Michael Seemann: Knowing Is Asking the Right Questions

"Proposition: In the Old Game, it was important who was storing which information and to what purpose. But what counts in the New Game, by that measure, is how information is retrieved. This shift of focus does not only change our attitude towards knowledge, but also touches on the power structures inherent in any kind of knowledge."

(Michael Seemann, 2014, p.25)

Michael Seemann (2014). 'Digital Tailspin: Ten Rules for the Internet After Snowden'

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The Digital Methods Initiative

Call for Participation – Digital Methods Summer School 2014, On Geolocation: Remote Event Analysis (Mapping Conflicts, Disasters, Elections and other Events with Online and Social Media Data), 23 June – 4 July 2014

"The Digital Methods Initiative is a contribution to doing research into the 'natively digital'. Consider, for example, the hyperlink, the thread and the tag. Each may 'remediate' older media forms (reference, telephone chain, book index), and genealogical histories remain useful (Bolter/Grusin, 1999; Elsaesser, 2005; Kittler, 1995). At the same time new media environments – and the software–makers – have implemented these concepts, algorithmically, in ways that may resist familiar thinking as well as methods (Manovich, 2005; Fuller, 2007). In other words, the effort is not simply to import well–known methods – be they from humanities, social science or computing. Rather, the focus is on how methods may change, however slightly or wholesale, owing to the technical specificities of new media.

The initiative is twofold. First, we wish to interrogate what scholars have called 'virtual methods,' ascertaining the extent to which the new methods can stake claim to taking into account the differences that new media make (Hine, 2005). Second, we desire to create a platform to display the tools and methods to perform research that, also, can take advantage of 'web epistemology'. The web may have distinctive ways of recommending information (Rogers, 2004; Sunstein, 2006). Which digital methods innovate with and also critically display the recommender culture that is at the heart of new media information environments?

Amsterdam–based new media scholars have been developing methods, techniques and tools since 1999, starting with the Net Locator and, later, the Issue Crawler, which focuses on hyperlink analysis (Govcom.org, 1999, 2001). Since then a set of allied tools and independent modules have been made to extend the research into the blogosphere, online newssphere, discussion lists and forums, folksonomies as well as search engine behavior. These tools include scripts to scrape web, blog, news, image and social bookmarking search engines, as well as simple analytical machines that output data sets as well as graphical visualizations.

The analyses may lead to device critiques – exercises in deconstructing the political and epistemological consequences of algorithms. They may lead to critical inquiries into debates about the value and reputation of information."

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Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight

20 February – 26 May 2014, Folio Society Gallery; admission free, London.

"Turning numbers into pictures that tell important stories and reveal the meaning held within is an essential part of what it means to be a scientist. This is as true in today's era of genome sequencing and climate models as it was in the 19th century.

Beautiful Science explores how our understanding of ourselves and our planet has evolved alongside our ability to represent, graph and map the mass data of the time.

From John Snow's plotting of the 1854 London cholera infections on a map to colourful depictions of the tree of life, discover how picturing scientific data provides new insight into our lives."

(The British Library)

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Raspberry Pi Box Lunch with Miller Puckette

Tinder: swiping yes to intimate invitations from relative strangers

"Tinder uses your existing social networking data from Facebook to locate people in the immediate vicinity, tell you a bit about them, whether you have any friends in common and (most importantly) show you a pic.

It has slimmed down the emotional, cognitive and financial investment required by the virtual dating process to one simple question: 'Do I want to do you?' What more modern way to make that most basic binary decision of whether you want to shag someone than a game of real–world 'Hot or Not'?

Social media has made us expert first–daters, well–versed in smalltalk and over–sharing with strangers. The quick follow–though from swipe to sex is similarly instinctive for a generation with an appetite for immediacy."

(Caroline Kent, 19 Sep 2013)

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