<rmm> Special Lecture 23 September - Digital Methods: Seemingly Intractable Issues

[Richard Rogers]

dear R.M.A. students,

You are invited and most welcome to attend this special lecture, and meet our guests from the University of the Free State (South Africa) who are also in attendance. The lecture presents the outcomes from the Digital Methods Summer School, New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam. Presentations by New Media PhD candidates are included. If you are able, do come! It is 23 September in the University Library at 11am to 1pm (11-13u.).

regards, Richard Rogers (New Media Professor)



LECTURE ANNOUNCEMENT 

Digital Methods: Seemingly Intractable Issues
By Richard Rogers and the Digital Methods Summer School Group including PhD candidates in New Media & Digital Culture

Organized by: New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam
Date & Time: Thursday, 23 September 2010, 11:00am - 1pm
Location:  University Library,  De Doelenzaal (Room C.007), Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam
Admission: free

The new media lecture is dedicated to digital methods, a term and program of research developed since 2007 at the University of Amsterdam [1]. Digital methods seek to analyze Web data in order to make findings about societal conditions and cultural change. Among the basic problems faced by digital methods researchers is the question of the status of Web data. Often considered messy, dirty, incomplete and otherwise reputationally challenged, under which conditions may Web data be seen as robust? Another set of fundamental problems concerns the idea of the Web as virtual, representational or otherwise having a special, ungrounded status. Where does the study of online culture end, and social and cultural research begin? When may the allegedly virtual be considered the baseline against which the real is measured and judged? 

The Web also has its recent specificities, which pose particular problems for digital methods researchers. Among them is the emergence of a new Web 'currency' - the 'like' and the 'share' buttons in social media. Digital methods, like search engines, have customarily relied on the hyperlink as a main unit of analysis. Are likes and shares challenging hyperlinks as the dominant, underlying calculation units of the Web? How would such acknowledgments change hierarchies of credibility on the Web, such as lists of relevant sources, or relevance more generally? In the case of the Gulf oil spill, do people tweet mainly news, and ignore governmental and scientific URLs? Do official information channels suffer in Web 2.0 ranking cultures? A second issue to be treated is the different paces per online space, exemplified by whether and when the ages of hyperlinks, posts and tweets matter. How do currency objects, particularly freshness, organize content per sphere? That is to say the pace of the various spheres vary, and comparing the websphere, the blogosphere, news sphere and the status update space (for example) should take into account how freshness is handled. Can the distinctive pacings be built into cross-spherical analysis -- a technique that ultimately investigates the quality of different online media spaces? Finally, from critiques of the web as workspace of amateurish content to the demise of directories and other librarian practices online, the Web has issues with content. Indeed, content is continually at risk on the Web from spambots and other content spoiling practices that foul especially wikis and comment spaces. In order to keep content intact, software bots, settings and other code are deployed, making content a rather technical affair online. Thus the Web may pose a problem for 'content analysis,' unless its technicity is considered. 

The presentation also includes findings from projects undertaken during the Digital Methods Summer School which explored popular claims about the Web. Among the research questions posed are, is there substance to the claim that Facebook is incapable of hosting activism? How do social media change the composition and the activities of social movements? The research projects to be presented include an investigation into two new forms of journalism. One emerging area of online investigative activity is "data-driven journalism." Arguably, interest in such a practice has been prompted by such seemingly diverse developments as the availability of online data visualization software (Wordle and IBM's Many Eyes), governmental data sets (data.gov), and leaked documents (as on wikileaks.org). Hans Rosling's Ted Talk about the Gapminder software was entitled, "No more boring data."  The Guardian called its reporting on the Afghan war diary "datajournalism." To investigate data-driven, citizen journalism we inquired into the use of the Afghan war diary - a set of official U.S. military reports detailing incidents in the war in Afghanistan. Are these documents and data being referenced by 'citizen journalists,' bloggers and other writers unaffiliated with traditional news organizations? The findings from the case study may go some way in developing what could be called the myth of citizen journalism.

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About this lecture

The presentation is a culmination of the 2010 Digital Methods Summer School by the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), a co-production of New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and the Govcom.org Foundation, Amsterdam, with generous support from the Faculty of Science, UvA. The Digital Methods Initiative and the Digital Methods Summer School are online at http://www.digitalmethods.net/.

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About the speakers

Richard Rogers holds the Chair in New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. Thomas Poell is Assistant Professor; Erik Borra is Docent; Anne Helmond, Sabine Niederer, Lonneke van der Velden and Esther Weltevrede are PhD candidates; and Catalina Iorga is a Research Master's candidate, all in New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam.
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Significant URLs

http://www.digitalmethods.net/
http://www.govcom.org/

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[1] See R. Rogers (2009). The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods. Amsterdam University Press. 
Hard copy: http://tinyurl.com/yb8vwlc
Pre-print: http://www.govcom.org/publications/full_list/oratie_Rogers_2009_preprint.pdf