The opacity of digital technologies has posed significant challenges for critical research and digital methods. In response, controversy mapping, reverse engineering and hacking have been key methodological devices to grapple with opacity and ‘open the black box’ of digital ecosystems. We take recent developments in digital humanitarianism and the accelerated production of apps for refugees following the 2015 Mediterranean refugee crisis as a site of methodological experimentation to advance hacking as critical methodological interference. Drawing on the work of Michel Serres, we propose to understand digital technologies as ‘parasitic’ and reconceptualise hacking as ‘acts of digital parasitism’. Acts of digital parasitism are interferences that work alongside rather than work against. On one hand, this reworking of hacking advances an agenda for digital methods through reworking hacking for digital humanities and social science research. On the other, it allows us to show how the object of research – humanitarian apps – is configured through platformisation and incorporation within digital parasitic relations.

In this short paper we discuss our work on coresearch devices with a young coder community, which help investigate big social data collected by mobile phones. The development was accompanied by focus groups and interviews on privacy attitudes and aims to explore how youth cultures are tracked in mobile phone data.

No abstract

Abstract-This paper discusses how born-digital cultural material can be opened up for research. We focus in particular on the grey area between private mobile phone data and its publication and use for research and beyond. We report on the results of the 'Empowering Data Citizens' (EDC) project, which is a collaboration between King's College London and the Open Data Institute. The work builds on the project Our Data Ourselves (http://big-social-data.net/), which studies the content we generate on our mobile devices, what we call big social data (BSD), and explores the possibilities of its ethical storage.