Call for Applications – Digital Methods Winter School 2017 in Amsterdam

“Data infrastructures provide the conditions of possibility for social action as well as ways of seeing the world. Among them, online data infrastructures these days range widely from social media API query environments as Facebook’s and Twitter’s and secrets repositories and dumps as Wikileaks to interactive databases of missing migrants, uncounted police killings as well as war deaths put together by social researchers and leading newspapers such as the New York Times and the Guardian. Beneath them are data collection regimes with multifarious goals such as corporate data science, state data transparency and investigative data journalism.”

The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), Amsterdam, is holding its annual Winter School on Data Infrastructures. The 2017 Digital Methods Winter School critiques and repurposes data infrastructures and dumps online so as to re-narrate their current dominant uses. Keynote speaker: Geoffrey Bowker (Univ California Irvine).

Deadline for Application: 17 November 2016

Deadline for Submission of Paper: 2  December

Program Dates: 9-13 January 2017, mini conference 13th

Participants need not give a paper at the Mini-conference to attend Winter School

Visit conference links above for complete information.

 

The format is that of a (social media and web) data sprint, with hands-on work for telling stories with data, together with a program of keynote speakers and a Mini-conference, where PhD candidates, motivated scholars and advanced graduate students present short papers on digital methods and new media related topics, and receive feedback from the Amsterdam DMI researchers and international participants.

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.

Preview of what the event is like, view the Summer School in 2015

A guide to the Amsterdam new media scene 

Application Procedure : send the following and mini-conference paper to winterschool@digitalmethods.net

• letter of motivation
• CV (including postal address)
• headshot photo
• 100-word bio
• copy of your passport (details page only)

For further questions, please contact the organizers, Alex Gekker, Jonathan Gray and Liliana Bounegru at winterschool@digitalmethods.net

The coordinators of the Digital Methods Initiative are Dr. Sabine Niederer and Dr. Esther Weltevrede, and the director is Richard Rogers, Professor of New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam. Liliana Bounegru is the managing director.