The great Romanian election TikTok replay

In December 2024, the European Commission launched an investigation following “serious indications that foreign actors interfered in the Romanian presidential elections using TikTok.” The elections have been described as a “first big test” for “Europe’s digital police” and the Digital Services Act.

In January 2025 a group of us met at the Digital Methods Winter School at the University of Amsterdam to explore how TikTok was used during and after the elections.

We explored ways of playing back election TikTok video collections to understand what happened.

We experimented with formats for retrospective display – drawing inspiration from creative coding, algorithmic composition, multiperspective live action replays, and the aesthetics of forensic reconstruction.

Following research on visual methods for studying folders of images (Niederer and Colombo, 2024; Colombo, Bounegru & Gray, 2023) and analytical metapicturing (Rogers, 2021), these formats display multiple videos simultaneously to surface patterns and resonances across them.

Beyond evaluating informational content, group replay formats can also highlight the everyday situations, aesthetics and affective dimensions of election TikTok videos – from sexualised lip-syncing to rousing AI anthems, sponsored micro-influencer testimonials to post-communist nationalist nostalgia.

We explored two approaches for critically replaying Romanian election videos: making video composites based on viral candidate soundtracks, and making post-election hashtag soundscapes. For the former we used a Python script to display videos by theme and adjust opacity according to play count. For the latter we used soundscaping scripts developed as part of the Forestscapes project.

For the video composites we used as case studies two viral soundtracks associated with ultranationalist Călin Georgescu and the centre-right, pro-EU, Save Romania Union candidate Elena Lasconi.

Our preliminary findings indicate that successful pro-Georgescu propaganda using the “SustinCalin Georgescu” soundtrack relies on memetic imitation of the message and affective resonances of the song. TikTok influencers and everyday users translate these into popular formats such as lipsyncs and ASMR videos effectively blending textual, visual, and audio elements.

Gender, sexuality and race are prominent themes in the most engaged with propagandist videos for both campaigns. In pro-Georgescu content, popular endorsement videos often feature white women in either sexualised roles or domestic family settings. Homophobic and transphobic videos with male characters in dresses parody the opponent’s and her party’s association with LGBTQ issues, fuelling the audience’s strong emotions towards minoritised groups.

For the “Hai Lasconi la Putere” propagandistic song, the most significant finding is its successful appropriation for counter-propaganda to spread racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic content targeting minoritised groups. These videos do not only target Lasconi but more worryingly these groups themselves, amplifying fears and prejudices, as often reflected in the comments.

The second technique we explored was post-election hashtag soundscaping. We examined hashtags such as: #anularealegeri, #aparamdemocratia, #calingeorgescupresedinte, #cg, #cinetaceestecomplice #demisiaccr, #demisiaiohanis, #lovituradestat, #romaniatacuta, #romaniavanduta, #stegarul, #stegaruldac and #votfurat.

For example, in the #stegaruldac soundscape the simultaneous replay of TikTok video soundtracks associated with this hashtag enables a synthetic mode of attending not only to the content of propaganda but also to the various settings in which propaganda unfolds in everyday life (e.g. in the home and on the street) as well as associated affective atmospheres.

You can explore our project poster and some of our video composites and soundscapes here.

Hybrid Event: Digital Methods in Brazil

[cross-post]

Call for Participation

This roundtable fosters dialogue about the current state of digital methods for Internet research in Brazil. We seek to celebrate emerging research practices and kick off a Global South network, situating them within a transitional methodological moment in which digital methods and methodologies have been built with, in and about AI, web platforms and data visualisation. This roundtable does not provide an exhaustive overview of digital methods in Brazil. Instead, it focuses on approaches specifically developed within the Brazilian context, offering unique perspectives on the field. 🇧🇷

✏️Confirm your participation here. If you join us online, we will email you the link.

🔗You are welcome to join the Digital Methods Global South Network by collaborating with us to map Digital Methods in Brazil (click here!) The results of this form will be displayed here and updated continuously 🤓.

