[ecrea] Call for participation - Digital Methods Winter School 2017 - Amsterdam

*Call for applications - Digital Methods Winter School 2017 - Amsterdam*
*Data infrastructures: Database stories, dumps and query driven narratives*

*Digital Methods Winter School 2017 *
Amsterdam
9-13 January 2017
https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/WinterSchool2017

Everyday Winter School location:
Digital Methods Initiative
University of Amsterdam
Turfdraagsterpad 9
1012 XT Amsterdam

*Digital Methods Winter School, Data Sprint and Mini-Conference *
The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), Amsterdam, is holding its annual 
Winter School on Data Infrastructures. The format is that of a (social 
media and web) data sprint, with hands-on work for telling stories with 
data, together with a programme 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. Participants need not give a paper at 
the Mini-conference to attend the Winter School. For a preview of what 
the event is like, you can view short video clips from previous editions 
of the Summer School in 2015 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nTxwl_kA5I> and 2014 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0BHzUefGqA>.
The DMI Winter School is pleased to have Geoffrey Bowker (Univ 
California Irvine) give the opening keynote. He is author (among other 
works) <https://mitpress.mit.edu/authors/geoffrey-c-bowker> of /Memory 
Practices in the Sciences/ and (with Susan Leigh Star) /Sorting Things 
Out: Classification and its Consequences/, both published by MIT Press.
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.
These data infrastructures have in common with ‘information 
infrastructures’ studied by G. Bowker and S. Leigh Star often enormous 
assemblages of socio-epistemological work invisible to the "the 
user-at-terminal”. The entire project of scanning the library books and 
putting into place the query infrastructure, the n-gram viewer, of 
Google Books (to mention another data infrastructure Bowker also pointed 
to) has been called ‘infrastructuring,’ which may be mapped out with 
considerable effort. Indeed, certain of the data collection work — 
whether vast and automated, laborious and manual and/or stealthy — as 
well as its ‘databasing’ have been visualised in a form of 
deconstruction that strives to demonstrate the crucial choices about 
what to collect and make available to the web browser user. For example, 
Facebook no longer makes friends data accessible, so as to enhance user 
privacy but it also forestalls research opportunities such as a like 
analysis of Donald Trump’s friends. This is one contribution digital 
methods may make to data infrastructure studies by providing a critical 
diagnostics of infrastructure by examining the data fields available and 
outputted by the query machine, and the limitations inhering therein.
Researchers may reverse engineer the query design and initial outputs, 
as was the case with the studies of the ICWatch database (on 
surveillance workers) and the JD database (concerning Fukushima). In an 
exploration of the ICWatch database, an activist project that sourced 
intelligence workers' profiles from the social networking sites, 
LinkedIn and Indeed, researchers also provided network-analytical 
techniques to clean the database, making the open secrets more credible 
but also created a typical profile of the surveillance worker. In the 
Fukushima project researchers found with the use of an historical tweet 
collection-maker that to check and enrich the (limited) Twitter data set 
about the Fukushima debates would cost over $10,000.

Apart from such critical diagnostics, or the identification of the 
mechanisms behind the outputs served, digital methods may also repurpose 
original or typical uses of the databases, and re-narrate the data space 
and thus the kind of stories they may tell. Stories told from Wikileaks 
data, for example, often concern how the release of the confidential is 
endangering or benefits certain states. Indeed one recent narrative (in 
the New York Times) has it that the leaks benefit the Russian 
government. Could Wikileaks be put to uses that Julian Assange once 
called ’scientific journalism’ or tell data stories of other kinds? In 
one brief study researchers found that Wikileaks data (Afghan warlogs) 
is rarely used by journalists and bloggers, hardly linking to the 
original leak as Assange once envisaged. When stories were told, they 
typically were scandalous, national stories (e.g., supposed military 
cover-ups).

The 2017 Digital Methods Winter School critiques and repurposes data 
infrastructures and dumps online so as to re-narrate their current 
dominant uses.
**
*References*
**

  * Infrastructuring, “the user-at-terminal” and Bowker’s remarks on
    Google Books, http://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/61986
  * Facebook Algorithmic Factory by Share Lab,

https://labs.rs/en/facebook-algorithmic-factory-immaterial-labour-and-data-harvesting/
  * Exploration of the ICWatch database, Digital Methods project,

https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/WinterSchool2016CareersInTheSurveillanceIndustry
  * Exploration of the JD Archive (Fukushima), Digital Methods project,
    https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/DmiSummer2014MappingTheJDArchive
  * Faces of the dead, /New York Times/,
    http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/us/faces-of-the-dead.html?_r=0
  * The Counted, /The Guardian/,

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database
  * Migrant Files, http://www.themigrantsfiles.com
    <http://www.themigrantsfiles.com/>
  * Wikileaks and data-driven user-generated journalism, Digital Methods
    project, https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/DataDrivenUserJournalism


*Digital Methods Mini-Conference at the Winter School*
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.

