Marta Delatte
Marta Delatte (1982) is a Barcelona-based Internet scholar and Data Scientist, and the founder and research director of Liquen Data Lab.
Graduated in Journalism (URL), she continued her education with a PgDip in Cultural Management (URL), and later on, with a Masters Degree in Music as Interdisciplinary Art (UB). She completed her PhD in Digital Memory at the University of Hull as a member of the Media and Memory Research Initiative. Her thesis, The experience as a document, designing for the future of collaborative remembering in digital archives, was published in 2020.
She has taught ethics and co-creation processes at LCI Barcelona School of Higher Education in Design (Barcelona, 2017-2020), and participated as lecturer in the course Forms of (dis)appearing. Identity, affects and platform capitalism at IHB - CCCB (Barcelona, 2021). Previously she has collaborated as teacher assistant at the School of Drama, Music and Screen of the University of Hull (UK, 2015-2016), as guest educator for projects such as the European Commission Camp "Generation 1992" (Barcelona, July 2011) and for The Will to Live Center, a nonprofit, based in Hanoi, Vietnam, that provides free computer and life skills training courses to people with disabilities, in order to help them find employment and expand their autonomy (Hanoi, February-June 2011).
In 2009 she co-founded the digital lab www.ellenjames.net, where she acquired a systemic approach to the Internet ecology and an interdisciplinary eye for research inquiry in creative fields. In 2010 she authors the chapter on “Contemporary Art & Informational Society” for Enciclopedia Catalana Temàtica, and the paper “Música y tecnología: la eclosión de lo virtual en la composición sonora” for the academic journal Trípodos.
Interested in digital affordances in the performing arts, in 2012 she starts working with opera director Rafael R. Villalobos with the production "Dido&Aeneas, Mircroopera for a single performer" premiered at Espai Moritz in Barcelona (june 2012). In 2013 they team up again to win the 7th Europäische Opernregie-Preis Camerata Nuova/Opera Europa, that lead to premiere Noye's Fludde in Wiesbaden in 2013. As creative director at ellen james, she also participated as curator for the Sarajevo Winter Festival (2010/2012) after authoring an Ethical proposal on the conflict of the visual representation of war in the digital age in 2008.
In 2015 she was awarded with a Doctoral Scholarship at the Media and Memory Research Initiative of the University of Hull (UK) where she contributed to the discussion around knowledge discovery in creative archives. Her research focuses on designing for the participation of underrepresented communities in online spaces and mitigating gender gaps of participation both in organizational and technological systems like Wikipedia.
As doctoral researcher, in 2015 she participated at the conference "Feminist Research Methodologies: Challenges and Negotiations" at Sheffield Hallam University. In 2016 she also presented her research project "A user experience approach to the politics of information design" at Signal/Noise: A FemTechNet conference on pedagogy, technology and transdisciplinarity at the University of Michigan, and participated in the elaboration of the report "Making Labour Advocacy Urgent: Tactics and issue Rhetorics in the Worker's Rights Issue Space" at the CUHK Research Summit: Digital Methods & Social Development at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In 2017 she was invited to give a talk about creative archives and critical perspectives on UX design and research and present her work at the ACCUMULATION TECHNOLOGIES: DATABASES AND 'OTHER' ARCHIVES, an international symposium focused on archival practices conducted within the framework of the Research Project Global Art Archive (GAA), and organized by Art Globalization Interculturality (AGI) and the Faculty of Geography and History of the University of Barcelona. Since 2018, she has been collaborating with Art+Feminism in Barcelona, a global campaign to improve content about feminism and the arts in Wikipedia, and presented her research on gender and participation in digital platforms in multiple events, universities and conferences mainly in Barcelona and Madrid.
Under her leadership as founder since 2014, the independent reach group Liquen Data Lab has worked on research and curatorial projects with a strong focus on data justice, participating in the BCN Science Biennale and the BCN Philosophy Biennale, and elaborating multiple reports for the Barcelona City Council and the Catalan Government.
Dr. Delatte is a gardening enthusiast. Her last digital project “The Computer Garden” (2022) seeks to find a dialogue between two of her major passions: making accessible the prevention of gender based digital violence through gardening practices and vernacular knowledge on flowers.