About

What is this?

This project, “alpha60,” is a data science/computational humanities research project by Abigail De Kosnik (Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley) and Benjamin De Kosnik (software engineer and artist). It uses a suite of custom software tools and analytical methods to examine and archive peer to peer activity; is can be thought of as a data scraper that quantifies and maps BitTorrent traffic—the number and location of downloaders (or “peers”) and of uploaders (or “seeds”)—around specific digital media files (“torrents”).

Privacy-preserving results are in the public domain as the following  data forms, and are updated regularly.