Informatic tactics: Indigenous activism and digital cartographies of gender-based violence

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ABSTRACT The impact of crowdsourced data visualization in the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (#MMIW) movement over the last decade reveals how institutional systems of organizing and representing space present a key obstacle to the cause. Activists’ digital crowdmaps express an ethos of Indigenous data sovereignty, or self-determination in data collection and application, that interrogates settler data procedures relative to gender violence. These tactical maps resonate with the circulation of location-tagged photographs via social media campaigns like #ImNotNext and #RedDressProject to similarly critique the datasets of government agencies. This article conceptualizes both media forms as informatic images that intervene in settler cartographic practice as part of an ongoing decolonization of digital mapping tools. Informatic images precondition the ways that users interact with data through hypermediated visual systems. Here, digital mapping and locative media practices focalize a relationship between violence, biased data and space, through various methods of layering, compositing and linking. Settler computational structures undergird these affordances, yet in a tactical context mapped images are reconstituted by user interaction with an oppositional dataset to intervene in that framework. Users’ emergent data of presence and absence plot a distributed landscape of settler violence in accordance, instead, with relational Indigenous knowledges.