Grafoscopio and the Data Week: Data Activism and Digital Citizenship powered by the Pharo ecosystem

Grafoscopio is a moldable and versatile tool for literate computing that allows to mix prose, data, code, visualizations into interactive documents, raging from single notebooks to complete books. It is being used in citizen, garage & open science, reproducible research and publishing, (h)ac(k)tivism, civic tech, open & community innovation, domain specific visualization and data journalism, and it has a lot of other potential uses.

The Data Week is a recurrent workshop+hackathon, where participants learn how to use, adapt, extend and modify Grafoscopio, to create their data narratives and custom agile visualization and to create and open their own reproducible publications. With these tools and practices, we are amplifying diverse voices about citizen concerns, crossing three themes: a) governance and autonomy, b) technology and information and c) power entanglements.

Some examples of what we have done with Grafoscopio are:

• The Grafoscopio User Manual.
• Panama Papers as reproducible research.
• Domain Specific Visualizations: for medicine public data released by governments in 16 countries.
• Open sourcing the Data Driven Journalism Handbook (Spanish).
• Steps towards a Digital Library in Bogotá (Spanish).
• Analysis of the Colombian Public Code Portal (Spanish).
• Twitter Data Selfies Workshop at re:publica 2018.
• Porting the Data Feminism book to our pocket infrastructures.
• Data Haiku: Small reproducible stories to critically engage with independient media as a way to empower citizens in their relation with past, present and future elected politicians.
• Documentathon: Agile and resilient tools and techniques for writing and publishing together. (Spanish)

Source code repositories:

• For Grafoscopio: Software | Documentation.
• For the Data Week: Documentation and memories
  

Grafoscopio and the Data Week has been developed mostly at HackBo, a hackerspace in Bogotá (Colombia), and is part of an ongoing PhD and hacktivist academic and community research practices.

Pharo and its ecosystem, and the proactive and helpful communities around them have been key in this experience, by providing a moldable base to create our own tools within an unified, extensible, interactive live coding and modeling environment, including the Roassal agile visualization engine and the GT Tools. Thanks to those tools and communities, we are able to move in a pretty agile way and to have a leverage point where we can work with an unified metaphor to approach a diversity of themes (like those linked above) and tools, from documentation formats and publication (Pandoc, Markdown, HTML, LaTeX, PDF, EPUB), to data modelling, retrieval, storage and serialization (JSON, STON, SQL, Fossil), to custom agile visualization. Such simple and powerful immersive integrated environment, that is well connected with the external world and helps the community to create its own tools, have proven to be key in developing the new devices, literacies and practices, that a world, where the intertwine between digital technologies, citizenship and power plays an increasing central role, is urgently needing.