Book chapter: “What a difference a dataset makes? Data journalism and/as data activism”, Data in Society, (Policy Press, 2019)

A book chapter on “What a difference a dataset makes? Data journalism and/as data activism” co-authored with Liliana Bounegru has just been published in a new book Data in Society: Challenging Statistics in an Age of Globalisation on Policy Press.

The preprint is available here and an excerpt from the introduction and full reference are copied below.

How and when might data journalism be viewed as a form of “data activism”? Data activism has been conceptualised as a set of practices which “interrogate the fundamental paradigm shift brought about by datafication”, including through resisting surveillance and mobilising data to denounce injustice and advocate for change (Milan and van der Velden, 2016). In this chapter we examine three ways in which data journalism can serve not just to reinforce and reify dominant regimes of datafication –or ways of rendering life into data (van Dijck, 2014) – but also to interrogate them and make space for public involvement and intervention around data infrastructures

Gray, J. & Bounegru, L. (2019) “What a difference a dataset makes? data journalism and/as data activism.” In Data in Society: Challenging Statistics in an Age of Globalisation, J. Evans, S. Ruane and H. Southall (eds). Bristol: The Policy Press. Preprint: 10.5281/zenodo.1415450.

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