NPC Wired Episode 5: Viral Memes as a Tool of Political Protest in Russia

This week's episode, hosted by Sofia Collignon Delmar and Nikki Soo, features Anastasia Denisova. Discussing the use of viral memes as a form of political protest and resistance, she explains how this is particularly important with censorship in Russia. She also shares more on her data collection methods, challenges she faced along the way, and her favourite meme.

Dr Anastasia Denisova is Lecturer of Journalism at the University of Westminster. Before embarking on academia, she spent a decade as a journalist in Russia. She is currently writing her book Internet Memes and Society based on her research on Internet memes as the casual artful means of political resistance in the restricted Russian media environment. It will be available in 2019. Read more about her research here, and follow her on Twitter here.

NPC Wired Episode 4: On Playing Games of Persuasion with Big Data and Micro-targeting

This week's episode, hosted by Professor Ben O'Loughlin and Dr Elinor Carmi, features Dr Jennifer Pybus. She discusses an array of important subjects, from Trump's use of data in his Facebook campaign (read more about that here), the covert shift to consumerist purchasing funnel in politics resulting in a large degree of personalisation, to China's social credit system.

Dr Jennifer Pybus is Lecturer in Digital Culture and Society at King's College London. Her current research looks at the politics of datafication and everyday life, specifically in relation to those critical points of tension that lie at the intersections between digital culture, Big Data and emerging advertising and marketing practices. Read more about her research here, and follow her on Twitter here.

NPC Wired Episode 2: Dr Anna Feigenbaum on Digital Storytelling and Social Change

The second episode of NPC Wired features Dr Anna Feigenbaum, Principal Academic in Digital Storytelling at Bournemouth University. Speaking with Professor Ben O'Loughlin and Dr Elinor Carmi, she discusses her current research (she is presently writing The Data Storytelling Workbook for Routledge, which will be coming out in 2019), draws on practitioners’ experiences and research to investigate how the rise in big and open data can be put to use to tell better data stories for social change. They also talk about the barriers various practitioners face when analysing data, and the fetishisation of data visualisation, among other things.

Her latest book, Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of WW1 to the Streets of Today, published with Verso, is available now. Find out more about Anna's work here, and follow her on Twitter here