Digital
Media Winter Institute 2019
28 January
– 1 February, 2019.
9:30 –
17:30 I #SMARTdatasprint I Research Blog I
Facebook
Group: SMART Data Sprint I @iNOVAmedialab
Universidade Nova de Lisboa I NOVA FCSH I iNOVA Media Lab
SMART Data Sprint is an intensive hands-on work, driven by online data and digital
methods. We adopt experimental and inventive ways of reading, seeing and
analysing platform data, with the aim of responding to a set of research
questions. For one week, participants will have the chance to attend keynote
lectures, short talks, and parallel sessions of practical labs. After that,
experts and scholars will invite participants to join projects and work in a
collective problem.
We are
pleased to announce that Richard Rogers (Professor of New Media & Digital
Culture, Media Studies, University of Amsterdam) is joining SMART Data Sprint 2019 with a keynote talk and practical labs. Rogers is Director of Govcom.org Foundation as well as the Digital Methods Initiative, and the 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)
and Digital Methods (MIT Press, 2013), awarded the 2014 Outstanding Book of the
Year by the International Communication Association (ICA).
SMART Data Sprint is open mainly to doctoral students and scholars. Master students,
non-academics, developers, research professionals, data journalists, designers,
and passionate about data and platform-led studies are also welcome. Our goal
is to collectively achieve concrete outcomes, creating the opportunity for
knowledge production and providing an environment in which participants can
equally contribute and benefit from one another’s expertise. We believe that:
1) new approaches for social media research can be collectively built and
designed through this experimental and exploratory process, and advanced by digital
methods; 2) the data sprint approach can trigger new possibilities for ongoing
digital research, as well as provide descriptions and a broad/narrow view on
the subject of study.
This year
SMART Data Sprint is committed to critically approach engagement: a key
parameter for web platforms studies, and a driver for scientific analysis and
critique. Digital engagement may connect with participation, interest,
contestation or support in different fields of society. It can also refer to
‘the language of sociality’ or a renewed currency in our societies [2], in
which stakeholders and diverse communities engage differently cross platforms.
A common research strategy to approach engagement is the use of the most
relevant or trending lists as sources of knowledge. In this scenario,
engagement research relates to visible practices, and its measures of analysis
tend to focus on high-visibility instead of ordinary lists [3] or opt for
marketing measures rather than other modes of engagement [4]. These visible and
prominent data are, actually, the output offered by platforms such as Google,
YouTube and Facebook, which sell the idea that “all activity is equally and
meritocratically available, visible, public, and potentially viral” [5].
Another
matter of concern in studying digital engagement is to account for the
different actors who may influence or boost public engagement: automated
beings. There is no novelty in affirming that bots, ad companies, and
applications play a crucial role in our daily digital life. In this context,
how to conduct engagement studies on web platforms? What are the alternative
approaches and ways of studying digital engagement?
SMART Data Sprint 2019 invites participants to go beyond visible engagement: foregrounding
digital practices and considering alternative metrics to measure other forms of
engagement – such as dominant voice, concern, commitment, positioning and
alignment, as proposed by Richard Rogers [5] in his Critical Analytics
approach. Additionally, we challenge participants to think critically about the
agency of bots, ad companies and algorithmic techniques embedded in digital
infrastructures. SMART Data Sprint 2019 is a call for investigating the domains
of engagement: activity, logic, structure and the vocabulary of actions
together with an understanding of the social relations [3]. It is also an
invitation to account engagement under unseen practices and the logic of both
human and non-human activities.
[1] The
Porn Similar Apps Network 2018 shows the logic of Google Play Store
recommendation algorithm. Analysis by Christina Meyenburg Dall Christensen,
Emanuela Blaiotta, Janna Joceli Omena, Maggie MacDonald, Shefali Bharati, and
Stephanie de Smale, DMI Summer School 2018.
[2] Marres, N. (2017). Digital sociology. Bristol: Polity
Press.
[3] Omena,J. J., Rabello, E., Mintz, A., Sanchez-Querubin,
N., Ozkula, S., Sued, G., Elbeyi, E. & Cicali, A. (2017). Visualising hashtag engagement: Imagery of political polarization on Instagram. DMI Summer School 2017.
Omena,
J.J.; Mintz, A.; Rabello, E. (2018). Hashtags are not the whole message: Approaching Hashtag Engagement Research. Instagram Conference 2018 – Studying
Instagram beyond selfies. Middlesex University, 1 June 2018, London.
[4] Rogers,
R. (2018). Otherwise Engaged: Social Media from Vanity Metrics to Critical
Analytics. International Journal of Communication : IJoC, 12, 450-472.
[5]
Tarleton Gillespie (24 ago 2017). The Platform Metaphor, Revisited (In this
text Gillespie presents the poles of what consists ‘the platform metaphor’:
what is emphasized/highlighted versus what is hidden/not captured – or what he
calls “the obscured aspects of platforms”. The main focus here is to discuss
and reflect on how web platforms downplay its hidden aspects).
Keynote
Talks and Practical Labs
We are glad
to receive Richard Rogers (University of Amsterdam), the director of Digital Methods Initiative and the author of Digital Methods (MIT Press, 2013), with a
keynote talk and practical labs.
An
International team of senior researchers, doctoral and master students will
also be leading Short Talks and Practical Labs. This year, the practical labs
will contemplate the following themes:
- Query Design
- Data Extraction Tools
- Querying App Stores
- Network Analysis with Gephi
- Image Networks
- YouTube Data Analysis
- Text Analysis with Antconc and Voyant Tools
- Raw Graphs
- Visual content analysis with Image Plot
Detailed
info on Practical Labs will be available for all SMART Data Sprint participants
(after the acceptance notification).
Deadline
for applications: 13 January 2019.
For further
information.
Learn more
about the data sprint approach in this video.
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