Grafoscopio and the Data Week: Critical code+data literacy practices and pocket infrastructures from/for the Global South
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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 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 (Bogotá, 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: [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 [hidden email] http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners |
Re: Grafoscopio and the Data Week: Critical code+data literacy practices and pocket infrastructures from/for the Global South
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Hi Offray, All the best, Ron Teitelbaum On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 12:45 PM, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas <[hidden email]> wrote:
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Re: Grafoscopio and the Data Week: Critical code+data literacy practices and pocket infrastructures from/for the Global South
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In reply to this post by Offray
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 > [hidden email] > http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners _______________________________________________ Beginners mailing list [hidden email] http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners |
Re: Grafoscopio and the Data Week: Critical code+data literacy practices and pocket infrastructures from/for the Global South
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In reply to this post by Offray
Offray,
I am sorry but I don’t understand what your project is about. The words you use are very precise words that have a technical meaning that I do not possess. Can you give us a simple example? I am looking for the junior high school version of your explanation. Sincerely, Joseph. _______________________________________________ Beginners mailing list [hidden email] http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners |
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Hi Joshep,
Thanks for your interest and sorry for the technicalities. Is some kind of old bad habit from "academy and research" and their ivory towers built with expert languages. I will try to explain myself and provide more technical details in links. It doesn't help not being a native English speaker neither, but I will try my best. So, lets start with the idea of critical literacy practices. This idea comes, mostly, from adults literacy. In such context, the teaching practices developed with children don't work pretty well (or at all). So the teachers of such practices don't start by teaching the basic of letters and handwriting and syllables compositions and words, as used with children education, or problems about adding numbers or planets names and rotation trajectories. Paulo Freire[1], for example, started with what he call "problemas generadores" (I don't know the English translation, but is about problems that create more problems, usually related with social and emotional issues), like reading the local newspapers or writing/reading letters from/for the loved ones, working such problems with poor people in rural Brasil. In such practices he recognized that there is not such think as a "neutral" education practice, and that education is about empowerment (or not) of the oppressed. So, think in something like that, but instead of using "classical" literacy for the printed world, we use practices related with data and code for young and mature adults. In such endeavor we don't start with the classical (and kind of dumb) "Hello world!" introduction to computing [2], but with social problems and questions: Do we and our politicians monologue or dialogue in social networks? How our public money is spend? How much information release the governments about medicine information[3]? Do you really need to have a lot of "Big Data" to be a critical participant in the "information society"? Once we have such questions, we start to get the proper vocabulary (coding+data) to express our partial ideas using prototypes. For that, we learn about Smalltalk basis, but instead of learning to create "apps", we learn to create visualizations and to tell stories supported by data. Some visualizations are the classical colored world map, like the one in the Panama Papers example [4], but made with reproducibility in mind. The idea is not only to publish a bitmap (png, jpeg) or vector image (SVG, PDF), but to provide the complete rationale, data and code behind such stories and visualizations. Other visualizations are custom made, to express some kind of issue, like the one about medicines released information[3] or our ways of communication in Twitter[5]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire [2] http://mutabit.com/offray/blog/en/entry/dumb-hello-world [3] http://mutabit.com/offray/blog/en/entry/sdv-infomed [4] http://mutabit.com/offray/blog/en/entry/panama-papers-1 [5] http://mutabit.com/offray/blog/en/entry/ds-twitter-mockup Despite of not being directly inspired by the theories of Alan Kay or Paulo Freire, I think that my research put some of their ideas into dialogue. What would happen if we put the ideas of Dynabook, started with kids ( and developed in the North) in dialogue with the ideas of Critical Pedagogy, started with adults (and developed in the South) in the current age of data? How new ways of civic participation are created when people learn how to use data, code, visualization and storytelling to talk about civic concerns? I hope to be clearer, but let me know if I'm still in the Ivory Tower. Thanks again, Offray On 05/02/18 20:24, Joseph Alotta wrote: > Offray, > > I am sorry but I don’t understand what your project is about. The words you use are very precise words that have a technical meaning that I do not possess. > > Can you give us a simple example? I am looking for the junior high school version of your explanation. > > Sincerely, > > Joseph. > _______________________________________________ > Beginners mailing list > [hidden email] > http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners _______________________________________________ Beginners mailing list [hidden email] http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners |
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Sorry for the typo, I meant Joseph.