Join us in person or online! ✨👩🏻‍💻❣️

What Digital Methods are we talking about?

The digital methods we discuss are known as a means to repurpose the functioning of dominant web platforms, search engines and online data for social research. Also, considering the technicity of AI and computational medium, these methods invite researchers to (re) think and create new ways of designing and implementing research methods. Digital Methods have been used to advance social media research, media and OSINT studies, and digital investigation.

Digital methods are crucially situated in the technological environments they utilise and build on: the web environments, data, technologies and practices, and software for data curation, analysis and visualisation. In this sense, designing and implementing digital methods integrates i) the technical aspects of web environments, technologies, objects, and AI but also respects ii) online (sub) cultures of use while iii) actively and critically engaging with capturing, analysis and visualisation software in their own language. These pillars not only inform, (re)shape and add new layers of meaning to the object of study but also form the epistemological foundation of knowledge central to digital methods. 

A hybrid round-table at King’s College London

This hybrid round table will discuss the current status of digital methods research in Brazil and what one can understand as “methods” when advancing research with the web as a methodological landscape. Rather than defining an exhaustive landscape of the practice, it aims to open up discussions about the role of digital methods in humanities and social sciences and their broad societal impact from a Brazilian perspective. What are the emerging creative methods developed in Brazil that leverage the web, its technologies and data to address research questions starting online/offline? Which digital methods are being implemented, and what for? What are their relevance and broader implications for studying digital media and culture in the country? Who is developing digital methods and research software? How are Brazil’s gender and race-diverse perspectives advancing the field? 

In this celebrative encounter, panellists will discuss: a mapping of initiatives and labs across five Brazilian regions within this context, the convergences and possibilities of connecting digital methods with traditional (Digital) Media and Communication Studies schools, and the history of software development for digital methods research in Brazil and its challenges.

A quick-and-dirty Historical Context of Digital Methods in Brazil

⚠️ Spoiler Alert: This is a simplified and brief overview rather than a comprehensive introduction to digital methods and their historical context in Brazil. 

In early 2011, three women started the first steps of digital methods in Brazil with the book “Métodos de Pesquisa para Internet” (2011), published by Sulina in Porto Alegre, Brazilian South Region. Suely Fragoso, Raquel Recuero and Adriana Amaral introduce methodological approaches that account for the Internet as an object of research (the subject being studied), a research environment (the setting where research is conducted) and a research instrument (e.g., a tool for data collection on a specific topic). Examples are network visualisation using online data, hyperlinks and ethnographic analysis for internet studies. In 2012, Fernanda Bruno founded the MediaLab.UFRJ at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Brazilian Southeast Region. Based in the School of Communication, the lab focuses on techno-politics, subjectivities, and visibilities, using digital methods for data analysis and visualisation in the humanities. 

In 2013, in the “golden” era of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram APIs, research labs such as Labic in Espirito Santo advanced digital methods for social media research to monitor and study the 2013 protests in Brazil, also known as June Journeys. This series of nationwide demonstrations claimed to stop corruption and improve public services, among other grievances. The lab, constituted by a multidisciplinary team of coordinators, has significantly contributed to the growth of digital methods in Brazil by showing the impact and relevance of repurposing web data and technologies in a societal context. The book “A Comunicação das Coisas: Teoria Ator-Rede e Cibercultura” (2013) by André Lemos became an early influence on the methodological thinking that emphasises the agency of media and their mediations in shaping digital phenomena. Lemos’ research lab LAB404 (founded in 2006) at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), Brazilian Northeast Region, and work, drawing from Science and Technology Studies (STS), while being characterised by a conceptual framework, his advocacy for addressing the technical affordances of media in communication studies laid foundational groundwork aligned with the principles of digital methods and their development in Brazil.

