Investigating Cybercrime in Brazil: A Transdisciplinary Analysis via Digital Humanities

Cybercrime is a global social phenomenon. It is evolving and is not limited to traditional physical borders. The rise of digital society has substantially impacted the world of crime with changes in typology. Despite being considered one of the most significant risks, cybercrimes are still understudied by Digital Humanities (DH). In Brazil, the task of combating cybercrime is given to the public security forces (PSF) at the state and federal levels. However, the Brazilian PSF acts in isolation at the state level and is out of sync with the requirements of national data integration, making it challenging to face the agility of criminal networks. This work presents a novel transdisciplinary cybercrime investigation, with the Brazilian public security scenario as its scope. The methodology adopted was a systematic review of the literature and a case study. As a contribution, a strategy was developed to collect and process public corpora on cybercrime from at least 30 Brazilian PSF structures and to produce open datasets related to the most common cybercrimes in Brazil. The results show qualitative and quantitative statistical and text analyses on data sets comprising five years of criminal data records. As a contribution, a conceptual computational framework is presented to aid citizens and the PSF in evaluating cybercrime occurrences. This investigation is significant because it is aligned with the Brazilian current scenario and is in line with the recommendations made by the international PSF to combat cybercrime.