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Free the Data from the Birdcage: Opening Up Data and Crowdsourcing Activism in Taiwan
Author(s) -
Lee Meichun
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
polar: political and legal anthropology review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.529
H-Index - 27
eISSN - 1555-2934
pISSN - 1081-6976
DOI - 10.1111/plar.12371
Subject(s) - crowdsourcing , digitization , politics , hacker , citizenship , citizen journalism , transparency (behavior) , citizen science , political science , analytics , public relations , sociology , data science , computer science , computer security , law , botany , computer vision , biology
This article examines Campaign Finance Digitization (CFD), a data initiative launched by the civic hacker community g0v (pronounced gov zero) in Taiwan. How do data trigger activism even before “facts” are known? This initiative crowdsourced xiangmin (netizens) to transcribe campaign finance reports from physical documents to digital datasets so as to bring transparency to the bribery and corruption in politics in postauthoritarian Taiwan. The crowdsourcing technology used by CFD harnessed an assemblage of humans, machines, codes, and signals around the data; turned this gathering of human and nonhuman actors into a political movement; and used the information as process and political practices. The political significance of CFD lies not in the “facts” produced from the data but in the collaborative practice of opening up the data. With mass participation, the data moved beyond the descriptive form of representation to produce a new type of digital participatory citizenship.