of Utrecht. Her research focuses on the (im)possibility of instantiating human rights principles in Internet standards and protocols. Read more here.

Vidushi Marda

Vidushi’s research focuses on internet governance, human rights and the ethics and regulation of algorithmic decision making. With DATACTIVE, she is working on a project to study content regulation by internet platforms. A lawyer by training, she graduated with a B.A., LL.B (Hons.) degree in 2015.

Vasilis Ververis

Vasilis Ververis is a PhD candidate with the Humboldt University of Berlin. It researches the technical implications of Internet blocking infrastructure and works to reclaim self-hosted technical infrastructures and services, censorship circumvention, anonymity and antisocial media. You can reach it in an off-line occurrence or via old-school email communication. Contact: andz [at] torproject [dot] org with fingerprint.