Abstract:

This presentation explores ongoing data activism practices (Milan & Gutiérrez, (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 Cárdenas 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 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 2013), moldable tools (Girba, Chis, and Niertrasz 2014), pocket infrastructures, computational narratives (Perez and Granger 2015), data activism, agile visualization (Bergel 2016), and grassroots innovation. This approach, we will argue, represents a means to enable an enactive critique to exclusionary divides: "Big Data" (Andrejevic 2014), software user/ software developer (Maxwell 2006) that also engages in productive dialogues with other critical discourses (decoloniality and femininist data visualization (D’Ignazio and Klein 2016) approaches).

Bibliography