The Digital Methods Initiative, a collaboration of the New Media & Digital Culture program at the University of Amsterdam and the Govcom.org Foundation, is organizing its 4th annual Summer School for advanced B.A. and M.A. students, PhD candidates as well as designers, artists and programmers working in the area of online media research, broadly conceived. This year’s edition of the annual Summer School is dedicated to “foundations” in digital methods. One set of foundations includes the question of the status of Web data. Often considered messy, dirty and incomplete, under which conditions may Web data be seen as robust? Another set of foundations concerns the idea of the Web as virtual, representational or otherwise having a special, ungrounded status. Can one only study online culture when one’s site of research is the Web? Where does online cultural studies end, and social and cultural research begin? The third set of foundations strives to codify the otherwise tacit knowledge required for online research. On top of formulating research questions, the purpose of foundational research skills sessions is to present strategies for compiling URL lists, building source sets, making issue and key word lists, designing queries and undertaking other core prep tasks, prior to tool use. Further foundational sessions include training in reading and interpreting search engine results and other standard Web device outputs.

Under-explored Spaces by Digital Methods

Special attention will be paid to under-explored spaces and subspaces online. Explored spaces by digital methods include hyperlink networks, IP numbers, archived website collections and previous states of the Web, top-level and second-level domains, search engine returns, social bookmarks and related tags, the spheres, national Webs and filtered content, social networking profiles, wikipedia article edit histories and tweets related by hashtag. Of the under-explored spaces, there are the classic ones, as well as those which may resist current tools and methods. In the former category of course there have been portions of the Web thought to be unreachable by crawlers (the ‘dark web’), another relatively untouched by humans (the crawled-only web), a third not to be captured (the ‘ephemeral web’) and the fourth one that no longer exists, the dead web. (Placing the robots.txt exclusion on a website now flushes the site’s stored history in the Internet archive.) However, the focus in the Summer School is on spaces currently garnering attention for their democratic potential, such as the comment space as well as the overlay or annotated map space, and exploring their potential for social and cultural research.

Digital Methods Training Certificate Program, 28 June – 9 July 2010

The Digital Methods Summer School has a certificate program. It is a two-week intensive training and skill acquisition program which runs, every other weekday, 28 June to 9 July 2010. The certificate program is recommended for those researchers with limited exposure to digital methods to date.

Digital Methods Advanced Projects Program, 9 August – 27 August 2010

The Digital Methods Summer School also has an advanced program. It is a three-week undertaking, meeting physically Mondays and Fridays, with an ongoing commitment, where researchers propose and carry out projects, from research question and query design to methodological operationalization, tool use and visual and written output, including narrative and presentation. Each week has a dedicated theme, and is facilitated by advanced Amsterdam-based Digital Methods researchers. Thematic projects may include explorations of the comment space, real-time results, activity in social media, comparative Web space temporalities (such as static, real-time, periodic and irregularly-paced), as well as the creation of Web collections for the purposes of historical research.

Applications

To apply for the Digital Methods Training Certificate Program, 28 June – 9 July 2010, please send a one-page letter explaining how digital methods training would benefit your current work, and also enclose a CV. Mark your application “DMI Training Certificate Program.”

To apply for the Digital Methods Advanced Projects Program, 9 August – 27 August 2010, please send a one-page letter explaining how digital methods have benefited your work, and also enclose a CV. Mark your application “DMI Summer Advanced Program.”

To apply for both programs, please write a letter explaining your overall affinity with digital methods work, and include your CV. Mark your application “DMI Summer Full Program.”

Selection of participants is based on the fit between candidate interests and available skills and expertise. Selection is also based on commitment to full attendance as well as your work in digital methods. Please be advised that we may contact you for additional information and request a conversation in person, by phone or by Skype (whichever is most suitable).

Please send applications to Esther Weltevrede, Digital Methods Initiative, Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, info {at} digitalmethods.net. Informal queries should be sent to Richard Rogers, University of Amsterdam, rogers {at} uva.nl.

Deadline for applications is 3 May 2010. Responses to be sent on 7 May 2010. Conversations in person, by phone or by Skype will be held on 10 and 11 May. Circulation of finalized participants’ list on 12 May.

Logistics

Participants must arrange their own travel and accommodation. There is no fee for participation in the Summer School. Space is limited.

The Digital Methods Initiative acknowledges the generous support of the Science Faculty, University of Amsterdam, and Platform Beta Techniek, http://www.platformbetatechniek.nl/.

