I conducted 3 expert interviews and looked at a number of approaches that others have taken on education about the digital. It was quite interesting to see a number of concepts: digital harm reduction, data-is-power etc pop-up in the reading. A lot of these terms point in the same direction I want to go… but I am not sure how they differ from each other and what putting all this into a cohesive whole looks like.

Since my aim was to approach my topic from a theoretical angle, I spent the last week looking for, finding and then culling a LOT of journal articles, strategy documents, and book chapters about my topic. I must have looked at about 100 and have about 30 saved in my Zotero for reading. Since I felt my topic is fast evolving and not fully defined into a discipline as yet (though one can see the first signs of that happening) I opted to ignore older articles and focus on material for the last two years only… unless something looked very relevant. I suspect I will want to add a few more things to the list below. Then I will read most if not all of the papers… and do summaries ONLY of the ones I find interesting.

Key Item Type Publication Year Author Title
DE89WMUM bookSection 2018 Breiter, Andreas; Hepp, Andreas The Complexity of Datafication: Putting Digital Traces in Context
JY3NNB3T webpage DFID DFID Digital Strategy 2018 to 2020: doing development in a digital world
5KRKIINV webpage 2020 USAID
Strategic Framework: Fostering an Inclusive Digital Future | USAID’s Digital Strategy | U.S. Agency for International Development
DC7THR4K journalArticle 2019 Ciuriak, Dan; Ptashkina, Maria
Leveraging the Digital Transformation for Development: A Global South Strategy for the Data-driven Economy
6CJQI7WB conferencePaper 2019 Verina, Natalja; Titko, Jelena
Digital transformation: conceptual framework
XWGNVAHR journalArticle 2020 Hall, Nina; Schmitz, Hans Peter; Dedmon, J Michael Transnational Advocacy and NGOs in the Digital Era: New Forms of Networked Power
JZ5Z28N4 book 2018
Technology, activism, and social justice in a digital age
KCF57JMY journalArticle 2020 Schmitz, Hans Peter; Dedmon, J. Michael; Bruno-van Vijfeijken, Tosca; Mahoney, Jaclyn Democratizing advocacy?: How digital tools shape international non-governmental activism
5A9TMC2I journalArticle 2020 Heeks, Richard ICT4D 3.0? Part 1—The components of an emerging “digital-for-development” paradigm
4YVNMLJ5 book 2020
Digital Inequalities in the Global South
7R7QTHPN book 2021 Filgueiras, Fernando; Almeida, Virgílio
Governance for the Digital World: Neither More State nor More Market
PEP9S8ZA document 2018
A Human Rights Based Approach to Data
5XEI2FRN book 2020
Ethics of Medical Innovation, Experimentation, and Enhancement in Military and Humanitarian Contexts
SM4F4DMV journalArticle 2020 Coles-Kemp, Lizzie; Ashenden, Debi; Morris, Amelia; Yuille, Jeremy Digital welfare: designing for more nuanced forms of access
7PULRJU6 book 2021
Legal challenges in the new digital age
AHP4F4WY bookSection 2020 McLean, Jessica Digital Rights and Digital Justice: Defining and Negotiating Shifting Human–Technology Relations
CR89DPEX webpage
Disappearing acts: Content moderation and emergent practices to preserve at-risk human rights–related content – Anna Veronica Banchik, 2020
7GNG672H journalArticle 2021 Soh, Changrok; Connolly, Daniel New Frontiers of Profit and Risk: The Fourth Industrial Revolution’s Impact on Business and Human Rights
U9PM5A9G bookSection 2020 Dubois, Elizabeth; Martin-Bariteau, Florian Citizens and their political institutions in a digital context
H9XCGD2B journalArticle 2020 Franklin, M. I. Human rights futures and the digital: a radical research agenda
9YHNRB4Z journalArticle 2020 Introduction to A Research Agenda for Digital Politics
SLIB79XV journalArticle 2020 Davis, Sara L. M. The Trojan Horse: Digital Health, Human Rights, and Global Health Governance
FCTTWEHA journalArticle 2020 Bock, Mary Looking Up, Talking Back: Voice and Visibility as a Digital Human Right
966WSI6U journalArticle Dror-Shpoliansky, Dafna; Shany, Yuval It’s the End of the (Offline) World as We Know It: from Human Rights to Digital Human Rights – a Proposed Typology
24WAZ5SL journalArticle 2014 Mathiesen, Kay Human Rights for the Digital Age
P7IZGEMW book 2005
Human rights in the digital age
PTFJ63IM journalArticle 2021 Casanovas, Pompeu; Wishart, David; Chen, Jianfu The Digital World We Will Live By
Y7YLPHSJ journalArticle 2017 Walsham, Geoff ICT4D research: reflections on history and future agenda
6B5AA6Q6 bookSection 2017 Taylor, Linnet Safety in Numbers? Group Privacy and Big Data Analytics in the Developing World
Y8YVZIXZ conferencePaper 2020 Zhao, Man; Liao, Han-Teng; Sun, Si-Pan An Education Literature Review on Digitization, Digitalization, Datafication, and Digital Transformation
52RRKD64 journalArticle 2020 Mugge, Paul; Abbu, Haroon; Michaelis, Timothy L.; Kwiatkowski, Alexander; Gudergan, Gerhard Patterns of Digitization

Review

While I read a lot of abstracts, I have not read any of the papers in full and attempted to digest it. Thus, I can’t do a review of a single paper. However, my search and reading of abstracts has indicated to me that I should probably think of what I have encountered in this way:

Meta/Conceptual – These are both papers about how concepts like Human Rights, inclusion would be impacted by digitization. But also these are frameworks on how to do/thinking about digitization as a whole.

Domain Specific – These are papers that look at specific case studies or data on how digitalization in one domain (education, finance) and usually also some limited geography (Experiences with Financial Inclusion Digital Transformation in Peru… might be a title in this category). These will be important and useful to validate or challenge the meta/conceptual stuff.

Technology Specific – I am still not sure this is a real category in the work… but I get the feeling not everything I have picked fits in the last two. So this category might evolve. But for now I am seeing a group of papers that actually look at how specific affordances or specific elements in the topology of the global digital infrastructure impact a specific issue.

Dream Review

“This toolkit and training package was both immediately useful and thought-provoking. The material and facilitator did an excellent job getting us to look out into a more digitized future and project the kinds of sociopolitical changes that might lie just past the horizon. However, the real benefit of the toolkit was that it helped in bringing us back to today, and how those possible digital futures could be impacted by the choices my team makes on the humanitarian projects and program we are designing right now.” Project Manager, Rural Economic Empowerment