title: "Civic Media & Data (h)ac(k)tivism: Environments, tools and practices for critical data+code literacy and visualization" author: - name: Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas affiliation: mutabiT / HackBo / University of Caldas email: offray@mutabit.com date: March 10 2017 abstract: > A responsible data-driven environment must consider data as a political human construct, and must be a space for empowering citizens. One important aspect of the notion of citizen empowerment involves prototyping of tools and practices
that may challenge hierarchies, by blurring binary constructs like author / lector, developer / user, document / data, binary aplication / source code. On this line of thought, a set of tools and practices will be described that look at data from a critical perspective, contrasting the neutralized "Hello world" approach to technology learning, and allowing the emergence of diverse communities of authorship. The tools blend code, document, data, query and visuals, and propose strategies to make the source code and history of all digital artifacts open to share, in order to improve the traceability of data and data derived arguments . I call them "pocket infrastructures" because they are self-contained, work online and offline and run on modest common technologies, from USB thumb drives to modest laptops and anything in between and beyond. These infrastructures try to put data in "everyone's pocket”, contrasting sharply the exclusionary ‘cloud’, ‘big data’ & ‘always connected’ discourses, where infrastructure can be owned only by the ones with "deep pockets".

This tool and its related practices are in dialog with other approaches like the feminist data visualization [@dignazio_feminist_2016], literate computing[@perez_project_2015] and reproducible research. keywords: data activism, data visualization, pocket infrastructures, moldable tools, data storytelling, reproducible research. ...

Reciprocal change between communities and digital artifacts: design as critical enactive knowledge

"How we can change the digital tools that change us?" or how to enable the reciprocal modifications between digital tools and communities? Approaching that fuzzy problem from a design research perspective implied to inhabit a particular community, in my case, HackBo in Bogotá Colombia, and to use prototypes to explore and communicate the problem [@saikaly_fatina_approaches_2005]. Because the direct relationship between design epistemologies and enactive knowledge (understanding by doing in a context), this text will present a historic development of that understanding process puting it into dialogue with other teorethical approaches (design research as a reflexive pratice). This reflexive trace of the history hopefuly would bring light on this kind of contextual research by deneutralizing the results and connecting them with the process that create them. At the end some provocations will be provided to connect this particular experiences with others show in the panel related with bio-creation, data and power.

Exploring the community meant to proprose from inside a set of iterative digital artifacts and practices around them to look if they allow to deconstruct the binary divide between those who made them ("coders") and those who use them ("end users"). and if such deconstruction made sense in a hackerspace, where most where, at least familiar, and mostly were proficient with coding.

At the beginning (from late 2010 to early 2013) I started trying to build digital habitats[@wenger_digital_2012] by using web technology (wiki and customized Content Management Systems CMS), but HackBo community approach to them was mostly operational: the most used feature of the CMS was the one that allows to schedule face to face activities in the hackerspace. Some other paralle explorations about using CMS to publish data notebooks were made at from 2013 to early 2014 with some participants of the hackerspace [@luna_publicaciones_2014][@luna_indie_2014]

But at some point at late 2013 the HackBo hackerspace was a focal point of resistance against gentrification of the hackathon (a prototyping by coding marathon) by the private and public sectors, with the implementation of the now commmon and oversimplifying "social problem solving hackathon" [@lilly_irani_hackathons_nodate] the HackathonGEL. The propossal of a counter-hackathon (the Gobernaton [@luna_gobernaton:_2013]) put the hackathon as a performatic act of civic critic and dialogue with public and private sectors and from there the idea of telling stories with data (particularly the integrity codes called hashes, of the contracts for the execution of the HackathonGEL), bringed some light over this alternative ways of data activism and the idea of a way of telling stories that could survive the volatility of hackathon prototypes. Techniques, infrastructures and knowledges to support data storytelling as a form of critic dialogue to deconstruct reconstruct power will last longer that the "app" or "social network" or "uber for" monocultural approach that has been build in the "social innovation" hackathons.

