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It’s been several years since I wrote with any regularity. Until recently I put this loss down to a break in my daily rhythms, in which I had let go of the space and time to focus on organizing my thoughts. I can’t say why, exactly, I allowed that to happen, but I suspect it…

This fall, Philadelphia’s Slought Foundation — an organization dedicated to engaging publics in dialogue about cultural and political change — hosted The Potemkin Project, an exhibition exploring the “falsification of reality in media and new frameworks for civic integrity.” In conjunction with the show, Slought brought Sam Gregory and me together for a gallery talk, “Weapons…

To accompany the exhibition The Potemkin Project, at the Slought Foundation, Sam Gregory of Witness and I are holding a discussion titled “Weapons of Perception,” on Friday, November 1, 2019, from 6-8pm. The event has been organized in partnership with the Center for Media at Risk at the University of Pennsylvania, and is part of…

As the tragedy surrounding attacks on churches and hotels unfolded in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, the Sri Lankan government took the unusual step of preemptively blocking a range of social media sites. The president’s office announced a block of Facebook and Instagram, reasoning that they could be used to spread misinformation. Internet censorship research…

Into the Fold of the True is the working title for investigations into archives of war and conflict at the Library of Congress, where I’ve been a fellow in digital studies in 2017-2018. This talk in October 2018 at MIT’s Open Documentary Lab is my first public discussion of the initial research and working method,…

With the F.B.I. indictment of 13 Russians for interfering in 2016 United States presidential elections, Global Voices revisited its extensive research into Russian online interference, underscoring the importance of open-source data and research to understand its impact. RuNet Echo, a Global Voices initiative, began covering Russian automated bots, trolls and paid bloggers seeking to influence online…

This story was originally published on Global Voices. In his recent manifesto, Mark Zuckerberg asserts that the response to our dysfunctional and conflict-ridden politics is to build a stronger global community based on ubiquitous interconnection. We know of course that Facebook stands to profit from this utopian vision, and we should be skeptical of the motives underlying…

This story was originally published on Global Voices. The residents of Washington D.C. came out of their houses and apartments last Sunday morning. They walked, biked and took buses down to Lafayette Square, in front of the White House, for a spontaneous demonstration, in tandem with other protests across the United States against Trump’s Executive Order banning entry to…

This story was originally published by Public Radio International. Listen to this story on PRI.org » We follow the tweets of 7-year-old Bana Alabed and her mother; the last messages of activists and fighters waiting to surrender or die; and seek to verify chemical attacks or conflicting stories about the bombings of hospitals. And at the…

The Ukrainian city of Mariupol sits 20 km from the front line between separatists and the Ukrainian military. It is a city at peace, but close enough to hear the war. Fighting between the Russian-backed separatists and the Ukrainian military has escalated over past months, and residents in Mariupol hear mortars and rocket fire when…

This story was originally published on Global Voices and written with Tanya Lokot. A car revs and pulls forward. Volume cranked on the radio, out blares a Russian pop song from the 1990s, all static and drum machine. Streets, pavement, peripheral view of buildings, trees, kiosks, streetlights, pedestrians. Occasionally the driver remarks on something unseen in…

This post was originally published in The Guardian as “Numaish Karachi: can art installations change this violent megacity’s image?” on June 5, 2015. Karachi, a city known for intractable political conflict and as a shelter for militants from the Afghan wars, has difficulty escaping its reputation as the world’s most violent megacity. It has suffered some 13,500…

As with flock, herd, murder, or coven, blogs in their late maturity should finally receive a collective descriptor. Agony, denoting a sense of public contest, a chorus observing and commenting upon the affairs of the day, and extreme pain, feels appropriate, as it captures the current discord of our civic speech. These agonies are our…

KCR appeared at Harvard’s Fogg Museum as a nine-channel interactive on April 20, 2015, and a second time in July as part of the workshop Beautiful Data, a two-week course on interactive media to help curators and archivists “develop art-historical storytelling through data visualization, interactive media, enhanced curatorial description and exhibition practice, digital publication, and data-driven,…

The world is saturated with media content, and attention is scarce almost everywhere. The fact of saturation and the ease of production does not mean equitable access to attention, even for important and worthwhile content. What we call the caring problem for audiences is not a determined fact, but also of building communities, language choices,…

Summary: a joint post with Tim Davies reflecting on our learning from a recent Berkman Center Network Stories hack-day There are hundreds of different digital tools for building online stories, and myriad ways to use them. Building stories online often requires creating alternative production and distribution paths for stories, in the context of networked, online communities. The choice of…

In June 2013, two sisters in the Chilas Vally in northern Pakistan were murdered by their step-brother, after a video of them dancing in the rain was shot on a mobile phone and circulated in their community. The killing may have been sparked by an offended sense of honor, or possibly part of a plot…

What shall we make of the flood of images and voices coursing through the Internet, and how shall we understand it? In our minds, the details of so much material overlap and overwhelm. On the Internet, we say, our attention is getting shorter, but our memory is improving. And yet, when I turn off my…

Over 500,000 videos have been uploaded to the Internet from Syria during the past two years. Many document the course of protest and conflict, while others promote the views and perspectives of combatants, protesters, peace movements, and ordinary citizens who are witness to events. Despite this profusion of eyewitness perspective, the Syrian conflict has been…

New Directions in Visual Storytelling is a graduate-level seminar that focuses on alternative production and distribution paths for documentary, visual storytelling, and photojournalism in the context of networked, online communities. It explores the effect of technological change on the aesthetics, production methods, distribution, and social impact of visual storytelling. I taught this class in the master’s…

A partial list of interviews and reviews of White Road, the book and the show: “White Road consists of a two volume set, one primarily text, the other pictures, that explores Ivan Sigal’s photographic work over a ten year period in Central Asia. The publication accompanied an exhibition of the same body of work at the Corcoran…

An exhibition of White Road opens at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. on November 3, 2012. A brief description of the exhibit: From 1998 through 2005, American photographer Ivan Sigal traveled through Central Asia, using his camera to record the unsettled lives of Eurasians in provincial towns and cities. Through nearly 100…

Printing at Steidl for the forthcoming book, White Road, available in November 2012.