What are algorithms? Who and what do they involve? What do they do? What is at stake with them? How can we account for them? How can we respond to them?
Following on from the Field Guide to “Fake News”, A Field Guide To Algorithms aims to gather and curate different starting points, recipes, approaches, experiments in participation and activities for collective inquiry into algorithms and the collectives, cultures, infrastructures, imaginaries and practices associated with them.
See also:
This project explores online responses and activity associated with the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C (SR15) on YouTube following its release in October 2018.
The results can be found in the following paper:
Bounegru, L., De Pryck, K., Venturini, T., & Mauri, M. (2020). “We only have 12 years”: YouTube and the IPCC report on global warming of 1.5ºC. First Monday, 25(2). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v25i2.10112
This project explores digital cultures of climate change denial in collaboration with DeSmog and taking their Global Warming Disinformation Database as a starting point.
Image from “engaged research-led teaching” project undertaken with DeSmog, researchers and students at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London.
A research initiative to map and explore what “citizen-generated data” can do, with a particular focus on the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Led by the Public Data Lab, King’s College London, the médialab at Sciences Po and Open Knowledge International in collaboration with the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data and the UN Foundation.
Further details can be found at this blog post and in this report.
Responding to the World Health Organisation’s warning that misinformation related to COVID-19 constitutes an “infodemic,” this project studies conspiracy theories as a particularly seductive kind of misinformation.
Infodemic: Combatting COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories is using methods from digital humanities and cultural studies to understand how and why conspiracy narratives circulate in different platforms and online spaces during the crisis.
The methodologies include analysing the historical roots of the conspiracy theories now circulating, how they have mutated during the pandemic, and how they contribute to both community and division. The latter practices constitute a foundation for looking at who has been promoting and spreading them, what form they take on the various social media platforms, and why some theories have gained more traction than others. The project will also assess the effectiveness of the varying interventions by social media companies.
The project involves developing collaborative digital methods investigations with journalists, researchers and students as part of “engaged research led teaching” activities at King’s College London and the University of Amsterdam. This has contributed to a set of digital investigations recipes with First Draft a long read on investigating troubling content on Amazon with the European Journalism Centre as well as the following investigations: