Our research

Data Science in Humanitarianism

The Data Science in Humanitarianism project studies how agencies such as the UN make use of data science to support decision-making and resource allocation in humanitarian and development work.

Data Associations in Global Law & Policy: A Workshop for New Writing

In 2015, the project launched with an interdisciplinary workshop 'Data Associations in Global Law & Policy: A Workshop for New Writing' and an accompanying public forum involving leading researchers and theorists of law, science and technology studies, social and political theory, cultural and media studies, communication and information technology, human rights, and anthropology. The workshop program can be downloaded here.

An edited podcast of the 2015 public forum is available via the ABC’s "RN Future Tense": We’re all data now: What Big Data could mean for law & policy.

Making Waste,Talking Trash’: Data Associations In Global Law & Policy II 

In 2018, we followed up with a second workshop ‘Making Waste,Talking Trash’ that invited a rethinking of the relation between data (information, knowledge, value) and waste (junk, trash, spam) and superfluity. It brought together scholars to explore the normative, distributional, constitutive, and associational dimensions of data production, formatting, storage, archiving, transfer, analysis, use, deletion and erasure. The workshop program can be downloaded here.

Reflecting on the Digital Humanitarianism: Tech, Law & Policy Challenges workshop

In 2023, the third and final workshop of the project was held, centring on the promise and difficulty of incorporating data science and machine learning into humanitarian work and official government statistics. This event gathered scholarly researchers from law, social science, computer science, statistics, and mathematics together with humanitarian professionals from the private sector, and senior statisticians and data scientists from four different governments (Australia, Colombia, Indonesia, and the UK) and from the UN’s Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP). The workshop can be downloaded here.

The project was funded in part by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council's Discovery Projects funding scheme (project DP180100903). The views expressed in publications and events referenced herein are those of the authors or speakers identified and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government or the Australian Research Council.

Project Sponsor

This research project is funded in part by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council's Discovery Projects funding scheme (project DP180100903). The views expressed in publications and events referenced herein are those of the authors or speakers identified and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government or the Australian Research Council.