Grafoscopio, a moldable tool for literate computing and reproducible research evolved from there with the companion Data Week, a recurrent hackathon/workshop were attendants learn how to use and modify Grafoscopio to create data visualizations and tell stories with data. Both can be seen from the duality of experience (participation/reification) propossed by Wenger [-@wenger_communities_1999]: participation produces artifacts that enable (or not) future ways of participation and feedback the cycle. The participation in the HackBo and Pharo communities created Grafoscopio¹, (as detailed on Luna [-@luna_cardenas_metaforas_2014]), and the existence of such artifact allowed the creation of the Data Week, to extend and deconstruct Grafoscopio and other digital related artifacts. The design issues behind such duo are considered below.

Grafoscopio took into account several years of experience teaching and using technology

• it cristalizes designer positions from his belonging to the free libre open source software (FLOSS) communities that are in dialogue with several authors: techologies as political devices [@langdon_winner_whale_1989], code as an exercise of freedom of expression [@coleman_coding_2013], knowledge as a commons [@ostrom_understanding_2006], and software as a craft that embodies designer experience and allows research throught desing [@blackwell_craft_2015]. This way of embodieness draw on several sources and concerns reflected in the activities that Grafoscopio should support: tool deconstruction and extensibility, open educational resources, alternative educational practices, non-hegemonic places, discourses and practices for knowledge, activist objects, reproducible research, garage and citizen science (early documentation of them are in [@luna_cardenas_metaforas_2014])
• it is a pocket infrastructure, which means that is self-contained, can work online and offline, from commons computer devices and low resources machines (USB drives, cheap laptops).
• it is based on Pharo Smalltalk, an environment that blends together source code, application, software development environment an adds/blends on top the idea of interactive notebooks.
• It tries to mix ideas of Leo Editor, Jupyter/IPython notebook and Mathematica, by creating and interactive documentation environment with a tree-like (outliner) interface that organizes the document, giving it sequence and hierarchy.

On the Data Week, these were some of the iterative desing circustances: - because was related with data activims, storytelling and visualization, participants were generaly interested in acquiring new symbolic and visual languages and knowledge to represent their concerns (the web page made also pretty clear the differential approach). - attendants came mostly non from the core community of HackBo, an included an increased diversity of path lives and profiles: journalist, teacher, philosopher, researcher, student, philologist, activist. - The roots on data activims from the Gobernaton where showed in the deployment of a critical approach to data and code literacy by choosing themes related with goverment transparency, like public spending and, mainly, the politiciand public discourse on Twitter and awareness of our own Twitter discourse with the implementation of Twitter data selfies [@luna_cardenas_twitter_2016].

The above practices and artifacts took a crtical approach to data and code literacy and visualization, that departed of the neutralized and common "hello word" inital example to code literacy. Instead our curriculum included: a historic approach on computation traditions (comparing the Unix tradition and the Smalltalk/Dynabook ones), design as the study of bifurcation points [@jonas_design_2007], like the ones is those traditions, with the possibility of link them from our present understanding, computers as cognitive devices that can help us into putting into dialogue different representations to understand and express a problem, particularly symbolic (code), graphical (visualization) and cuantitative (data) ones, the relation between technology and politics/power, moldable tools, Smalltalk/Pharo learning fomr basic syntax to medium scripts and finally we tackle an open problem (the Twitter data selfie).

Participants reported consistently a change in their reading of techology as a given towards a possiblity to be constituted by more fluid devices. The idea of coding as storytelling instead of a practice to build apps or websites seemed more plural for most them, although they recognized that it is a from of literacty that takes time. Despite of the general good results, some questions remain for the future that I think could be used as provocations for this panel.

Some provocations on bio-creation, data and power

How can this artifacts and practices dialogue in a more permanent and potent way with institutional setups in academy, government and enterprise, without being coopted for them? Could be the commons a framework to stablish generative relationships with those sectors as an alternative place to the now almost monopolic neoliberal/capitalist frame to bridge academy, industry, government and civil society?

Is data at the service of biopolitics from of surveillance training and control, by the cuantification of existance and the creaton of an equivalence between what exists and is visible, and another between what is visible with what is measurable? If this is the case, how alternative metris, dark information (as a metaphor/analogy with dark matter and the relation between visible and invisible), and data activism can propose alternative ways of governance and fluid power structures and hierarchies for a more plural and common world? How spaces like ISEA that dialogue with previous others like the Image Festival can put different aesthetics like festival, conference and hackathon into a generative and permanent exploration of such issues?

References

1. ^{^} Pharo provides the technology ecosystem behind Grafoscopio.