The first day kicks off with Nathaniel Tkacz from the University of Warwick who will talk about Dashboards and Data Signals, and the desire to control the data deluge. The second keynote speaker is Carolin Gerlitz from the University of Amsterdam who will talk about new media metrics critique. Next a series of online media monitoring dashboards and methods will be presented. The Dutch design agency Clever Franke will show TrendViz. Soenke Lorenzen of Greenpeace International, Eoin Dubsky of SumOfUs, Dounia Kchiere of UNICEF, and Christian Teriete of TckTckTck will be talking about media monitoring at their respective organisations. Next will be project pitches by Ria Voorhaar of the Climate Action Network, Danie Stockmann of Leiden University, Jonathan Gray of the Open Knowledge Foundation and Alberto Abellan of Social Alto Analytics.
The annual Digital Methods Mini-Conference at the Winter School, normally a one-day affair, provides the opportunity for digital methods and allied researchers to present short yet complete papers (5,000-7,500 words) and serve as respondents, providing feedback. Often the work presented follows from previous Digital Methods Summer Schools. The mini-conference accepts papers in the general digital methods and allied areas: the hyperlink and other natively digital objects, the website as archived object, web historiographies, search engine critique, Google as globalizing machine, cross-spherical analysis and other approaches to comparative media studies, device cultures, national web studies, Wikipedia as cultural reference, the technicity of (networked) content, post-demographics, platform studies, crawling and scraping, graphing and clouding, and similar.
The fee for the Digital Methods Winter School 2015 is EUR 295. Bank transfer information will be sent along with the notification on 9 December 2014. The Winter School is self-catered. The venue is in the center of Amsterdam with abundant coffee houses and lunch places. Participants are expected to find their own housing (airbnb and other short-stay sites are helpful). During the week there is an evening at the Royal Academy with Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia. The Winter School closes on Friday with a festive event, after the final presentations. Here is a guide to the Amsterdam new media scene. For further questions, please contact the organizers, Liliana Bounegru, Natalia Sanchez and Saskia Kok, at [log in to unmask].
The Digital Methods Winter School is part of the Digital Methods Initiative, Amsterdam, dedicated to reworking method for Internet-related research. The Digital Methods Initiative holds the annual Digital Methods Summer Schools (eight to date), which are intensive and full time 2-week undertakings in the Summertime. The 2015 Summer School will take place 29 June - 10 July 2015. The coordinators of the Digital Methods Initiative are Sabine Niederer and Esther Weltevrede (PhD candidates in New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam), and the director is Richard Rogers, Professor of New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam. Liliana Bounegru is the managing director. Digital methods are online at http://www.digitalmethods.net/. The DMI about page includes a substantive introduction, and also a list of Digital Methods people, with bios. DMI holds occasional Autumn and Spring workshops, such as recent ones on mapping climate change and vulnerability indexes as well as on studying right-wing extremism and populism online. There is also a Digital Methods book (MIT Press, 2013), papers and articles by DMI researchers as well as Digital Methods tools.
See you in the winter time in Amsterdam!
Image credit:
Online resonance of the international climate change issue agenda, EMAPS data sprint, Amsterdam, April 2014.