Data witnessing: attending to injustice with data in Amnesty International’s Decoders project

Abstract

The concept of witnessing has been used to explore the construction of evidence and experience in settings of law, religion, atrocity, media, history and science. Recent research has examined how digital technologies may multiply the involvement of remote, non-present and unanticipated actors in the witnessing of events. This paper examines what digital data practices at Amnesty International's Decoders initiative can add to the understanding of witnessing. It introduces the notion of 'data witnessing' with reference to four projects on (i) witnessing historical abuses with structured data from digitised documents; (ii) witnessing the destruction of villages with satellite imagery and machine learning; (iii) witnessing environmental injustice with company reports and photographs; and (iv) witnessing online abuse through the classification of Twitter data. These projects illustrate the configuration of experimental apparatuses for witnessing injustices with data. In contrast to accounts which emphasise the presence of an individual human witness at the scene, Amnesty's data practices are conspicuously collective and distributed, rendering the systemic scale of injustices at a distance, across space and time. Such practices may contribute to research on both (new) media witnessing and data politics, suggesting ways in which care, concern and solidarity may be constructed, structured, extended and delimited by means of digital data.

Understanding power positions in a new digital landscape: perceptions of Syrian refugees and data experts on relocation algorithm

“…Early studies in this field focused on the manifestations of the control over spaces through socio-spatial sorting (Graham, 2005), where people are evaluated via algorithms that calculate and enforce differential access with respect to perceived worth. Although the digital technologies have the potential to involve remote, non-present and unanticipated actors (Gray, 2019), the studies have cautioned the possible (re)production of spatial inequalities inscribed to these calculative systems.…”

Human rights collectives as visual experts: the case of Syrian Archive

“…Thus, the article complements other research on how human rights collectives are shaping the unfolding tenor of media witnessing in the crowded eyewitness media landscape (e.g. Allan, 2017; Gray, 2019; Gregory, 2015; Land and Aronson, 2018; Ristovska, 2016b). Rather than focusing on the witnesses who produce these video materials, though, the article turns to the institutional and legal environments that use eyewitness imagery and legitimize the unfolding visual expertise.…”

Stratégies des Premiers Peuples au Canada concernant les données numériques : décolonisation et souveraineté

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