New publication on “Informative Activism” for monitoring purposes

Introducing the concept of “Informative activism” within the framework of the BIT-ACT project, PhD student Alice Fubini sheds light on how the shifting boundaries between data journalism and data activism challenge both traditional journalism and activism fields of action. Comparing two non-profit foundations involved in monitoring governmental authorities as “watchdogs” through the analysis (and requests) of public data, the results converge in bringing out from a comparative perspective a new form of activism that captures the nature of collective actors involved in the development of open databases and data-driven technologies, labelled «informative activism». This concept represents a new lens able to broaden the rhizomatic approach to the media ecosystem applied to journalism, including more explicitly the contribution of the data activism realm and contiguous fields of action to the news network. 

The paper was published in the academic journal Problemi dell’Informazione - Special Issue Re-considering journalism as an ecosystem: borders, shapes, and powers.

Access the paper here.