Previous Digital Methods Summer Schools, 2007-2009

The Digital Methods Summer School is in its fourth year. The third Summer School in 2009 treated media attention formats, Wikipedia as space of controversy, repurposing Google for social research and methods for Internet archive research, including “conjuring a past state of the Web.” The second Summer School, which coincided with the 10-year jubilee of the Govcom.org foundation, was dedicated to the turn away from user studies, and also produced the video, commenting on Google’s 10-year anniversary, “Google and the politics of tabs.” The IP Browser, recently shown at Arts Santa Monica in Barcelona, is also a product of the 2008 gatherings. The first Summer School, in 2007, sought to establish the study of natively digital objects, how they are handled by dominant web devices, and whether the “methods in the media” may be repurposed for social and cultural research.

Related project URLs

The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), Amsterdam, participates in the EU project facilitated by Bruno Latour, Sciences Po, Paris, http://www.mappingcontroversies.net/.

DMI researchers also participate in the ATACD network, the EU project facilitated by Celia Lury, Goldsmiths, London, http://www.atacd.net/.

About

Reworking method for Internet research, the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) is a collaboration of the New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam and the Govcom.org Foundation, Amsterdam. Its director is Richard Rogers, Chair, New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam, and its coordinators are Esther Weltevrede and Sabine Niederer, PhD candidates in Media Studies, University of Amsterdam.

The notion of following is anthropological or ethnographic. Bruno Latour: “Follow the actors.” Now we follow all sorts of things: object, medium, money. Why follow the medium? It has to do with a particular research practice: a new medium offers new spaces and objects and new opportunities arise. For example studying the commentspace as a subspace of the blogosphere. If we were to remediate the commentspace it is potentially some kind of lively, productive area for organizing voices and mobilizing citizens. A new space for organizing or issue making. One could stay in that mode no matter which new space arises, however, Richard Rogers rather looks at the specificity of the objects of that space and asks how the devices handle them and see if we can learn, repurpose and make findings. Political scientists/students embrace the commentspace as the new hope. However, the commentspace is being ignored by devices by the implementation of the nofollow tag. The commentsphere is a messy space for engines. Engines and humans ignore it but the users are subjected to the engine regime of nofollow. What to do? Digital methods are a new recipe for new spaces: look at digital objects, how do the devices handle them? Analyze, learn and repurpose.

Presented at the DMI mini-conference, University of Amsterdam, day 2.

Introduction to my paper on Identity 2.0
Yesterday we talked about the web having technological eras, or periods of the web that have specific providers, software and templates. This is also what I indirectly undertake in my study into the reconfiguration of identity in the era of search engines. By studying different software platforms for presenting the self online through their medium specific qualities we see what Fuller calls “digital subjectivity – that software constructs sensoriums, that each piece of software constructs ways of seeing, knowing and doing in the world that at once contain a model of that part of the world it ostensibly pertains to and that also shape it every time it is used” (2003: 19)

The reconfigured relationship between the user, the platform and the search engine is studied from what Manovich calls ‘cultural software,’ a genre of software that is cultural through its use and because it carries atoms of our culture. It is an undertaking that looks at the different software platforms that have been developed over time to allow us to understand how the configuration of the ecology the software is embedded is in has changed with the advent of the search engines. The platforms: the homepage, the blog, the social networking profile, the micro-blog and the lifestream are not presented in a chronological order in order to create a teleological account, rather they are presented in more or less the order in which they came into being. All platforms for presenting the self online still exist, while one may argue that the homepage is slowly disappearing, and some platforms even co-exist in the hands of the user who integrates her Twitter account into her blog.

In general, the Digital Methods Initiative researches society through the online, however, what I aim to do is research online web culture through the online software and devices that shape it. How is this research placed within digital methods? At first it seems an ethnographical account of my Web 2.0 being placed within the studies into identity but what it aims to do is to look at the medium specific qualities of the platforms and determine their web native elements, such as the permalink or the status update, in order to see how these tie up to search-engines. In a first small casestudy, it was shown that platforms relate to each other and that some platforms are closer together than others through their entanglement of structuring natively digital objects such as site feeds and embed codes. The question then is, how to operationalize the relationship between the platforms and their distance (topological).

This paper is based on the Networked book chapter ‘Lifetracing’¹ commissioned by Turbulence. Rewritten for the Digital Methods Initiative mini-conference January 20-22, 2010 at the University of Amsterdam.

Identity 2.0: Constructing identity with cultural software.

ABSTRACT: This essay deals with the change of identity on the web as a result of the assemblage of social software platforms, engines and users. It can be stated that major platforms for presenting the self online have developed over time: the homepage, the blog, the social networking profile, the micro-blog and the lifestream. They each have their own specific way for presenting the self online. The advent of the search engine has had a major impact on both the construction and the presentation of the online identity. Search engines not only index the platforms on which identity is performed, but they also organize and construct identity online. They act as a central point where identity performance is indexed. Since identity construction and identity performance have significantly changed with the advent of these engines, identity must be reconsidered. It can be argued that the assembly of platform, engine and user has constructed a new type of identity: Identity 2.0. This type of identity, placed within the period of Web 2.0, is always under construction, never finished, networked, user-generated, distributed and persistent.

