Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 209.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2023-09-14 15:46:51+00:00
        From: Richard Rogers <rogers@govcom.org>
        Subject: Digital Methods Winter School '24 - Univ. Amsterdam

Digital Methods Winter School 2024

’Digital investigation with AI’

8-12 January 2024

New Media & Digital Culture
Media Studies
University of Amsterdam
Turfdraagsterpad 9
1012 XT Amsterdam
the Netherlands

Call for participation
The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), Amsterdam, is holding its annual
Winter School on ’Digital investigation with AI’. 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.

Digital investigation with AI

Online information in the public domain has been the source of study of
societal trends and cultural condition for some time now. Geo-located
search queries and social media engagement have been deployed as proxies
for interests, concerns and sentiments. For a variety of reasons from
data access to algorithmic effects, there has been an easing away from
trace research and at the same time a growing interest in digital
investigation. It focuses less on trends and more on 'fact-finding' or
'what actually happened'. In a sense it is an understandable shift,
given the impact of the 'fake news' crisis that transpired on social
media during the U.S. presidential election of 2016 and subsequent votes
in Europe and beyond. Since then there have been grander narratives of
the current informational situation online such as the rise of a
'post-truth' era. To settle things down a variety of digital
investigative epistemologies are the focus of attention from
fact-checking, debunking and source and media verification to
algorithmic auditing. They seek to address a wide variety of disruptions
to the new media landscape, such as media and attention manipulation to
continual influence and information campaigning and coordinated
behaviour, whether with harmful intention or more ironic and troll-like.
The Winter School takes up a series of questions concerning the
investigative turn from the impact of disinformation and content
moderation to the new conditions of artificiality and detection with AI.

At the Winter School there are the usual social media tool training
tutorials for working on single and cross-platform analysis, but also
continued attention to thinking through and proposing how to work
critically with social media data, both from mainstream social media
platforms as well as so-called alt tech.

Apart from the keynotes and the training tutorials, there are also
empirical and conceptual projects that participants work on. To gain a
flavour of the type of projects to expect, the past Summer School
included these: # Disinformation Impact Assessment - Does the work of
“opinion shapers” matter?
# Prompting for Biodiversity: Visual research with AI
# Hashtag and Genre Analysis #Seçim2023 on TikTok: Focusing on the
Turkish Presidential Elections
# The Divine Online? Mapping Algorithmic Conspirituality on TikTok
# Testing LLMs for conflict & dialogue analysis on social media
# The force of falsity? When AI prompt guesses or narratives about
debunked images sow more confusion about the fake
# Examining Web Detection Algorithms
# The Art in Artificial: AI as Co-Creation Storytelling Device
# Mapping post-truth narratives concerning the war in Ukraine
# Exploring the Impact of LLM-Powered Search Engines on Political Candidates
# Revolution By Other Memes: Online Subcultures, Modular Ideologies And
The Political Compass
# From Ranking to Clustering Cultures: towards a time-varying network
analysis of YouTube algorithms on Global Warming and Climate Change
# The Anatomy of (In)Direct Harassment

Application information at
https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/WinterSchool2024
Winter School ’24 organisers: Richard Rogers, Kamila Koronska and
Guillen Torres, Media Studies, University of Amsterdam.

Best regards
Richard Rogers
Media Studies
University of Amsterdam



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