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:
How can we share different ways of doing things with digital data, methods and infrastructures? How can text, images, video, GIFs and other materials be used to provide accounts of digital methods, cultivate sensibilities towards interpretive work, surface tacit knowledge and encourage reflection on decisions, tools, devices, assumptions and materials?
This is a project to gather, exchange and share digital methods recipes and “how-tos” for research, teaching and collaborations from across the Public Data Lab.
You can see a preview of some of these here: http://recipes.publicdatalab.org/
A set of recipes developed as a collaboration between digital methods researchers at the Public Data Lab and digital journalists at First Draft can be found at: https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/digitalrecipes/
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: