Dear colleagues and friends,
We are pleased to invite you to join the public program of the online 1,5-day conference and data sprint “Witnessing and Justice in Data-based Research” on 31 March (full day) and 1 April (evening) to reflect upon the practices and limits of war-related research based on digital, archived and other types of data. The urgent question here is how to address the ongoing tension between such data-based research of war and the injustices that persist. Despite the large volume of data and the variety of ways in which Russia’s war in Ukraine has been documented, represented and analysed in order to expose its unjust nature and practices, the destruction and attacks against Ukraine persist. Data-based investigations using “data for the good” (cf. Williams, 2022; Kazansky et al., 2019) form a small part of achieving transitional justice and maintain hope and demand accountability by using digitally derived evidence of war injustices and crimes.
The event consists of two sessions that are open for the general public. The first open session takes place in the morning of 31 March and features a keynote talk by Oksana Avramenko, followed by a roundtable discussion with Jelnar Ahmad, Karina Buhaichenko, Yevheniia Drozdova, Oleksiy Radynski and Bohdan Shumylovych. The second session, which is also open to the public, will take place in the evening on 1 April and will consist of a roundtable discussion with Jenna Dolecek, Kaja Kowalczewska and Maryna Slobodyanuk. This will be followed by a screening of the film “A Home for Rita”, after which there will be a Q&A session with the director, Yulia Appen, and Sashko Protyah.
The event will also consist of a half-day closed data sprint on the afternoon of 31 March, during which participants from the previous data sprint will discuss their ongoing hands-on work with the Telegram Archive’s data. Due to the sensitive and ongoing nature of the research, this part will only be open to previous data sprint participants.
The programme outline is shared in the attachment. The final programme, including the Zoom links, will be sent to registered participants.
We invite scholars, activists, journalists, civic tech communities, and individuals interested in digital war studies to join the event online. To participate, please send a short email to warsensing@europa-uni.de by 29 March, expressing your interest to join the public programme. We will follow up with more details and the Zoom link.

With best regards,
On behalf of the CRC Media of Cooperation and the project teams “War Sensing” (European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder) with Prof. Dr. Miglė Bareikytė, Johanna Hiebl and Gregor Wörl, the Telegram Archive of the War (Center for Urban History, Lviv) with Oksana Avramenko and Maryana Mazurak and School of Communication (Dublin City University) with Prof. Dr. Tanya Lokot