[Air-L] [Open Webinar] José van Dijck on platformisation at SMART Data Sprint 2021

Sat Jan 30 10:43:35 PST 2021

 Dear Ana, Janna
The question was placed here on the list for the benefit of the AoIR community (most of whom are not on the ECREA Facebook page where I had commented on your announcement a while ago). The talk you are advertising, as well as your overall event, is timely and important  (in fact, I was going to direct my graduate students to attend, until I saw the registration form). It is therefore all the more surprising that , as organisers of an event on data and platformisation, you do not realise how problematic your  compulsory request to provide information on one's country of origin and residence is. 

At the time of uprecedented data mining and sophisticated digital surveillance, in particular in e-governance, border control and state and police violence against many precarious subjects (refugees, migrants, racialised minorities, political activists), the question of origins or residence is not simple, and not neutral.  Requesting such information - a rather unusual practice in event regisration where all you need is a working email for confirming zoom link - is not just insensitive and intrusive, but can actually put some of your attendees in danger. Or to deter them from participating- which makes your event hardly an "open" one.
If you are interested in knowing the spread of your event and your audience, you can offer a volutary, anoymous survey, to determine that. 

I am sure that as data scholars and digital practitioners with interests spanning from digital methods to data rights, you can find a way to be more considerate of how your organising practices impact and potentially endanger your participants. 

Kind regardsAdi
DrAdi Kuntsman, Reader in Digital Politics 
Programme Leader, MA in International Relations and Global Communications 
Coordinator, PhD pathway in Digital Politics
Department of Politics | Manchester Metropolitan University 
Geoffrey Manton Building|  Manchester | M15 6LL| Web| 

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Dr Adi Kuntsman

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    On Saturday, January 30, 2021, 4:39:18 PM GMT, Smart Inovamedialab <smart.inovamedialab at fcsh.unl.pt> wrote:  

 Hello Mr. Kuntsman,We hope this mail finds you well.
As we have already replied to you on Facebook, as global researchers, we are interested in getting to know our participants and to know how far our event is going. The SMART Data Sprint aims to provide an environment in which researchers and Ph.D. students from all over the place come together to engage with academic and non-academic projects.
It is important to see the context of the event that has always been interested in how people are connected (attached you can see last year's world map as an example of how participants were connected). In this form, the questions about nationality and residence are not required to participate.

As social platform researchers, we are only interested in how these environments also gather many different nationalities. You can see this in our very research group, in which members are mostly living in countries other than the one they were born in.
We are never meant to be invasive or misuse this information.If you have any other questions, please feel free to contact us through smart.inovamedialab at fcsh.unl.pt
Best regards,
On behalf of SMART Data Sprint,Ana Marta M. Flores
Janna Joceli Omena

On Sat, 30 Jan 2021 at 14:55, Adi Kuntsman <adi_kuntsman at yahoo.com> wrote:

What is the reason for the registration form  asking for info on country or origin and country of residence? This is a rather bizarre form of digital surveillance of participants of a free,  open to all event...
Dr Adi Kuntsman Reader in Digital Politics Manchester Metropolitan University 

  On Tue, 26 Jan 2021 at 23:30, Smart Inovamedialab<smart.inovamedialab at fcsh.unl.pt> wrote:   Open Webinar | SMART Data Sprint 2021
A European perspective on platformisation by José van Dijck
February, 3rd at 5 PM (GMT) | ONLINE (Zoom)

We are pleased to announce that José van Dijck is joining SMART Data Sprint
2021 with a keynote open to the public on the theme of a European
perspective on platformization. José van Dijck is a distinguished professor
at the University of Utrecht (Netherlands), and a former dean of the
University of Amsterdam. From 2015 to 2018, she also served as
president-elect of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Van Dijck's field of research focuses on media studies and digital society.
Her work covers a wide range of topics in media theory, technologies and
communication, social media, and digital culture. She is the co-author and
co-editor of ten books and over one hundred journal articles and book
chapters. Van Dijck’s book The Culture of Connectivity. A Critical History
of Social Media (Oxford UP, 2013) was distributed worldwide and was
translated into Spanish, Chinese, and Farsi. Her latest book, co-authored
by Thomas Poell & Martijn de Waal is titled The Platform Society. Public
values in a connective world (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Van Dijck's lecture will be online (via Zoom) and open to SMART Data Sprint
participants and the general public under free registration at <
https://bit.ly/SMARTDataSprint_keynoteJvD>

About SMART Data Sprint
SMART Data Sprint is an international event promoted by the SMART research
group (iNOVA Media Lab/NOVA University of Lisbon) that provides an intense
hands-on experience, driven by online data and digital methods.

More info at <http://smart.inovamedialab.org>

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SMART ˚ ˚ Social Media Research Techniques I #SMARTDataSprint
iNOVA Media Lab I NOVA FCSH I Universidade Nova de Lisboa
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SMART ˚ ˚ Social Media Research Techniques I #SMARTDataSprint
iNOVA Media Lab I NOVA FCSH I Universidade Nova de Lisboa