Data Witnessing: Attending to Injustice With Data in Amnesty International's Decoders Project

               This post is a summary of an article with the title above published in 2019 at   file:///C:/Users/Luciano/Downloads/Data_witnessing_attending_to_injustice_with_data_i.pdf

        

               Bearing witness is said to be at the heart of Amnesty International's culture, evident in its combination of volunteer's networks and documenting abuses. Amnesty's earliest activities in the 1960s involved compiling information about political prisoners and mobilising volunteers to advocate for their release, including through letters, petitions, candle-lit vigils, supporting their families and the "adoption" of prisoners. In 1973, Amnesty introduced "Urgent Actions" to their repertoire of activities. These were transnational campaigns against abuses often involving mass letters, fax and email writing to parties considered responsible. This article examines how Amnesty's practices of documenting and responding to abuses have been extended, modified and redistributed by means of data and digital technologies, focusing on its Decoders initiative ( https://decoders.amnesty.org ). Founded in 2016, Amnesty Decoders describes itself as an innovative platform for volunteers around the world to use their computers or phones to help our researchers sift through pictures, information and documents. The concept of 'data witnessing' characterise how data is involved in attending to situations of injustice in Decoders projects, as a conspicuously collective. Unlike accounts which emphasize a singular witness present at the scene, the work of Amnesty Decoders involves human and non-human actors to attend to the systemic scale of injustice at a distance, across space and time. Emphasize the role of digital technologies in facilitating witnessing through the production and sharing of media content. The professor Chouliaraki defines 'digital witnessing' as 'the moral engagement with distant suffering through mobile media, by means of recording, uploading and sharing,' The proliferation of devices capable of producing and distributing online content is said to enable "distant witnessing, citizen witnessing." This represent a shift from the singular experiences of individuals which are surfaced through textual practices. An Amnesty proposal called 'Alt Click' sought to explore how to utilise large volumes of digital data to advance advocacy against abuses, as well as how digital technologies might enable 'deeper and 'more meaningful' forms of volunteer engagement beyond social media sharing and signing online petitions. By conbining these aspirations, the project would enable volunteers to become 'human rights monitors' contributing to information and research challenges through a global digital action platform. The project sought to render historical human rights situations legible through data at scale and across space and time, by translating archival documents into structured data. The data witnessing apparatus in this project was intended to render past injustices and Amnesty's work intelligible at a distance through the addition of structured data fields, connecting historical events and contemporary volunteers through engagement with organisational memory. In the project above, data witnessing involves the 'parameterisation' of situation of injustice, articulating actors, relations, events, spatiality, temporality and activity as data. This schematisation of that which is witnessed is co-produced through a combination of existing materials of varying levels of proximity to situations of injustice (eg. archives, images, reports, tweets, emails). In shifting from individual testimony to the commensuration, quantification and analysis of injustice 'at a distance' through data, might this displace or distract from compassion for the individual that is elicited by testimony from those present in space and time? The above projects suggest that Amnesty campaigners assume that these data witnessing experiments will not function in isolation, but in tandem with other research and activities (online and offline).