Interfaces for the Cloud: Curating the Data

Digital Methods Winter School (mini-conference and workshop)
25-27 January 2012
Media Studies
Turfdraagsterpad 9
University of Amsterdam
https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/WinterSchool2012

The Digital Methods Initiative is holding its fourth annual Winter School on 25-27 January 2012 at Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. To gain a sense of the atmosphere of the DMI Winter School, see the report from the first one, "Digital Methods: First Steps" (Stevenson/Rogers, 2009).

Digital Methods Winter School Mini-conference
The mini-conference provides the opportunity for digital methods and allied researchers to present short yet complete papers (5,000-7,500 words) and serve as respondents, providing feedback. Often the work presented follows from previous Digital Methods Summer Schools. The mini-conference accepts papers in the general digital methods and allied areas: the hyperlink and other natively digital objects, the website as archived object, web historiographies, search engine critique, Google as globalizing machine, cross-spherical analysis and other approaches to comparative media studies, device cultures, national web studies, Wikipedia as cultural reference, the technicity of (networked) content, post-demographics, platform studies, crawling and scraping, graphing and clouding, and similar.

Digital Methods Winter School Workshop
For the Winter School Workshop the theme is API critique, where we seek to build interfaces on the cloud, in particular connecting with select APIs, pulling in and curating the data, learning from dominant algorithms, and repurposing them for social and cultural research. There will be dedicated teams working on big data company APIs, and proposing interfaces (with tools) onto the cloud, or however we may wish to call the source of the data streams. The critique of APIs follows from working with them. There also will be interface design for curated data, and a separate stream on data curation.

Key dates
20 December 2011: Submission of paper titles, abstracts and bios to winterschool at digitalmethods.net
21 December 2011: Notifications
20 January 2012: Submission of complete papers (5,000-7,500 words)
21 January 2012: Program and schedule
25-27 January 2012: DMI Mini-conference and Workshop

Tentative Winter School Schedule
25 January 9.30-5 Mini-conference, per paper: 10-minute presentations, two 5-minute responses, 5-minute Q&A
26 January 9.30-5 Workshop, with morning mini-talks, introducing the streams (API critique, Data interface design, Data curation)
27 January 9.30-5 Workshop, with morning talk ("The politics of the cloud")

About
The Digital Methods Winter School is part of the Digital Methods Initiative, Amsterdam, dedicated to reworking method for Internet-related research. The Digital Methods Initiative holds the annual Digital Methods Summer Schools (five to date), which are intensive and full time 2-week undertakings in the Summertime. The 2012 Summer School will take place 25 June - 6 July 2012. The coordinators of the Digital Methods Initiative are Sabine Niederer and Esther Weltevrede (PhD candidates in New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam), and the director is Richard Rogers, Professor of New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam. The DMI about page includes a substantive introduction. Digital methods are online at http://www.digitalmethods.net/.

Workshop Projects

• Interfaces for the (public) graph
• Tinguely Machine
• Tracking the trackers
• Exporting Facebook
• Defacing Facebook
• API Ecology

Previous Winter Schools

• Winter Workshop 2011
• Winter Workshop 2010
• Winter Workshop 2009