Month: December 2024

Job: Digital Methods Research Associate at Media of Cooperation, University of Siegen

Posted on | by Public Data Lab

The Media of Cooperation Research Centre at the University of Siegen is hiring a Digital Methods Research Associate. Further details can be found here and copied below.

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Job title: Research Associate – Digital Methods / Scientific Programmer (SFB 1187)

Area: Faculty I – Faculty of Philosophy | Scope of position: full-time | Duration of employment: limited | Advertisement ID: 6274

We are an interdisciplinary and cosmopolitan university with currently around 15,000 students and a range of subjects from the humanities, social sciences and economics to natural sciences, engineering and life sciences. With over 2,000 employees, we are one of the largest employers in the region and offer a unique environment for teaching, research and further education.

In Faculty I – Faculty of Philosophy, SFB 1187 Media of Cooperation, we are looking for a research assistant in the field of Digital Methods/Scientific Programming as soon as possible under the following conditions:

100% = 39.83 hours

Salary group 13 TV-L

limited until December 31, 2027

YOUR TASKS

  • Support in the development and teaching of digital research methods within the framework of the SFB Media of Cooperation and teaching in the media studies courses.
  • Development, implementation and updating of software tools for working with digital research methods, as well as further development of existing open source research software, such as 4CAT.
  • Support in the collection, analysis and visualization of data from online media within the framework of the research projects of the SFB Media of Cooperation, especially in the area of ​​social media platforms, audiovisual platforms, generative AI, apps and sensory media.
  • Administration and maintenance of the digital research infrastructure for data collection, archiving and analysis
  • Participation in the planning and implementation of media science research projects
  • Technical support for workshops and events
  • Networking with developers of research software, also internationally
  • Teaching obligation: 4 semester hours per week

YOUR PROFILE

  • Completed academic university degree (diploma, master’s, magister, teaching qualification, comparable foreign degree) in computer science, business informatics, media studies or a related discipline
  • Experience with system administration and support of server environments (Linux) as well as the operation of web-based applications (e.g. 4CAT)
  • Very good knowledge of developing applications with Python and database systems (MySQL or similar) or willingness to deepen this
  • Basic knowledge of web development with JavaScript, PHP, HTML, CSS, XML or willingness to acquire this
  • Affinity for working with data from platforms, apps, web or other data-intensive media, for example using scraping or API Retrieval
  • Ability to work in a team, creativity and very good communication skills
  • Fluent written and spoken English
  • Experience in the conception and development of research software and interest in supporting the research of the SFB Media of Cooperation

OUR OFFER

  • Promotion of your own scientific or artistic qualification in accordance with the Scientific Temporary Employment Act
  • Various opportunities to take on responsibility and make a visible contribution in the field of research and teaching
  • A modern understanding of leadership and collaboration
  • Good compatibility of work and private life, for example through flexible working hours and place of work as well as support with childcare
  • Comprehensive personnel development program
  • Health management with a wide range of prevention and advice services

We look forward to receiving your application by December 24, 2024.

Please only apply via our job portal (https://jobs.uni-siegen.de.) Unfortunately, we cannot consider applications in paper form or by email.

German language skills are nice to have, but not required.

Contact: Prof. Dr. Carolin Gerlitz

New chapter on “#amazonfires and the online composition of ecological politics” in Digital Ecologies book

Posted on | by Public Data Lab

How are digital objects – such as hashtags, links, likes and images – involved in ecological politics?

Public Data Lab researchers Liliana Bounegru, Gabriele Colombo and Jonathan Gray explore this in a new chapter on “#amazonfires and the online composition of ecological politics” as part of a book on digital ecologies: mediating more-than-human worlds which has just been published on Manchester University Press.

Here’s the abstract for the chapter:

How are digital objects such as hashtags, links, likes and images involved in the production of forest politics? This chapter explores this through collaborative research on the dynamics of online engagement with the 2019 Amazon forest fires. Through a series of empirical vignettes with visual materials and data from social media, we examine how digital platforms, objects and devices perform and organise relations between forests and a wide variety of societal actors, issues, cultures – from bots to boycotts, agriculture to eco-activism, scientists to pop stars, indigenous communities to geopolitical interventions. Looking beyond concerns with the representational (in-)fidelities of forest media, we consider the role of collaborative methodological experiments with co-hashtag networks, cross-platform analysis, composite images and image-text variations in tracing, eliciting and unfolding the digital mediation of ecological politics. Thinking along with research on the social lives of methods, we consider the role of digital data, methods and infrastructures in the composition and recomposition of problems, relations and ontologies of forests in society.

Here’s the book blurb:

Digital ecologies draws together leading social science and humanities scholars to examine how digital media are reshaping the futures of conservation, environmentalism, and ecological politics. The book offers an overview of the emerging field of interdisciplinary digital ecologies research by mapping key debates and issues in the field, with original empirical chapters exploring how livestreams, sensors, mobile technologies, social media platforms, and software are reconfiguring life in profound ways. The collection traverses contexts ranging from animal exercise apps, to surveillance systems on the high seas, and is organised around the themes of encounters, governance, and assemblages. Digital ecologies also includes an agenda-setting intervention by the book’s editors, and three closing chapter-length provocations by leading scholars in digital geographies, the environmental humanities, and media theory that set out trajectories for future research.