Morgan Currie

Seven dimensions of contemporary participation disentangled

Participation is today central to many kinds of research and design practice in information studies and beyond. From user‐generated content to crowdsourcing to peer production to fan fiction to citizen science, the concept remains both unexamined and heterogeneous in its definition. Intuitions about participation are confirmed by some examples, but scandalized by others, and it is difficult to pinpoint why participation seems to be robust in some cases and partial in others. In this paper we offer an empirically based, comparative analysis of participation that demonstrates its multidimensionality and provides a framework that allows clear distinctions and better analyses of the role of participation. We derive 7 dimensions of participations from the literature on participation and exemplify those dimensions using a set of 102 cases of contemporary participation that include uses of the Internet and new media.

The conundrum of police officer-involved homicides: Counter-data in Los Angeles County

This paper draws from critical data studies and related fields to investigate police officer-involved homicide data for Los Angeles County. We frame police officer-involved homicide data as a rhetorical tool that can reify certain assumptions about the world and extend regimes of power. We highlight the possibility that this type of sensitive civic data can be investigated and employed within local communities through creative practice. Community involvement with data can create a countervailing force to powerful dominant narratives and supplement activist projects that hold local officials accountable for their actions. Our analysis examines four Los Angeles County police officer-involved homicide data sets. First, we provide accounts of the semantics, granularity, scale and transparency of this local data. Then, we describe a “counter data action,” an event that invited members of the community to identify the limits and challenges present in police officer-involved homicide data and to propose new methods for deriving meaning from these indicators and statistics.

The Feminist Critique: Mapping Controversy in Wikipedia

Research on Wikipedia often compares its articles to print references such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a resource historically associated with depoliticised content, neutrality, and the desire to catalogue the external world objectively.Yet Wikipedia, the free-content, openly editable, online encyclopedia, evolves out of a process whereby multiple perspectives, motives, compromises, and protocols determine the present version of an article. Using controversy as an epistemological device, can we explore Wikipedia to map editors’ concerns around an issue? Can we observe how the mechanics of controversy regulation affect the quality of an article?

Infrastructure, Representation, and Historiography in BBN's Arpanet Maps

The earliest and most widespread representation of the Arpanet were network graphs or maps that, arguably, remain its most prominent artifact. In an earlier article, the authors analyzed how the maps were created, what they represented, and how histories of the network parallel their emphases and omissions. Here, they begin a retooling of the maps to highlight further what is missing from them: flows, gateways, and hierarchy.

Back-ups for the future: archival practices for data activism

Abstract Literature on activist archiving theorises the power of recordkeeping to give voice to marginalised communities. However, missing from this archival literature are analyses about the political practice of preserving data as an act of grassroots resistance. Simultaneously, existing scholarly literature on grassroots data activism analyses the creation of new statistical representations to challenge official ones. This literature has largely ignored what will happen to this data over the long term, nor has it treated data archiving as an activist project in its own right. This theoretical article seeks to close the gap between literature on archival activism and literature on data activism, in hopes that both sets of research can draw productively from each other. There are clear affinities between activist archives and data activism: both address the failure by mainstream institutions to account for marginal voices, both have the power to make issues visible and legitimate within the public sphere, and both experiment with traditional forms of memory and statistical evidence. The authors believe that these two powerful forms of activity have much to learn from each other, particularly as the need to steward data over the long term will only grow.