Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - DATACTIVE (Data activism: The politics of big data according to civil society)

Teaser

\"With the progressive datafication of many aspects of social life, citizens become increasingly aware of the critical role of information in modern societies. While the business community and public administrations have long acknowledged the value of the so-called \"\"big data\"\"...

Summary

\"With the progressive datafication of many aspects of social life, citizens become increasingly aware of the critical role of information in modern societies. While the business community and public administrations have long acknowledged the value of the so-called \"\"big data\"\" for their activities, the organized civil society—that is to say the domain of human action outside the realms of the state and the market—has only recently started to reflect on and act upon the challenges and advantages of datafication for its own endeavors and goals.

DATACTIVE explores the politics of datafication from the perspective of the organized civil society, adopting the notion of \'data activism\' as a heuristic tool. Data activism embraces the broad spectrum of novel socio-technical practices and nascent grassroots mobilizations that take a critical stance towards big data and massive data collection. It emerges from the hacker and open software sub-cultures, but gradually involve ordinary users, signaling a change in perspective and attitude towards datafication emerging within the citizenry at large. While some people consider massive data collection by governments and the industry as a challenge to civil liberties and human rights, others avidly explore and exploit the new opportunities for civic engagement and collective action that come along with the increased availability of data.

DATACTIVE addresses three broad research questions: How do citizens resist massive data collection by means of, e.g., technical fixes (“reactive data activism”)? How do social movements use big data to foster social change (“proactive data activism”)? How does data activism affect the dynamics of the transnational civil society? Proactive and reactive data activism represent two facets of the same phenomenon, namely citizens’ reaction to the fundamental paradigm shift brought about by datafication and its consequences for the organization of social life. Data activism practices and tools are variably positioned in the proactive-reactive continuum.

DATACTIVE contributes to the emerging interdisciplinary field of critical data studies. It relies on a multidisciplinary conceptual framework integrating the social sciences (in particular social movement studies, digital sociology, governance studies, surveillance studies and critical security studies) with media studies and science and technology studies. Empirical data collection combines qualitative methods (e.g., in-depth interviews, field observations, infrastructure ethnography) and computational methods developed specifically for the purpose (e.g., data mining in mailing-lists and online repositories). DATACTIVE sub-projects include a critical look at forms of institutional resistance to open data policies, the emergence of civic tech networks, security practices within human rights organizations, the governance of data flows in relation to internet infrastructure, open source intelligence practices, and the evolution of digital activism in times of big data and artificial intelligence.

With a focus on civic engagement, citizen practices, and activism, this research contributes to reflect on the future of digital democracy vis-à-vis datafication and massive data collection, and analyzes the epistemological and ontological consequences these embody for the organization of democratic societies. It is ground-breaking in four ways: 1) by analyzing civil society’s engagement with massive data collection, it evaluates risks and promises of datafication and big data; 2) by addressing an uncharted but rapidly growing field of human action, it sets the basis for understanding the future of civic engagement an digital democracy; 3) by integrating adjacent disciplines that seldom interact, it magnifies their ability to understand the interplay between society, information, technology and power; 4) by developing dedicated data collection tools, it adds to methodological innovation in big-data analyti\"

Work performed

\"THE GROUNDWORK. In Year 1 In Year 1 the PI established an interdisciplinary team initially composed of four PhD students (two of whom externally funded), two postdoctoral fellows, and a research assistant, as well as a 20-member Advisory Board and an Ethics Board (see https://data-activism.net/people/). The team laid down the conceptual and methodological framework integrating distinct disciplines. The modular interview questionnaire for in-depth interviewing and the codebook for data analysis were designed through a participatory process aimed at embodying different disciplinary perspectives. A detailed ethical guide to qualitative and quantitative data gathering details, e.g., how to approach and interact with interviewees in a privacy-aware manner, how to securely community internally and store data. Three Working Papers describe the conceptual, methodological and ethical tenets of the project.

SECURE COMMUNICATION/RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE. In Years 1-2, A secure, privacy-aware infrastructure has been set up for DATACTIVE. Among others, said infrastructure includes secure cloud space for data storage; five mailing lists and individual e-mail accounts for team members on the project’s own domain; a password-protected Etherpad for collaboratively producing and editing documents in real-time. The entire is managed by DATACTIVE and hosted in dedicated VPSs run by a local privacy-aware small enterprise.

