News/Research

Abigail De Kosnik's Alpha 60 Featured in Daily Cal's Innovation Round Up

01 Jun, 2017

Abigail De Kosnik's Alpha 60 Featured in Daily Cal's Innovation Round Up

TDPS and BCNM professor Abigail De Kosnik's work on Alpha60, a BCNM seed grant funded digital humanities tool, was recently featured in "Innovation Right in Berkeley's Backyard" an article by Camryn Bell and Imad Pasha in the Daily Cal.

From the article:

Alpha60 is a data scraper and geospatialization tool pioneered on the UC Berkeley campus. The tool tracks the number of people uploading and downloading files to BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol. It essentially quantifies and maps data on global unauthorized media access.

According to Abigail de Kosnik, project director and an assistant professor in the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies, alpha60 works as a ratings system for TV piracy. The tool can show the spread of pirate activity of a given TV show and can show the shape of “pirate archipelagos,” or physical sites where illicit media sharing occurs.

Read the rest of the article here.