Participation is today central to many kinds of research and design practice in information studies and beyond. From user-generated content to crowdsourcing to peer production to fan fiction to citizen science, the concept remains both unexamined and heterogeneous in its definition. Intuitions about participation are confirmed by some examples, but scandalized by others, and it is difficult to pinpoint why participation seems to be robust in some cases and partial in others. In this paper we offer an empirically based, comparative analysis of participation that demonstrates its multidimensionality and provides a framework that allows clear distinctions and better analyses of the role of participation. We derive 7 dimensions of participations from the literature on participation and exemplify those dimensions using a set of 102 cases of contemporary participation that include uses of the Internet and new media.

This paper uses autoethnography to examine locative media -specifically, the location-based social network app Grindr -in the context of spatial practices. Because of the way it integrates the physical location of a user in the construction of a digital space, its curious political and logistical challenge to previously defined spatial arrangements such as gay villages, and the negotiation over interpersonal relations its use entails, Grindr poses a unique case to examine questions around space and locative media. I argue that Grindr harkens back to Pre-Stonewall modes of cruising and socializing through the manipulation of cues, codes, and symbols and disturbs the link between spatial arrangements based on co-presence and gay identity politics. Contents Introduction Locative Media and Gay Representations Embodiment and Inscription Straight Space and Gay Villages Etiquettes of Desire Conclusion

Contemporary forms of data activism promise community organizers the means to pursue political action, but they simultaneously threaten to responsibilize individuals and communities for documenting collective harms that are already known to the state. In this article, we use Mouffe's articulation of agonistic pluralism to analyze recent literature on data activism in terms of this double bind, the threat that authentic community voice might be muted when data is used for activist purposes. We argue that community organizers navigate this double bind through agonistic data practices, tactics which draw on the affective and narrative potentialities of data to dispute the terms by which majoritarian political agents rationalize their actions and direct policy. Agonistic data practices do not presume that data will lead to more equitable consensus in representative government or to a more rational debate in the public sphere; instead, agonistic data practices mobilize the antagonisms that motivate people to act, to imagine alternative political arrangements, and to contribute to long-term collective action. We conclude by mapping out a research agenda that focuses on agonistic data practices enacted in minoritized communities in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.

Data-centered participatory design research projects-wherein researchers collaborate with community members for the purpose of gathering, generating, or communicating data about the community or their causes-can place epistemic burdens on minoritized or racialized groups, even in projects focused on social justice outcomes. Analysis of epistemic burden encourages researchers to rethink the purpose and value of data in community organizing and activism more generally. This paper describes three varieties of epistemic burden drawn from two case studies based on the authors' previous work with anti-police brutality community organizations. The authors conclude with a discussion of ways to alleviate and avoid these issues through a series of questions about participatory research design. Ultimately, we call for a reorientation of knowledge production away from putative design solutions to community problems and toward a more robust interrogation of the power dynamics of research itself.

This paper explores data analytics applied to urban education, focusing in particular on issues of representationalism, the view that representations (here, digital data) stand in mimetic relation to some external reality from which they are ontologically distinct. Based on interviews conducted over the 2016-2017 school year with a team of data professionals employed by a Charter Management Organization (CMO) that operates one dozen schools in South and East Los Angeles, this paper shows that respondents endorse a range of views about how data can stand in for things, events, and people. Data professionals charged with the creation and management of student-level data expressed views consistent with a representationalist understanding of digital data; by contrast, those charged chiefly with aggregating and analyzing heterogeneous streams of data expressed greater skepticism toward representationalist commitments. Despite this difference in viewpoint, all of the data professionals interviewed relied on the same medium to communicate their interpretations of data to other members of the organization, including school personnel: a bespoke platform that consists of 125 dashboards. Critically, graphical means of visualization expressed objectivity, certainty, and actuarial foresight, even in cases where data professionals expressed ambivalence about the representational power of a given source of data.