Download PDF: Identity 2.0: Constructing identity with cultural software.

1. Helmond, Anne. “Lifetracing. The Traces of a Networked Life.” Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art). 2 July 2009. Available online: http://helmond.networkedbook.org/[↩]

Carolin Gerlitz, Made by many: Tracing and mapping consumer/brand interaction across online spaces.

Respondent: Anne Helmond, University of Amsterdam. 21 January 2010.

“Made by many” in the paper title refers to the way brands are increasingly shaped and expressed in performative spaced on the web by consumers along with producers. Brands are constituted by the people who use them and interact with them. This interaction with brands is described from what I would propose to call “user generated marketing” as a branch, or side-effect, of user-generated content.

Gerlitz wishes to map and trace how consumers interact with brands across different webspheres using both digital methods and sociological methods, including topology. Gerlitz writes:

The way these heterogeneous spaces relate to each other will be understood from a topological perspective which emphasises the distance/resonance between spaces, the speed at which the objects/brands/issues move through them and the openness of the assemblage of spaces. (1)

An example of the coming together of these heterogenous spaces is the website of the brand Crispin, Porter + Bogusky which shows the result of the brand query across different spaces. This reminded me of the rebranding of Skittles.com which overlays a small navigation block in the topleft corner as an overlay to the social media sites they present themselves on. The Skittles homepage currently shows their Facebook Group “The Wall” with the latest messages from their fans (often not related to Skittles). The question then is: Is this the performance of a brand or a brand image? What is the difference between a brand an an image if we’re talking about producer-consumer interaction?

The major task of brand management to be developed is described as

a variety of techniques that all aim at controlling, pre-structuring and monitoring what people do with brands, so that what these practices do add to its value” (Arvidsson 2006, 82).

Has brand management shifted into the realm of webcare? While not officially defined, webcare seems to deal with companies keeping track of their brand in a particular websphere or across different spaces. For example @UPC_Webcase actively monitors Twitter for complaints about their tv/webservice and passively monitors Twitter by answering direct questions about their services. Is there a shift from the common practice of search-engine optimization for promoting your brand to webcare, consisting of search-engine monitoring and responding?

Case studies
In order to to explore the activities of the brands in her case studies Gerlitz uses a combination of methodologies primarily derived from

object oriented methodology (2007) with its leitmotif ‘follow the object’ and a topological perspective as a methodological framework. [...] Core element of the method is to abstain from reading, interpreting and analysing the object of interest but moving, navigating and unfolding with it, never exactly knowing in which direction it and therewith the research will drift. (5)

The question then arises: Don’t digital methods temporarily fix the object in time, by compiling a sample and taking a snapshot? While digital methods follow the medium do they also continue to follow the object as object oriented methodology does?  For example, one of the steps you describe in your paper deal with “the non-manual analysis of content” (9) which seems to oppose the object oriented method.

The second approach “The feedback loops between the consumers and the brand within and across these spaces will be explored by a mix of digital and qualitative social research methods.” A long list of research methods follows which feels like a broad mix. Specifying which research method belongs to which question (very likely addressed in future chapters) may give the reader some methodological coherence guidance.

Contribution
What Gerlitz contributes is a new area to apply digital methods to. Digital methods, due to the background of the program, are often used in research related to for example, human rights, controversy, NGOs, political issues,  while Gerlitz is associated with Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process at Goldsmiths, University of London doing research on brands. Her case studies, to me, showed that her paper on brands and my paper on identity are actually may be aligned through the notion of performative capacities.

Remarks
Additional research in spaces. Flickr: now: imagery, also: use of tags. YouTube: Trace embed codes. In which spheres do consumers place which videos?

How else to study consumer/brand interactions? By the actions consumers perform on social objects: +1, recommend it, love it/hate it, skip, next. There are certain typical actions consumers can perform on objects in the social web.

Questions
What is the role of bots in brand management? For example, automatic retweeting of brands by brand bots. What is the role of search engines in the feedback loops you describe?

Literature recommendation
Petersen, Søren. “Loser Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation” First Monday [Online], Volume 13 Number 3 (2 March 2008)

The examples in this paper outline two different strategies within the architecture of exploitation that capitalism can benefit from:

Through a distributed architecture of participation, companies can piggyback on user generated content by archiving it and making interfaces, or using other strategies such as Google’s AdSense program.
Designing platforms for user generated content, such as Youtube, Flickr, Myspace and Facebook. (Søren 2008)

To what extent do Dove and American Apparel offer the users interfaces or platforms for interacting with/uploading content?

