Tag Archives: social media

Hello, digital methods!

In October and  November 2014 we finally had a series of workshops we planned for experimenting and discussing the potential of digital methods for social sciences and humanities. Digital methods are a set of methods aimed at supporting researchers’ ability to explore and display data or objects that can be collected through the Web (Dutton-Jeffreys, 2010). As Richard Rogers (2009) made clear, these methods could not exist or even be conceived without the web, as their mode of operation is based on objects/content/devices/environments that are natively digital, or born in the new mediumas opposed to the ones that simply “migrated” into it. According to other scholars, such as Venturini and Latour (2010), the potential of digital technologies for social sciences research could lie in allowing for the overcoming of the traditional micro/macro dualism, making possible to track both the actors and the interactions among them while collective phenomena emerge, and to develop analyses of social phenomena that achieve at the same time “breadth and depth” (ibid., p. 2).

We had the pleasure to have Tommaso Venturini,  Paul Girard and Benjamin Ooghe Tabanou as our instructors for two two-days workshops in which they showed us the tools they are developing at the Medialab Paris and guided us in applying them to a wide set of research questions.

Opened by a lecture for CES PhD students held by Venturini, the workshops involved 15 researchers from several Portuguese university that applied some of the methods to a wide set of research in progress, such as the case of the Portuguese memorandum during the recent economic crisis in the country, the EU discourse about scientific mobility, the development of the new European Data Protection Act.

The slide from the lecture and the workshop are here.

First session

Tuesday, Oct 28

Wednesday, Oct 29

Morning session9.30-13.00 Working with data and networks:

Afternoon session14.30-18.00 Tommaso Venturini, PhD seminar (lecture, CES, Sala 1; 14.30-17.30) Escaping the Great DivideHow actor-network theory, digital methods and network analysis can make us sensitive to the differences in the density of associations Extracting data

Workshop projects’ presentation:

  • Each participants (or group) presents what she/he wish to achieve during the workshop
  • The médialab team provide feedback on feasibility and operationalization
Dinner Dinner

Second session

Thursday, Nov 13

Friday, Nov 14

Morning session9.30-13.00 Projects advancement presentation:

  • Each participant (or group) show what has been achieved so far, problems and objectives.
  • Discussion on the planning of the work during the rest of the workshop
Work under the guidance of the médialab team
Afternoon session14.30-18.00 Work under the guidance of the médialab team Results presentation:

  • What worked what didn’t?
  • Feedbacks on methods used
  • Discussion on the next steps.
Dinner

Venturini_lectureresults8 results4 results5 workshop workshop5 workshop8 workshop9 resultsresults2

Digital Scholarship Workshop in Portugal

The importance of being digital – i.e. establishing a digital identity, and engaging in research dissemination and in wide, open scientific conversations on the web – has become nowadays a sort of mantra for scholars of all disciplines and at different stages of their career. If traditionally scholars’ visibility was a function of academic outputs – books, book chapters, and peer-reviewed journal articles – this situation is rapidly changing with the meteoric increase of the communication and dissemination opportunities opened up by the advent of digital media which are changing the dissemination, accessibility and recognition of scholarship.

Among the activities of our project we organized two editions of a Digital Scholarship Workshop (DSW), on the 24th of June in Lisbon (at CES-Lx) and on the 25th of June in Coimbra (at CES). We offered to 30 early stage researchers and tenured faculty the opportunity to learn how to use in a more effective way digital media to produce and disseminate research. The DSW aimed at helping participants in identifying an online repertoire suited for their specific needs and goals and at enabling researchers of different backgrounds to effectively integrate social media applications into their research activities and professional development strategies.

We had the pleasure to have Martin Weller from the Open University (UK) as instructor of the sessions. Martin is specialized in the area of online publishing, academic digital identity, writing for non-academics and engagement with social media and is author of the book The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice (2011). Here the slides Martin used during the workshop.

DSW Coimbra DSW in Coimbra DSW in Coimbra DSW in Coimbra DSW in Coimbra DSW in Lx