[Air-L] Digital Methods Winter School '24 - Univ. Amsterdam

[rogers at govcom.org]

Digital Methods Winter School 2024

’Digital investigation with AI’

8-12 January 2024

New Media & Digital Culture
Media Studies
University of Amsterdam
Turfdraagsterpad 9
1012 XT Amsterdam
the Netherlands

Call for participation 

The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), Amsterdam, is holding its annual Winter School on ’Digital investigation with AI’. The format is that of a (social media and web) data sprint, with tutorials as well as hands-on work for telling stories with data. There is also a programme of keynote speakers. It is intended for advanced Master's students, PhD candidates and motivated scholars who would like to work on (and complete) a digital methods project in an intensive workshop setting.

Digital investigation with AI

Online information in the public domain has been the source of study of societal trends and cultural condition for some time now. Geo-located search queries and social media engagement have been deployed as proxies for interests, concerns and sentiments. For a variety of reasons from data access to algorithmic effects, there has been an easing away from trace research and at the same time a growing interest in digital investigation. It focuses less on trends and more on 'fact-finding' or 'what actually happened'. In a sense it is an understandable shift, given the impact of the 'fake news' crisis that transpired on social media during the U.S. presidential election of 2016 and subsequent votes in Europe and beyond. Since then there have been grander narratives of the current informational situation online such as the rise of a 'post-truth' era. To settle things down a variety of digital investigative epistemologies are the focus of attention from fact-checking, debunking and source and media verification to algorithmic auditing. They seek to address a wide variety of disruptions to the new media landscape, such as media and attention manipulation to continual influence and information campaigning and coordinated behaviour, whether with harmful intention or more ironic and troll-like. The Winter School takes up a series of questions concerning the investigative turn from the impact of disinformation and content moderation to the new conditions of artificiality and detection with AI.

At the Winter School there are the usual social media tool training tutorials for working on single and cross-platform analysis, but also continued attention to thinking through and proposing how to work critically with social media data, both from mainstream social media platforms as well as so-called alt tech.

Apart from the keynotes and the training tutorials, there are also empirical and conceptual projects that participants work on. To gain a flavour of the type of projects to expect, the past Summer School included these: 
# Disinformation Impact Assessment - Does the work of “opinion shapers” matter?
# Prompting for Biodiversity: Visual research with AI
# Hashtag and Genre Analysis #Seçim2023 on TikTok: Focusing on the Turkish Presidential Elections
# The Divine Online? Mapping Algorithmic Conspirituality on TikTok
# Testing LLMs for conflict & dialogue analysis on social media
# The force of falsity? When AI prompt guesses or narratives about debunked images sow more confusion about the fake
# Examining Web Detection Algorithms
# The Art in Artificial: AI as Co-Creation Storytelling Device
# Mapping post-truth narratives concerning the war in Ukraine
# Exploring the Impact of LLM-Powered Search Engines on Political Candidates
# Revolution By Other Memes: Online Subcultures, Modular Ideologies And The Political Compass
# From Ranking to Clustering Cultures: towards a time-varying network analysis of YouTube algorithms on Global Warming and Climate Change
# The Anatomy of (In)Direct Harassment 

Application information at https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/WinterSchool2024 

Winter School ’24 organisers: Richard Rogers, Kamila Koronska and Guillen Torres, Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. 

Best regards
Richard Rogers
Media Studies
University of Amsterdam