Abstract previous paper: Gerlitz, C (2009). ‘Made by many. Tracing and mapping the affective topologies of brands.’ presented at ATACD conference, Barcelona.

The Digital Methods Initiative is holding a three day mini-conference with workshop presenting papers and research proposals.Today I responded to Michael Stevenson’s paper on the history of the blogosphere through the eyes of EatonWeb and the Internet Archive. The following is my summary of his paper and argument followed by questions.

Michael Stevenson. The archived blogosphere: exploring web historical methods using the Internet Archive

Respondent: Anne Helmond, University of Amsterdam. 20 January 2010.

One of the main questions of Stevenson’s research is: How can we use and repurpose the Internet Archive to study the history of the blogosphere?  The Internet Archive is especially useful for single site histories, as the Archive is browsed by URL. However, websites rarely exist in a vacuum on their own. This is partly recognized by the special collections in the Archive on a particular topic or event. Blogs, and their (in)formal linking policies, constitute a different type of collection of sites that do not converge on topic or event but on their formal characteristics: the blogosphere. As Stevenson notes “The genre (of blogs) was defined less by content than by form, with reverse-chronology and the centrality of linking trumping the extent to which bloggers focused on similar topics.” How to deal with a collection of websites in an archive that constitute a separate websphere when the device used is especially useful for studying the history of single sites?

Historical accounts of the blogosphere are often from an anecdotal perspective (Blood 2000 & Rosenberg 2009). Stevenson notes that:

What is missing in this approach, however, is reflection on the changing conditions for historical research when the object of study is the Web, or (as may increasingly be the case) is studied with the Web. (p. 75)

The Internet Archive is described as a legacy system in the sense that it is based on browsing instead of the current trend of searching and in this sense displays aspects of an earlier (web) culture. What is sustained is cyberculture. Cyberculture (1980s-1990s) is characterized by a “commitment to egalitarian and universal access to information” (78). Cyberspace is described as “somewhere else” which is still visible in the IA which prefers browsing over querying. The rise of the blogosphere may be seen as “the rejection of cyberspace” and as a transition phase from cyberculture (egalitarian) to web culture (A-lists). The blogosphere is marked with a strong tension between the idea of egalitarianism and the actual compilation of A-lists by disproportionate linking.

Case study
How to delimit the object of study? DMI asks how the dominant devices do it, for example blogs are defined by the engines as anything that publishes a feed. In this case study the first dominant blogosphere device EatonWeb was taken as a starting point. EatonWeb was a manually created collection (expert-list) of blogs and inclusion was based on the formal characteristic of blogs: reverse-chronological ordered entries. “Of the 947 blogs listed by the directory, 857 (or 85.5%) were present in the Internet Archive.” The missing blogs in the Archive were located by following the outlinks of the blogs in the set. This presents a map of the “whole” early blogosphere.

Contribution
Stevenson contributes to studies on the history of the blogosphere by compiling a new special collection, the Early Blogosphere (according to EatonWeb), that may be mapped and queried. By mapping the outlinks of the blogs in EatonWeb the non-archived blogs (the missing pieces of the archived blogosphere by the Internet Archive) are positioned within the network.

Questions
“The organization of the EatonWeb Portal suggested egalitarianism” which is in line with the characteristics of cyberspace. Are ranking devices the official end of cyberspace? Do you consider EatonWeb in that sense a transitional device?
You have now compiled your own special collection of the early blogosphere. Querying this collection, in contrast to the IA, is now possible. What would you like to ask the collection?
The focus is now on outlinks. Where were these links taken from? The whole page? Suggestion for detailed focus: blogroll analysis only. Do they provide a different map?

Further research
Platform specific maps. Actors receiving links from EatonWeb blogs that are not in the EatonWeb themselves are often blog platforms such as Blogger.com and Pitas.com. Redo map with a focus on platforms. Do platforms cluster?
There are some specific Pitas blogs on the maps, but no specific Blogger.com websites. Is it possible to look “beyond” pitas.com (*.pitas.com) or blogger.com (*.blogger.com) which sites were there?

More info on Michael Stevenson’s & DMI research on the DMI wiki:
Tracing And Mapping The Evolution Of The Early Blogosphere With The Internet Archive
Profiling the Archived Blogosphere
Wayback Web Collections
Early Blog Features

It’s been pretty quiet here in contrast to my Twitter account (in Dutch). While finishing my publication for the Networked book I applied for a PhD position at the University of Amsterdam.

I am happy to announce that I will continue my research on software-engine relations as a PhD within the emerging field of Software Studies with my colleagues of the Digital Methods Initiative. Of course this also means that the summer break is officially over for my blog. I redesigned it as a fresh start to enter a new era of my blog as a research tool, a place for discussion and publication.

My new workplace at the UvA.