In 2016, the data journalism Coda.BR event in São Paulo emerged to provide training for journalists, researchers, and data enthusiasts in Brazil, and it later became known as the Brazilian Conference on Data Journalism and Digital Methods. Everton Zanella Alvarenga, then-executive director of Open Knowledge Brazil, and journalists Natália Mazotte and Marco Túlio Pires, were instrumental in implementing the project in Brazil. In the same year, the Brazilian Institute of Research and Data Analysis (IBPAD) and the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) played pivotal roles in advancing digital methods in Brazil. The former is by offering courses and publications covering techniques for monitoring and researching social media. The latter is through the Department of Public Policy Analysis (DAPP Lab), which developed methodologies to meet academic needs and produced reports to serve the public through multidisciplinary research. In 2017, the Advanced Studies Center on Digital Democracy (CEADD) of UFBA became the central laboratory of the National Institute of Science and Technology for Digital Democracy (INCT.DD). This initiative has focused on understanding how media and networks shape political and social phenomena, such as the rise of the far-right, misinformation, and electoral campaigns. 

In 2019, Métodos Digitais: Teoria-Prática-Crítica (2019), edited by Janna Joceli Omena, marks the launch of the first book in Portuguese on digital methods, gathering seminal and original texts authored by key Brazilians and International researchers in the field. The book addresses digital methods from a theoretical, practical, and critical perspective and has been adopted by several Brazilian universities to introduce these methods. Since 2019, research groups and labs have been established in the country, including the principles and practice of digital methods. For instance, the R-EST research group of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), under Carlos D’Andrea’s coordination, investigates how digital platforms mediate political and social interactions.

Programme

Opening 14:00 – 14:15

Welcome & What digital methods are we talking about?

Janna Joceli Omena (in person)

This opening statement unpacks digital methods from conceptual and practical perspectives. It will focus on how the practice of digital methods enables researchers to conduct digital fieldwork and gain a deeper understanding of their study topic through the lens of three distinct yet interconnected pillars: (i) platform grammatisation, (ii) online (sub)cultures of use, and (iii) the affordances and limitations of computational media necessary for implementing the method.

📣🕸️🙋🏻Please join this Miroboard (https://bit.ly/Metodos-Digitais-Brasil-Miroboard) to introduce yourself and ask questions throughout the talks.

📣🇧🇷 👩🏻‍💻 You are welcome to contribute and be part of the Digital Methods Global South Network by filling out the form Mapeando Métodos Digitais no Brasil.

15m Interventions 

14:15 – 14:30

Mapping research groups and labs developing digital methods across five Brazilian Regions: North, Northeast, Central-West, Southeast, South

Alan Angeluci (in person)

This presentation shares the findings of a bibliometric study that identifies Brazilian researchers and institutions from all five regions of the country who have published scientific works employing or focused on digital methods.

14:30  – 14:45

Digital Methods and Schools of (Digital) Media and Communication Studies: Convergencies and Possibilities in Brazil

Elias Bitencourt (online)

This talk briefly revisits key research schools and agendas within the field of media and communication studies in Brazil that have created favourable conditions for the emergence of initiatives focused on the research and development of digital methods in the country.

14:45 – 15:00

A brief history of software development for digital methods research in Brazil

Giulia Tucci (online)

This talk explores tools and methodologies developed in Brazil that are (or could be) used in digital methods research, highlighting innovative practices and localized contributions. Examining key projects and software initiatives showcases Brazil’s role in advancing digital research techniques and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration.

Tea break

15:00 – 15:15

Discussant Commentary and Q&A Panellists

15:15 – 15:30

Critical commentary and insights 

Richard Rogers (in person)

15:30 – 15:40

Q&A Panelists 

📣You can join this Miroboard to ask questions 🙋🏿‍♀️🙋🏻🙋🏽‍♂️

Short link: https://bit.ly/Metodos-Digitais-Brasil-Miroboard 

Collective Discussion

15:40 – 16:15

Dialogue, Connection & Collective Discussion

Thais Lobo, Janna Joceli Omena (in person)

This moment fosters dialogue about the current state of digital methods for Internet research in Brazil. We will use a shared document to promote dialogue, networking, and the launch of a Global South network.