CODE DEVELOPMENT. In Years 2-3, the team invested in devising and developing computational methods, in view of exploiting for data collection the ways in which the web affords specific patterns of information creation and distribution. To this end, the team collaborates with external developers. Currently the team is contributing to the development of two software: BigBang, a Python-based open-source toolkit for the analysis of online collaborative communities and their communication practices (https://github.com/datactive/bigbang), and Facebook.tracking.exposed (fbtrex), a browser plug-in for investigating the effects of personalization algorithms on social media, taking Facebook as an example. Oriented to both researchers and users, who can thus investigate their “information diet”, fbtrex represents an instance of “data activism in practice”.

DATA COLLECTION. In the first half of the project, ~125 interviews (out of a total of 250) have been conducted with activists, human rights defenders, NGO workers, software developers, hackers, policy advocates and ordinary citizens. Participant observation targeted activist events like the Chaos Communication Congress 2016 (Hamburg, Germany, December 2016), RightsCon (Brussels, March 2017), the Internet Freedom Festival (Valencia, March 2017 and 2018), the hacker gathering Still Hacking Anyway (July 2017), and a number of data activism activities (e.g. trainings, knowledge sharing workshops), access to which was negotiated with organizers and participants from time to time. Infrastructure ethnography focused on a set of tools and interfaces designed by the digital rights community to support citizen resistance to surveillance and massive data collection (e.g., the operating system Qubes). Document analysis has targeted both commercial and activist material on, e.g., security strategies and threat modelling. Testing BigBang prior to the ethical review of the software, the team analyzed a selection of publicly archived mailing lists of the internet governance community. Other sub-projects employing digital methods include critical analysis and visualization of the Transparency Toolkit Scraping/data mining intelligence project; an investigation of the evolution and sustainability of digital security tools, particularly open-source encrypted chat apps; the mapping of the \"\"civic tech\"\" community\'s presence on social media.

DISSEMINATION. The project website (https://data-activism.net) was launched on October 8, 2015. The Twitter account (@data_ctive), set up as early as April 20\"

Final results

\"Focusing on civic engagement, activism and participatory governance, DATACTIVE explores the future of digital democracy as it evolves under the pressures and uncertainties of datafication and massive data collection. It goes beyond the state of the art in at least four instances:

1. By analyzing people\'s reaction to and engagement with datafication as well as the epistemological and ontological consequences of datafication on the organization of social life, DATACTIVE contributes to critically assess the risks and promises of datafication and big data for contemporary societies, and for the organization of representative democracies in particular. It adds to the body of empirical data available to the research community and ultimately contributes to theory development.
2. By addressing an underexplored but rapidly growing field of human activity at the crossroads of the social, the informational and the technological, DATACTIVE sets the basis for the understanding of the future of civic engagement as technology, data, and data analysis and visualization techniques progressively move to the core of citizen participation.
3. By integrating adjacent disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities that seldom interact (e.g., sociology of social movements with science and technology studies), DATACTIVE magnifies their ability to understand the interplay between society, information, technology and power.
4. By developing dedicated data collection and analysis tools and sharing the resulting open-source software with the broader research and activist communities, it adds to methodological innovation in big-data analytics.

In addition, the wider societal implications of DATACTIVE include the following:

1. DATACTIVE contributes to the self-reflexivity of activists and civil society organizations engaged in data activism by involving them in the research cycle, by sharing data, and by providing open-source software that said organizations can also use to better understand their own activities and the society where they intervene.
2. Turning research data into points of intervention, DATACTIVE actively contributes to shape the public debate on digital rights and risks in the Netherlands and beyond, by sharing research findings with the general public and delivering talks for a popular audience, interacting with the media, and collaborating with civil society groups on the ground.
3. By explicitly bringing the team and the research in dialogue with society at large and governance institutions, and by practicing \"\"engaged research\"\" (an approach to social inquiry that, without departing from evidence-based social science research, aims at making a difference for disempowered communities beyond academia), DATACTIVE contributes to rethink the role of research and research institutions in society.
4. By implementing horizontal, participatory and collaborative working dynamics in its day-to-day activities and in its interaction with both academia and the research subjects, DATACTIVE contributes to transform the hierarchical dynamics of contemporary academia, engaging in a prefigurative exercise that reforms research institutions \"\"by doing\"\".


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Website & more info

More info: https://data-activism.net.