On 05/02/18 21:09, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas wrote: > Hi Joshep, _______________________________________________ Beginners mailing list [hidden email] http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners |
Re: Grafoscopio and the Data Week: Critical code+data literacy practices and pocket infrastructures from/for the Global South
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Offray, Are you signed up on the squeak-dev mailing list or just beginners? I think the members of the Squeak-Dev list would enjoy having you there! You would also get more feedback from that group. All the best, Ron On Tue, Feb 6, 2018 at 9:50 AM, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas <[hidden email]> wrote: Sorry for the typo, I meant Joseph. _______________________________________________ Beginners mailing list [hidden email] http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners |
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Hi Ron, I'm just in the beginners list (when I subscribed I was a beginner and I never thought of myself as a developer). I have seen the dev list, but there is a lot of automatic mail send by commit activity. I'm not sure if I want such traffic in my mail inbox. Anyway, having proper feedback places is important and I wonder
if some kind of middle place between developers and beginners is
needed. In the Pharo case, the users list has pretty good activity
without details about commits. Maybe beginners is misleading and
we need a users list or setup something like discourse[1] to
improve communication. In the Manjaro case, it has worked pretty
well[2] (but, of course, infrastructure by itself is not a
warranty). [2] http://forum.manjaro.org/ Cheers, Offray On 06/02/18 10:51, Ron Teitelbaum
wrote:
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Re: Grafoscopio and the Data Week: Critical code+data literacy practices and pocket infrastructures from/for the Global South
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Hi Offray,
Squeak dev always has been the place to be and newbies was just invented to have a lower hurdle on entry. For the automatic traffic there's (spam) filters in your mail program.
Please feel free move over, we are not so many in our community that separate lists are needed.
My 2c. Cheers,
Herbert Am 06.02.2018 um 17:13 schrieb Offray
Vladimir Luna Cárdenas:
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Thanks Ron and Herbert, I would rater try to improve a "users lists" that filter commits in a dev-list. That's one of the interesting points of systems like discourse: you can create subthreads for particular information and connect or not to them, create hooks and get only the information you are interested in. Seems that we have plenty of channels and I don't know if one
more is going to help with the problem of more fluid communication
in the community that helps with dynamics of governance (like
voting). In the case of Manjaro, I was already in an old forum
that was migrated to discourse, so I don't know a lot about
details on managing Spam. Discourse have spam filters activate and
you only get to post a lot of information with links, if you have
interacted with the community enough, with preset rules. That
means that your first post, as a member could have maybe two
links, but you can not start to put a lot of links in the same
post, unless you gain some reputation, which discourages spammers. For me the important thing is: can we have a more permanent and fluid conversation that shows the pulse and vitality of this community? If the way to do it is to be in the developers list, filter commits with extra technical info, and having a beginners list with almost no entries, so we are not addressing properly the transitions and middle places between users and developers: you have too much info or too little. More granular information is a place where forums like discourse could help. Cheers, Offray On 06/02/18 12:53, Ron Teitelbaum
wrote:
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Re: Grafoscopio and the Data Week: Critical code+data literacy practices and pocket infrastructures from/for the Global South
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Hi Offray, IMO our community is small and fragmentation (of communication channels) is not helpful. There are some 'special' concerns like VMDev and Beginners that 'justify' their own channels but most additional Squeak channels have dried out quickly. Should have said this in the first place instead of giving tips how to mitigate what you seemed to dislike on Squeak dev. :-)) Cheers, Herbert Am 06.02.2018 um 20:53 schrieb Offray
Vladimir Luna Cárdenas:
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Hi Herbert, I understand. That confirms my initial assertion, when I said that "I changed, but community was kind of the same". I'm not a developer, but some kind of old user coming back (but not a beginner, anymore). I don't think that there is a need for a new list. Maybe just talking here of more advanced topics here will show that beginners change, without becoming devs ;-). Cheers, Offray On 06/02/18 17:22, Herbert König wrote:
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