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Digital Methods events November 16 + 17

On November 16 and 17, Centre for Internet Studies and NetLab will host a series of events featuring Richard Rogers, Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and director of the Digital Methods Initiative.

Digital Methods (Rogers, 2013, MIT Press)

The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) is one of the leading research groups within Internet Studies, and they specialise in designing methods and tools for repurposing online devices and platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Google etc.) for research into social and political issues. Instead of migrating existing social science methods onto the web as is often the practice within the social sciences, DMI writes and repurposes tools specifically designed to run online. The DMI toolbox includes, among other things, tools that can extract URLs from different sources, scrape images, extract datasets from Facebook, scrape Pinterest for pins, capture tweets, extract data from YouTube, compare images across language versions of wikipedia etc. One of the most well-known tools developed by DMI is the Issue Crawler, a server-side Web crawler, co-link machine and graph visualizer, which maps online networks working in the same issue area (cf. https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/ToolIssueCrawler).

Richard Rogers is the author of Digital Methods (MIT Press, 2013), which won ICA’s Outstanding Book Award in 2014, The End of the Virtual (Amsterdam University Press, 2009), Information Politics on the Web (MIT Press, 2004/2005) and many other publications.

The two days will include:
1) A lecture with a broad introduction to Digital Methods, hosted by the Centre for Internet Studies. The lecture is open for all.
2) A workshop for researchers at Media Studies and Information Studies.
3) A workshop for students at Media Studies (all semesters, max. 25 students will be able to participate).
4) A talk (possibly also a short workshop) about Digital Methods and the archived web, hosted by NetLab Forum.

The exact schedule of events is still in the workings but we will return with more information and a way to sign up for one or more events after the holidays. It will also be possible to join pre-sessions on November 10, where Rogers’ book Digital Methods will be the topic of discussion. So for now, please save the dates if you are interested in joining! We hope to see many colleagues and students.