*Applications: Key dates*
The deadline for application is 17 November 2016. To apply please send 
along a letter of motivation, your CV (including postal address), a 
headshot photo, 100-word bio as well as a copy of your passport (details 
page only) to winterschool [at] digitalmethods.net 
<http://digitalmethods.net/>. Notifications of acceptance will be sent 
on 18 November. If you are participating in the mini-conference the 
deadline for submission of your paper is 2 December. The mini-conference 
takes place on Friday 13 January 2016. Please send your mini-conference 
paper to winterschool[at] digitalmethods.net <http://digitalmethods.net/>
. To attend the Winter School, you need not participate in the 
mini-conference. The full program and schedule of the Winter School and 
Mini-conference are available on 4 January 2017.

*Fees & Logistics*
The fee for the Digital Methods Winter School 2017 is EUR 695 (both 
credits and non-credits options), and upon completion participants 
receive certificates and/or 6 ECTS. To complete the Winter School 
successfully all participants must co-present the final presentation and 
co-author the final project report, evidenced by the presentation slides 
as well as the final report itself. Bank transfer information is sent 
along with the notification on 15 November 2016. Participants must pay 
the fee by 22 December 2016. Students at the University of Amsterdam do 
not pay fees. Participants from LERU 
<http://www.leru.org/index.php/public/home/> as well as U21 
<http://www.universitas21.com/member>universities receive a tuition 
waver of EUR 500 
<http://www.uva.nl/en/education/other-programmes/summer-winter/scholarships/scholarships.html#anker-scholarships-for-participants-from-leru-and-u21-partner-universities>. 
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), or we have available accommodations at the Student Hotel:

The Student Hotel Amsterdam
Jan van Galenstraat 335
1061 AZ Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Tel: +31 20 760 4000
info-amsterdam [at] thestudenthotel.com <http://thestudenthotel.com/>
Arrival: 8 January 2017
Departure: 14 January 2017
The Student Hotel Amsterdam West website 
<https://www.thestudenthotel.com/amsterdam-west>

If you would like to have accommodations at the Student Hotel, please 
write to the student hotel directly. To avoid disappointment, please 
write to them as early as possible.

The Winter School closes on Friday with a festive event, after the final 
presentations. Here is a guide to the Amsterdam new media scene 
<https://www.digitalmethods.net/MoM/NewMediaAmsterdam>. For further 
questions, please contact the organizers, Alex Gekker, Jonathan Gray and 
Liliana Bounegru at winterschool [at] digitalmethods.net 
<http://digitalmethods.net>.

Please bring your laptop computer, your European plug as well as the VGA 
adaptor for connecting to the projector.

*About DMI*
The Digital Methods Winter School is part of the Digital Methods 
Initiative (DMI), Amsterdam, dedicated to developing methods for 
Internet-related research. The Digital Methods Initiative holds the 
annual Digital Methods Summer Schools 
<https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/DmiSummerSchool> (ten to date), 
which are intensive and full time, 2-week undertakings in the 
Summertime. The 2017 Summer School (dedicated to ‘Visual Methodologies’) 
will take place from 26th June to the 7th July 2017.
The /Digital Methods/ <http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/digital-methods> 
book (MIT Press, 2015) provides an introduction to the methodological 
outlook that frames and informs the work of the DMI. There is also a 
companion volume about mapping social and political issues with digital 
methods: /Issue Mapping for an Ageing Europe/ 
<http://en.aup.nl/books/9789089647160-issue-mapping-for-an-ageing-europe.html>//(Amsterdam 
University Press, 2015), which is also freely available on the web 
<http://www.oapen.org/download?type=document&docid=569806> as an open 
access monograph. Further information and resources about digital 
methods can be found at digitalmethods.net 
<http://www.digitalmethods.net/> - including links to example projects 
<https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/ProjectsByTheme>, publications 
<https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/PapersPublications> and tools 
<https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/ToolDatabase> as well as an 
introductory "founding narrative 
<https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/MoreIntro>" about the Digital 
Methods Initiative and details about associated researchers 
<https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/DmiPeople>.
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.

*Social*
For those of you that use Twitter we are using the #DMI17 hashtag 
<https://twitter.com/search?q=DMI17> as the backchannel for 
communication. Some pictures from Winter School 2015 
<https://www.flickr.com/photos/130167703@N08>. Here is the Facebook 
Group <https://www.facebook.com/groups/DMIWinterSchool2015/> from one 
year. Here are pictures from a variety of DMI Summer and Winter School 
<https://www.flickr.com/search/?text=digital%20methods> flickr streams.


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