Day 1: Richard Rogers, Chair in New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam. He is Director of Govcom.org, the group responsible for the Issue Crawler and other info-political tools, and the Digital Methods Initiative, reworking method for Internet research. Rogers is author of Information Politics on the Web (MIT Press, 2004), awarded the 2005 best book of the year by the American Society of Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T). Current research interests include Internet censorship, googlization, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on the Web, as well as the post-demographics implied by recommender systems.
"Digital Methods"
Abstract: Digital studies on culture may be distinguished from cultural studies of the digital at least in terms of method. The lecture takes up the question of the distinctiveness of ‘digital methods’ for researching Internet cultures. It asks, initially, should the methods of study change, however slightly or wholesale, given the specificity of the new medium? The larger digital methods project thereby engages with ‘virtual methods,’ the current, dominant ‘e-science’ approach to the study of the Internet, and the consequences for research of importing standard methods from the social sciences in particular. What kinds of contributions are made to digital media studies, and the Internet in particular, when traditional methods are imported from the social sciences and the humanities onto the medium? Which research opportunities are foreclosed? Second, I ask, what kinds of new approaches are worthwhile, given an emphasis on the ‘natively digital’ as opposed to digitization. The goal is also to change the focus of humanities and humanities computing away from the opportunities afforded by transforming ink into bits, and instead inquires into both the ‘born digital’ as well as digital-only cultures, that is, the ‘technicity of content’ and the environments that sustain it. In all, the effort is to develop and disseminate novel approaches to the study of natively digital objects (the link, the tag, etc.) and devices (engines and other recommendation machines). It does so by critically reviewing existing approaches to the study of the digital, and subsequently by proposing research strategies that follow the medium. That is, how do digital objects and the devices that capture them change the order of things? How may one demonstrate the ‘media effects’ of a device-centric information culture? The lecture launches a novel strand of study, digital methods.
Day 2: Noshir Contractor, Northwestern University, the Jane S. &
William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the School of
Engineering, School of Communication and the Kellogg School of
Management at Northwestern University, USA. He is the Director of
the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at
Northwestern University. He is investigating factors that lead to
the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of dynamically linked
social and knowledge networks in communities. Specifically, his
research team is developing and testing theories and methods of
network science to map, understand and enable more effective
networks in a wide variety of contexts including communities of
practice in business, science and engineering communities, disaster
response teams, public health networks, digital media and learning
networks, and in virtual worlds, such as Second Life.
"Digital Traces: An Exploratorium for Understanding & Enabling Social Networks"
Abstract: Recent advances provide comprehensive digital traces of social actions, interactions, and transactions. These data provide an unprecedented Exploratorium to model the socio-technical motivations for creating, maintaining, dissolving, and reconstituting knowledge and social networks. Using examples from research in a wide range of activities such as disaster response, digital media and learning, public health and massively multiplayer online games (WoW - the World of Warcraft), Contractor will propose how YouTube can serve as a testbed to help advance our understanding of the emergence of social and knowledge networks.
