When 22-year-old Mahsa (Zhina) Amini died in Iranian morality police custody in September 2022, the #MahsaAmini hashtag was used 350+ million times coordinating Iran's longest protest movement. Simultaneously, the Iranian regime deployed internet shutdowns, surveillance, and computational propaganda to suppress evidence. This presentation examines a GraphCommons network visualization project that documents the Women, Life, Freedom movement's digital infrastructure as an act of what data feminist Catherine D'Ignazio calls "counterdata science"—challenging authoritarian information monopolies by making visible connection patterns states attempt to erase. Using virtual ethnography methodology, this project maps how hashtags, activists, organizations, and supporters connected across Twitter and Instagram revealing patterns invisible to conventional documentation. The color-coded network visualization exposes how diaspora activists functioned as vital bridges maintaining information flow when domestic internet was severed for weeks, how multilingual networks connected women across the globe, and how the movement's digital infrastructure adapted to state repression in real time. This project contributes to critical DH conversations about documentation under authoritarianism while raising urgent ethical questions: How do we archive resistance when documentation endangers activists? What does feminist data preservation look like when surveillance extends transnationally into diaspora communities? The visualization deliberately refuses institutional archiving, maintained instead under personal control to prioritize activist safety—demonstrating that in authoritarian contexts, the politics of who controls archives matters as much as what gets preserved. Drawing on feminist DH principles, transnational feminist theory, and digital authoritarianism scholarship, this presentation argues that network visualization becomes activist practice itself in contexts where regimes control official narratives. By documenting transnational solidarity networks sustaining Iranian women's resistance, the project demonstrates how Global South activists innovate digital documentation strategies under extreme constraint—offering methodological insights for documenting activism globally while centering ethical commitments to community governance of data and activist security over academic extraction.
Niloufar Esmaeili (Fri,) studied this question.