📣You can join this Miroboard to engage in collective discussion and networking ✨

Short link: https://bit.ly/Metodos-Digitais-Brasil-Miroboard 

Meet the Guest Speakers

Alan Angeluci

Alan is a Productivity Research Fellow (PQ-2) of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). Senior Lecturer at the Department of Information and Culture, School of Communications and Arts, University of São Paulo (ECA/USP), and at the Graduate Programs in Information Science and Communication Sciences (PPGCI and PPGCOM ECA/USP). Leader of the Smart Media and Users Research Group (SMU/CNPq) (smartmediausers.org). Conducted postdoctoral studies at ECA/USP and the University of Texas at Austin, USA. Holds a PhD from the Polytechnic School of USP, with a doctoral exchange period at the University of Brighton, England. Earned a Master’s and Bachelor’s degree from the Faculty of Architecture, Arts, Communication, and Design at São Paulo State University (UNESP). Main areas of teaching, research, and outreach include Data Visualisation, Digital Methods, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), Digital Culture, and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).

Elias Bitencourt

Elias is an Associate Professor in the Design Undergraduate Program at the State University of Bahia (UNEB), with a Ph.D. in Communication from FACOM/UFBA and a Master’s in Culture and Society from IHAC/UFBA. Visiting researcher at the Milieux Institute in Canada in 2019. Lead of Datalab/Design (CNPq) at UNEB, a research and development lab dedicated to data visualization and digital methodologies. Research interests include data visualization, digital methods, platform studies, digital imaginaries, and the social impacts of algorithmic mediation. Background in Design, Applied Social Sciences, Information Science, Digital Humanities, STS, Digital Methods.

Giulia Tucci

Giulia Tucci has a Ph.D. in Information Sciences (2023) from the Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology (IBICT) and the School of Communication at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). She has a master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from COPPE/UFRJ (2011) and a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from PUC-Rio (2006). Since 2017, she has focused her studies on the information flow on digital platforms. Her doctoral research investigated the flow of information (and disinformation) on Telegram during the 2022 electoral campaign in Brazil. Her expertise spans computational social sciences, political studies, and digital methods. Currently, she is a postdoctoral researcher in a joint program between IBICT and UFRJ, as well as a visiting researcher at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, contributing to the CGIAR FOCUS Climate Security program.

Richard Rogers

Richard Rogers is Professor of New Media and Digital Culture, Media Studies and Director of the Digital Methods Initiative, Humanities Labs, University of Amsterdam. He is author of Information Politics on the Web, Digital Methods (both MIT Press) as well as Doing Digital Methods (Sage). 

Meet the Moderators

Janna Joceli Omena

Janna is from Northeast Brazil, Pernambuco, Recife, and has a PhD in Digital Media from NOVA University Lisbon. She is the author of Métodos Digitais: Teoria-Prática-Crítica (2019), the first edited collection on digital methods in Portuguese, bringing together seminal and original texts. In Lisbon, Portugal, she founded the SMART Data Sprint (2016-2023), an initiative that provided a platform for teaching and developing digital methods, benefiting hundreds of participants and collaborators. She is a Digital Methods Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at King’s College London. Janna’s work focuses on understanding the epistemological dimensions of AI, web technologies, digital objects, and research software in designing and implementing methods and their role in research and knowledge production. Her research explores the practice and theory of digital methods, where she investigates the technicity of computational media from conceptual, technical, and empirical perspectives. She applies this knowledge to develop accessible and reproducible methodologies, supporting collaborations that build research software for analysing visual media content and online data.

Thais Lobo

Thais Lobo holds an MA in Digital Humanities from King’s College London and is currently engaged in ERC-funded research projects within the Departments of Digital Humanities and War Studies (Digisilk and Security Flows, respectively). As a media researcher and practitioner, she combines data analysis and research outreach to disseminate critical insights into digital platforms and online cultures. She has applied digital methods to explore social issues like health disinformation, political bots, greenwashing, climate change denial, datafication and digital surveillance in interdisciplinary projects collaborating with external organisations in the UK. Her experience includes roles in the media and research fields in Brazil.

Contact

Janna Joceli Omena, J.J.Omena@kcl.ac.uk

Thais Lobo, thais.matias@kcl.ac.uk

Acknowledgements

Janna Joceli Omena led the ideation of the event and authored this page, with contributions from Thais Lobo, Elias Bitencourt, Giulia Tucci and Alan Angelluci to the overall discussion and editorial work, bringing their experience on the Brazilian academic landscape. Bitencourt has also contributed to the section A Quick-and-Dirty Historical Context of Digital Methods in Brazil. Many thanks to Charlotte and Iryna for providing event logistics support, and special thanks to Jonathan Gray and Liliana Bounegru for their support in making this event possible.

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

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.

Chatbots and LLMs for Internet Research? Digital Methods Winter School and Data Sprint 2025

The annual Digital Methods Winter School in Amsterdam will take place on 6-10th January 2025 with the theme “Chatbots and LLMs for Internet Research?”. The deadline for applications is 9 December 2024. You can read more on this page (an excerpt from which is copied below).

Chatbots and LLMs for Internet Research? Digital Methods Winter School and Data Sprint 2025
https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/WinterSchool2025

The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), Amsterdam, is holding its annual Winter School on ‘Chatbots for Internet Research?’. 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. For a preview of what the event is like, you can view short video clips from previous editions of the School.Chatbots and LLMs for Internet Research? Towards a Reflexive ApproachPositions now are increasingly staked out in the debate concerning the application of chatbots and LLMs to social and cultural research. On the one hand there is the question of ‘automating’ methods and shifting some additional part of the epistemological burden to machines. On the other there is the rejoinder that chatbots may well be adequate research buddies, assisting with (among other things) burdensome and repetitive tasks such as coding and annotating data sets. They seem to be continually improving, or at least growing in size and apparent promise. Researcher experiences are now widely reported: chatbots have outperformed human coders, ‘understanding’ rather nuanced stance-taking language and correctly labeling it better than average coders. But other work has found that the LLM labeling also has the tendency to be bland, given how the filters and safety guardrails (particularly in US-based chatbots) tend to depoliticise or otherwise soften their responses. As researcher experience with LLMs becomes more widely reported, there are user guides and best practices designed to make LLM findings more robust. Models should be carefully chosen, persona’s should be well developed, prompting should be conversational and so forth. LLM critique is also developing apace, with (comparative) audits interrogating underlying discrimination and bias that are only papered over by filters. At this year’s Digital Methods Winter School we will explore these research practices with chatbots and LLMs for internet research, with an emphasis on bringing them together. How to deploy and critique chatbots and LLMs at the same time, in a form of reflexive usage?

There are rolling admissions and applications are now being accepted. To apply please send a letter of motivation, your CV, a headshot photo and a 100-word bio to winterschool [at] digitalmethods.net. Notifications of acceptance are sent within 2 weeks after application. Final deadline for applications is 9 December 2024. The full program and schedule of the Winter School are available by 19 December 2024.

The @digitalmethods.net Winter School in Amsterdam will take place on 6-10th January 2025 with the theme “Chatbots and LLMs for Internet Research?”. Apply by 9th December. 📝✨ publicdatalab.org/2024/11/29/d… #digitalmethods

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— Public Data Lab (@publicdatalab.bsky.social) 5 December 2024 at 10:56
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zeehaven – a tiny tool to convert data for social media research

Zeeschuimer (“sea foamer”) is a web browser extension from the Digital Methods Initiative in Amsterdam that enables you to collect data while you are browsing social media sites for research and analysis.

It currently works for platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and provides an ndjson file which can be imported into the open source 4CAT: Capture and Analysis Toolkit for analysis.

To make data gathered with Zeeschuimer more accessible for for researchers, reporters, students, and others to work with, we’ve created zeehaven (“sea port”) – a tiny web-based tool to convert ndjson into csv format, which is easier to explore with spreadsheets as well as common data analysis and visualisation software.

Drag and drop a ndjson file into the “sea port” and the tool will prompt you to save a csv file. ✨📦✨

zeehaven was created as a collaboration between the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick and Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London – and grew out of a series of Public Data Lab workshops to exchange digital methods teaching resources earlier this year.

You can find the tool here and the code here. All data is converted locally.

Exploring forest hashtags in COP27 Twitter with the European Forest Institute

The following is a cross-post from Rina Tsubaki at the European Forest Institute, drawing on digital methods recipes and approaches developed with the Public Data Lab as part a broader collaboration around the SUPERB project on upscaling forest restoration.

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has prompted confusion among its users and concerns about the platform’s future. Musk’s tweets are gathering daily attention due to large-scale layoffs and safety concerns around the new paid blue verification mark. To make things worse, as its engineers are on their way out of the door, users are also experiencing various technical glitches on the platform. Millions of users – including journalists, researchers and organisations – are already signing up on alternative platforms to be prepared for the platform’s deterioration and demise.

While no one can predict Twitter’s future, it remains widely used by politicians, scientists, companies, NGOs and influencers who are still busy posting on the platform. This includes COP27 in Egypt, where Twitter was one of the main platforms to report on the event. #cop27 has been tweeted over 2.85 million times since 5 November 2022. 

Social media platforms can give us additional insights into how broader publics make connections between forest restoration and other social, economic and environmental issues. To see which issues and narratives around forest restoration have been brought up on Twitter in the lead-up to the event, we’ve carried out a series of small explorations based on the digital methods recipes developed by our colleagues at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London and the Public Data Lab who are part of the SUPERB consortium led by EFI. This has been a good way to see if EFI could use these methods independently to understand international events as they unfold.

We usually see a spike in hashtag usage a few days before global events like the COPs. Using #cop27we collected 217,189 tweets between 5 and 7 November 2022. We then examined the top 1000 hashtags to see which kinds of forest-related issues are present. 

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“What actually happened? The use and misuse of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT)”, Digital Methods Winter School and Data Sprint 2023

Applications are now open for the Digital Methods Winter School and Data Sprint 2023 which is on the theme of “What actually happened? The use and misuse of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT)”.

This will take place on 9-13th January 2023 at the University of Amsterdam. Applications are accepted until 1st December 2022.

More details and registration links are available here and an excerpt on this year’s theme and the format is copied below:

The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), Amsterdam, is holding its annual Winter School on the ‘Use and Misuse of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT)’. 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. For a preview of what the event is like, you can view short video clips from previous editions of the School.

Continue reading

Article on “Engaged research-led teaching: composing collective inquiry with digital methods and data”

A new article on “Engaged research-led teaching: composing collective inquiry with digital methods and data” co-authored by Jonathan GrayLiliana BounegruRichard RogersTommaso VenturiniDonato RicciAxel MeunierMichele MauriSabine NiedererNatalia Sánchez-QuerubínMarc TutersLucy Kimbell and Anders Kristian Munk has just been published in Digital Culture & Education.

The article is available here, and the abstract is as follows:

This article examines the organisation of collaborative digital methods and data projects in the context of engaged research-led teaching in the humanities. Drawing on interviews, field notes, projects and practices from across eight research groups associated with the Public Data Lab (publicdatalab.org), it provides considerations for those interested in undertaking such projects, organised around four areas: composing (1) problems and questions; (2) collectives of inquiry; (3) learning devices and infrastructures; and (4) vernacular, boundary and experimental outputs. Informed by constructivist approaches to learning and pragmatist approaches to collective inquiry, these considerations aim to support teaching and learning through digital projects which surface and reflect on the questions, problems, formats, data, methods, materials and means through which they are produced.

Profiling Bolsobot Networks

Blog post by By Emillie de Keulenaar, Francisco Kerche, Giulia Tucci, Janna Joceli Omena and Thais Lobo [alphabetical order].

Brazilian political bots have been active since 2014 to influence elections through the creation and maintenance of fake profiles across social media platforms. In 2017, bots’ influence and forms of interference gained a new status with the emergence of “bot factories” acting in support of Jair Bolsonaro’s election and presidency. What we call bolsobots are inauthentic social media accounts created to consistently support Bolsonaro’s political agenda over the years, namely Bolsonaro as a political candidate, President, and avatar of a conservative and militaristic vision of Brazilian history, where social discipline, Christian values and a strong but economically liberal state aim to uproot the decadent influence of “socialism” (Messenberg, 2019). From viralising or spreading hashtags to establishing target audiences with pro-Bolsonaro “slogan accounts” with a strong, visual presence, these bots have also been tied to documented disinformation campaigns  (Lobo & Carvalho, 2018; Militão & Rebello, 2019; Santini, Salles, & Tucci, 2021). Despite the efforts of social media platforms, including Whatsapp and Telegram, to restrict their more or less coordinated inauthentic activities (Euronews, 2021), bolsobots still exist and actively adapt to online cultures.

Accounting for the upcoming Brazilian 2022 elections, the project Profiling Bolsobots Networks investigates the practices of pro- and anti- Bolsonaro bots across Instagram, Twitter and TikTok. It aims to empirically demonstrate how to capture the operation of bolsobot networks; the types of accounts that constitute bot ecologies; how (differently) bots behave and promote content; how bolsobots change over time and across platforms, pending to different cultures of authenticity; and, finally, how platform moderation policies may impact their activities over time. In doing so, the project will produce a series of research reports on “bolsobot” networks and digital methods recipes to further the understanding of bots’ presence and influence in the communication ecosystem. 

We are (so far) a group of six scholars collaborating on this project: Janna Joceli Omena (Public Data Lab / iNOVA Media Lab / University of Warwick), Thais Lobo (Public Data Lab / King’s College London), Francisco Kerche (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro), Giulia Tucci (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro), Emillie de Keulenaar (OILab / University of Groningen) and Elias Bitencourt (Universidade do Estado da Bahia). Below are some of the preliminary outputs of the project.

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EASST session on ‘quali-quantitative’ methods in STS

The following post is from Judit Varga, Postdoctoral Researcher on the ERC-funded project FluidKnowledge, based at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University.

We would like to invite the Public Data Lab and its network of researchers and research centres to join and contribute to our session about quali-quantitative, digital, and computational methods in Science and Technology Studies (STS) at the next EASST conference 6-9 July 2022.

Fitting with the Public Data Network’s activities, the session starts from the observation that engaging with digital and computational ways of knowing is crucial for STS and related disciplines to study or intervene in them. The panel invites contributions that attempt or reflect on methodological experimentation and innovation in STS by combining STS concepts or qualitative, interpretative methods with digital, quantitative and computational methods, such as quali-quantitative research.

Over the past decade, STS scholars have increasingly benefited from digital methods, drawing on new media studies and design disciplines, among others. In addition, recently scholars also called for creating new dialogues between STS and QSS, which have increasingly grown apart since the 1980s. Although the delineation of STS methods from neighboring fields may be arbitrary, delineation can help articulate methodological differences, which in turn can help innovate and experiment with STS methods at the borders with other disciplines.

We invite contributions that engage with the following questions. What do we learn if we try to develop digital and computational STS research methods by articulating and bridging disciplinary divisions? In what instances is it helpful to draw boundaries between STS and digital and computational methods, for whom and why? On the contrary, how can STS benefit from not drawing such boundaries? How can we innovate STS methods to help trace hybrid and diverse actors, relations, and practices, using digital and computational methods? How can methodological innovation and experimentation with digital and computational methods help reach STS aspirations, or how might it hinder or alter them? What challenges do we face when we seek to innovate and experiment with digital and computational methods in STS? In what ways are such methodological reflection and innovation in STS relevant at a time of socio-ecological crises?

The current deadline for abstract submissions is the 1st of February 2022 7th February 2022 (the deadline has been extended).