🎓 Summer School Public Keynotes

Join us for two exciting public lectures as part of the summer school "Ecological Data – Data Ecologies: Engaging with Methods for Critical Data Studies" at Goethe University!

#DataEcologies #GenerativeAI #DigitalSTS #SummerSchool #GoetheUniversity #PublicLecture #CriticalDataStudies #AIandSociety

"Research data management has become an inevitable part of research, and both funding agencies and publishers nowadays require open and reusable data. This article focuses on one of the most prominent initiatives promoting reusability of research data – the FAIR guiding principles – nowadays widely accepted as the new standard for research data management. Through semi-structured interviews, we investigated researchers’ experiences of practicing FAIR research data management within the context of a multi-stakeholder project within the field of health research funded by the European Commission. Our analysis showed that the informants’ experiences of practicing FAIR research data management differed largely depending on which scientific tradition they belonged to; something that previous studies have attributed to shortcomings in the current infrastructure, lack of resources and persistent cultures around data sharing in the wider scientific community. Drawing on previous work presented within the field of Critical Data Studies (CDS), we argue that our findings point to a more fundamental problem; namely the failure to recognize that the FAIR framework is built on a positivist conceptualization of data. We argue that if FAIR is to have any chance of succeeding in its ambitions to be as inclusive and all-encompassing as it wants to be, these insights need to be taken more into account and provide some potential pathways."

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517251349157

#DataScience #CriticalDataStudies #DataManagement #DataGovernance #FAIR

Critical Data Study fresh from the press!

In this contribution to the latest special issue of the Swiss Journal of Sociology, I critically examine how Convolutional Neural Networks can be used to explore historical photo collections. In essence, the writing examines potentials and challenges of human-machine collaboration by juxtaposing human and machine ways of seeing. Clustering 48,000 negatives from the collection Ernst Brunner the analysis reveals how sociotechnical imaginaries in infrastructure act as an epistemological Trojan horse and emphasizes the need for thematic data sets to utilize machine-learning approaches for visual data analysis.

Open Access ➡️ https://www.socio-journal.ch/article/view/6907

Thank you Sebastian W. Hoggenmüller for the great editing, to Kurt Fendt and Tobias Hodel for their critical remarks and to the anonymous reviewers who have given tough but constructive feedback.

#digitalhumanities #criticaldatastudies #datavisualization #artificialintelligence

"In recent years, critical data studies from the Global South have gained traction, generating debates on power, knowledge production, and the politics of data. While these discussions challenge universalist frameworks, they also risk essentializing the ‘Global South’, requiring a more nuanced approach. This special issue centres Latin America as a site of theoretical, methodological, and empirical inquiry, highlighting its potential to generate new insights into datafication, power, and artificial intelligence. Rather than treating Latin America as a passive recipient of Global North theories, this issue foregrounds its epistemological and methodological contributions to global debates. Engaging with frameworks such as capitalism, coloniality, and dependency theory, the articles explore the region's heterogeneity and intellectual traditions in social sciences, humanities, and science and technology studies. This introduction proposes a research agenda for Latin American critical data studies – one that reflects historical legacies while envisioning possible data futures through interdisciplinary and critical engagement. It interrogates the politics of knowledge production, emphasizing the need for non-extractive, dialogical approaches to studying data in, from, and with Latin America. By centering Latin American scholarship and experiences, this special issue challenges dominant narratives in critical data studies and offers alternative theoretical perspectives that are globally informed yet locally grounded."

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517251330160

#LatinAmerica #GlobalSouth #CriticalDataStudies #STS #AI #Datafication #Capitalism #Coloniality #DependencyTheory

🎉 Hallo Welt!

Das Fachgebiet #Medienbildung der @tuberlin zieht gerade von @medienbildung hierher um.

Wir forschen und lehren zu Bildung in der digitalen Welt, kreativen Praktiken und kritischen Perspektiven auf Algorithmen, Code & Daten.

Hier gibt’s Updates zu unseren Projekten, Publikationen & Veranstaltungen.

Folgt uns schon jetzt für Diskussionen, Denkanstöße & spannende Einblicke! 💬👀

#Digitalität #TUBerlin #SETUB #critcode #criticaldatastudies #Wissenschaftskommunikation

Happy to share that a few weeks ago I successfully defended my dissertation as the first doctoral student of Digital Humanities at the University of Bern (insigni cum laude).

My study under the title «Generative Data Design: Data Visualization as Argumentative Process in The Digital Humanities» developed a practical and critical design method that conceptualizes data visualization as an argumentative process (contrary to the idea of visualizations being neutral and objective) supporting the interpretation of digital cultural heritage collections.

A great thank you goes to my supervisors Tobias Hodel and Ulrike Felsing (University of Bern) as well as Kurt Fendt (MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing). And of course to all my friends, family and colleagues who supported this journey in a diversity of ways. 🙏

Next up: Publication process.

#digitalhumanities #datavisualization #criticaldatastudies #generativedesign #desingresearch