A research initiative to map and explore what “citizen-generated data” can do, with a particular focus on the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Led by the Public Data Lab, King’s College London, the médialab at Sciences Po and Open Knowledge International in collaboration with the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data and the UN Foundation.
Further details can be found at this blog post and in this report.
How can we share different ways of doing things with digital data, methods and infrastructures? How can text, images, video, GIFs and other materials be used to provide accounts of digital methods, cultivate sensibilities towards interpretive work, surface tacit knowledge and encourage reflection on decisions, tools, devices, assumptions and materials?
This is a project to gather, exchange and share digital methods recipes and “how-tos” for research, teaching and collaborations from across the Public Data Lab.
You can see a preview of some of these here: http://recipes.publicdatalab.org/
A set of recipes developed as a collaboration between digital methods researchers at the Public Data Lab and digital journalists at First Draft can be found at: https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/digitalrecipes/
Responding to the World Health Organisation’s warning that misinformation related to COVID-19 constitutes an “infodemic,” this project studies conspiracy theories as a particularly seductive kind of misinformation.
Infodemic: Combatting COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories is using methods from digital humanities and cultural studies to understand how and why conspiracy narratives circulate in different platforms and online spaces during the crisis.
The methodologies include analysing the historical roots of the conspiracy theories now circulating, how they have mutated during the pandemic, and how they contribute to both community and division. The latter practices constitute a foundation for looking at who has been promoting and spreading them, what form they take on the various social media platforms, and why some theories have gained more traction than others. The project will also assess the effectiveness of the varying interventions by social media companies.
The project involves developing collaborative digital methods investigations with journalists, researchers and students as part of “engaged research led teaching” activities at King’s College London and the University of Amsterdam. This has contributed to a set of digital investigations recipes with First Draft a long read on investigating troubling content on Amazon with the European Journalism Centre as well as the following investigations:
As part of this project we created an “Atlas of Offshore FDI” exploring financial relations between states through the flows of money from foreign direct investment (FDI). Its specificity is the effort to visualize the combinations and modifications of the flows of money for making sense of transnational economic activity as well as visual practices for representing uncertainty. While public data practices often emphasise and value the production of certainty , this project considers what data projects may learn from diverse cultures for visually representing, managing and articulating uncertainty.
It is a research project done in collaboration with the Tax Justice Network, a network of researchers and research centres, and the Public Data Lab. The experimental visual model is designed and developed by DensityDesign Research Lab.
For further details see:
Supported by OrganiCity and developed by the Public Data Lab, SaveOurAir is an exploration of the social and political aspects of “smart cities”. Its specificity is the effort to use digital data to stir (rather than settle) urban debate and to nurture (rather than purify) their multiple attachments.
Focussing on air quality, SaveOurAir explored three ways to make urban data more “local” and “politically relevant” and developed three experiments in data activation.