[Newbies] Grafoscopio and the Data Week: Critical code+data literacy practices and pocket infrastructures from/for the Global South

[David T. Lewis]

This looks like very interesting work, and some very interesting ideas driving
the project.

Dave

On Mon, Feb 05, 2018 at 12:45:15PM -0500, Offray Vladimir Luna C??rdenas wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Following the idea of talking about educational practices powered by (a
> flavor of) Smalltalk. I would like to share two of them, mainly by
> sharing some links and small phrases/paragraphs about the.
> 
>   * Grafoscopio [1] is what I call a "pocket infrastructure" for data
>     activism, digital citizenship and reproducible research and
>     publication. It tries to approach critically to the exclusionary
>     "fashionist" concept of "Big Data", by arguing that other
>     infrastructures and practices can bootstrap citizenship around data
>     without being constrain by the size of data or the computational
>     resources to process it. An example is the Panama Papers as
>     reproducible research[2] project, that shows how this pocket
>     infrastructures can be used, even in the case of the biggest data
>     leak in the history of journalism.
>   * The Data Week [3](Spanish) is a recurrent Hackathon+Workshop where
>     people learn how to use, extend and modify Grafoscopio, so they can
>     tell Data Stories to amplify their voices and community concerns. We
>     choose problems where data and its visualizations give visibility to
>     grassroots communities and help to bridge the gap between "user" and
>     "maker", "coder" and "citizen", among others. We try make and
>     enactive?? critic of the (also) "fashionist" hackathon, going beyond
>     the "pitch", or the meeting of "sleep deprived strangers" to create
>     a "tech innovative solution" in a weekend to complex social
>     problems. Next Data Week will overlap with the Open Data Day, and we
>     are going to address the political discourse on Twitter, as a way to
>     improve awareness on upcoming presidential elections in Colombia,
>     but we think that this (pocket infrastructures) approach could be
>     used as a way to use critical code+data digital literacy practices
>     to enable informed citizenship discourse and voting in the times of
>     social networks noise and post-truth.
>   * Recently we have expanded our actions and infrastructures to the
>     publishing field by going beyond "open access" (as promoted in
>     practice by the Creative Commons movement) to "reproducible
>     publishing". One example of that is the "Data Driven Journalism
>     Handbook"[4] (Spanish). More are planed, using "remix-traslation" to
>     bootstrap a more fluent South -> North dialog, because most of the
>     ideas of Non-English and Non-Writing cultures are kept outside of
>     the public discourse. By non-writing I mean cultures with strong and
>     rich oral traditions, but low writing/publishing practices, let
>     alone non-coding citizens in the Global South.
> 
> Grafoscopio and the Data Week are developed as part of my PhD research,
> where I ask about "how we can change the digital tools that change us?"
> (or the reciprocal modification between digital artifacts and
> communities of practice), in the context of a Hackerspace in the Global
> South (Bogot??, Colombia). Such research is informed by participatory
> action research, ethnography and design research traditions, and is
> trying to approach "wicked problems" to build a path in the present with
> possible and desirable futures. I'm now finishing to write the
> dissertation, so I'm tight on time, but I would be glad to keep this
> conversations (or others) going.
> 
> Links:
> 
> [1] http://mutabit.com/grafoscopio/index.en.html
> [2] http://mutabit.com/offray/blog/en/entry/panama-papers-1
> [3] http://mutabit.com/dataweek/
> [4] http://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/mapeda/
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Offray

> _______________________________________________
> Beginners mailing list
> Beginners at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners