JISCMail - MECCSA Archives

In critical media and communications research there has been a marked increase in interest in web-based ways of gathering and generating knowledge. These include digital tools that navigate and map the web itself, that can also create various sorts of maps and other sorts of visualisations – infographics – to use in research, policy-making, and advocacy. All these techniques, and the new ways of conveying what is going on in the world that they open up, present exciting possibilities for doing research, ‘seeing’ and presenting our ideas. They have also provided important avenues for citizens to challenge businesses and governments about what they are doing with our data, and to what ends. Whilst a picture may be worth a thousand words, infographics, like maps and other images, also imply and convey more than one story. Humanitarian, environmental, and commercial uses of digital tracking, mapping, and crowdsourcing are not always compatible with each other, and they also raise challenging questions about freedom of expression, privacy, intellectual property rights, and research ethics based on informed consent. Moreover, the politics of ownership and control of our data and the data of others is becoming more urgent as large corporations and governments can accumulate this data and then grant or restrict access to it in non-accountable ways.