"Freedom for Our Files: Creative Reuse of Personal Data Workshop" (2 days)

A two-tiered workshop, with both technical hands-on and idea-driven components. Learn to scrape data and reuse public and private information by writing custom code and using the Facebook API. Additionally, we’ll converse and conceptualize ideas to reclaim our data literally and also imagine what is possible with our data once it is ours!

1. Day One

• a. Objective(s):

i. Quick introduction to programming (if needed)
ii. Scrape and reuse data from a public website
iii. Learn about Application Program Interfaces (APIs)
iv.Get your own Facebook data

• b. Introduction (20 min)

i. Cover objectives for both days
ii. How many programmers?
iii. Introductions
iv.Who is this workshop for?

• c. Programming intro: PHP (20 min)

i. Installation (MAMP) or FTP server
ii. Variables, arrays, loops
iii. file()
iv.Codeplay (20 min) (pair-off)

• d. Scraping (20 min)

i. Overview
ii. Spiders
iii. Codeplay (20 min)

• e. Technical description of how an API works (10 min)

i. XML
ii. relational database
iii. re-constructing information

• f. Get data from Facebook API (10 min)

i. Codeplay (20 min)

1. Artists, activists, and programmers with an interest in privacy, media democracy, and data mining and visualization.

2. Day Two

• a. Objective:

i. Review material from previous day
ii. Visualization options
iii. Projects to discuss
iv.In the spirit of Give Me My Data, find ways to re-imagine your personal data
v. Discussion: what should Give Me My Data 2.0 be?

• b. Review and share work from previous day (30 min)

• c. Visualize and represent (20 min)

i. Many eyes
ii. Graphviz
iii. Processing
iv.Nodebox
v. even CSS

• d. Projects in the world that reuse found or personal data (20 min)

i. My own
ii. http://wefeelfine.org
iii. http://theyrule.net
iv.many more here...

• e. Give Me My Data 2.0 (60 min)

i. Participation groups
1. What can be done with data?
2. How can data be reused?
3. What formats are most useful?
4. Who has the data?
5. Is it possible to provide a function and critique at once?
a. Can users download data?
b. Can users download the data companies use to create demographics?

• f. Presentation of projects and feedback (20 min)