Coordinator:

Richard Rogers

Participants:

Staff: Richard Rogers, Bernhard Rieder, Stefania Milan, Lonneke van der Velden, Esther Weltevrede, Marc Tuters, Anne Helmond, Sabine Niederer

PhD’s: Rebecca Kazansky, Natalia Sanchez Quérubin, Nadia Dresscher-Lambertus, Simeona Petkova

This project belongs to the following research constellations:

Description:

The Digital Methods project 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 (Woolgar, 2002; 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’ (Rogers, 2004). The web may have distinctive ways of recommending information (Sunstein, 2006). Which digital methods innovate with and also critically display the recommender culture that is at the heart of new media information environments?

Activities/Output:

monthly seminar, Summer and Winter Schools