---
title: Data activism as a ongoing civic enactive critique on Big Data and software user/developer divides
author:
- name: Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas
affiliation: mutabiT / HackBo
email: offray@mutabit.com
- name: Carlos Barreneche
affiliation: Javeriana University
email: barrenechec@javeriana.edu.co
date: March 1 2017
abstract: >
This presentation explores ongoing data activism practices (Milan & Gutiérrez, [-@milan_citizens_2015]; Shrock, 2016)
and the prototypyng of tools and infrastructural alternatives to Big Data in the context of a hackerspace
in Bogota (Colombia) and a PhD research on design and creation. We will present the case of a periodic
hackathon/workshop event (The Data Week) engaging diverse concerns and communities (journalists, (h)ac(k)tivists,
teachers, students, researchers, novices) and its companion development of a so-called "pocket" infrastructure
(Grafoscopio [@luna_cardenas_metaforas_2014]).
Though these experiences, draw on long standing practices in the hacker Free Libre Open Source (FLOSS) community,
the presentation will frame them also as experiments in (digital) citizenship (Isin & Ruppert, 2015 ) through
critical making [@ratto_critical_2011], as they aim to amplify civic voices and enable public participation.
We will focus particularly on some projects involving data visualization and storytelling in the cases of politicians
discourse on Twitter.
Such projects addresses people’s needs and capacities in the Global South in order to overcome infrastructural limitations
to civic engagement through data. In order to do so, the Data Week and Grafoscopio deploy the alternative framework of frictionless
data [@pollock_frictionless_2013], moldable tools [@girba_scg:_2014], pocket infrastructures, computational narratives [@perez_project_2015],
data activism, agile visualization [@bergel_agile_2016], and grassroots innovation.
This approach, we will argue, represents a means to enable an enactive critique to exclusionary divides: "Big Data" [@andrejevic_big_2014],
software user/ software developer [@maxwell_tracing_2006] that also engages in productive dialogues with other critical discourses
(decoloniality and femininist data visualization [@dignazio_feminist_2016] approaches).
bibliography: bibliography.bib
...
# Bibliography