Please to announce that I’ll be speaking at this wonderful workshop on researching apps with Fernando van der Vlist (U of Siegen) and Nathaniel Tkacz (U of Warwick). Read the full call for all information.
Workshop organized by
When? 1 April 2019
Where? University of Groningen, TBA
Time? 10.00 – 17.30
Coordinator? Dr Rik Smit (RUG)
ECTS? 1 EC
Open to? PhD’s and research master students, max 20 participants
Registration
This workshop explores how we can study mobile application software, popularly known as ‘apps’, discussing and applying methods from digital ethnography and user interface analysis. For most people who own a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet, apps are part and parcel of everyday life. Whether people cook, play, jog, or date, they increasingly use apps to aid them in these activities and practices. At the same time, apps – or at least their developers – use us to gather user data, often for commercial purposes, or to refine their proprietary algorithms.
During this workshop we will explore possible ways to study these “apps of life†and the “life of apps.†Like any medium or technology, apps live a life of their own: they are conceived of, presented to the world, implemented and used, and they may stop being used (they die). As a specific form of digital ethnography (Pink, et al. 2016), “appnography†will be proposed as a way to analyze the various stages of development (production) of an app, the discourses surrounding the app (how the app is marketed and presented to the world), and how it is used and made sense of by app users. Moreover, we will discuss various ways in which to analyze app interfaces, features, and affordances, which enable, shape, and restrict practices.
The workshop is organized by Dr Rik Smit and is connected to a new research project following his recently completed PhD project Platforms of Memory: Social Media and Digital Memory Work (defended March 2018, cum laude). In this new project, he investigates the plethora of personal memory apps available in app stores. Apps such as The Memory App, Lifecake, Relive, Facebook’s On This Day, and Moment Garden help organize mediated memories by categorizing, sorting, and filtering them. These apps, he argues, signal a broader shift toward systems and services that structure and automatically re-present our pasts for us, so-called “mnemotechnologies†(Stiegler, 2010). As such, they are part of an emerging “algorithmic culture†(Striphas, 2014), in which our daily practices have come to involve algorithmic procedures such as automatic recommendation and personalization. Thus, in a nutshell, this research scrutinizes how the logic of computational systems and databases intertwine with personal digital memory work.
GUEST SPEAKERS
Anne Helmond (UvA)
Anne Helmond is assistant professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. She is a member of the Digital Methods Initiative and the App Studies Initiative where she focuses her research on social media platforms, apps, and web history. She holds a Veni grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for the project ‘App ecosystems: A critical history of apps’.
Fernando van der Vlist (U of Siegen)
Fernando van der Vlist is a research associate with the Collaborative Research Centre ‘Media of Cooperation’ at the University of Siegen. He is a member of the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the App Studies Initiative. He has lectured in new media, digital culture, and digital methods (University of Amsterdam, Utrecht University, Utrecht Data School) and has a background in media arts and design.
Nathaniel Tkacz (U of Warwick)
Nathaniel Tkacz is Reader at the University of Warwick. His work investigates the political, economic and organizational dimensions of technology, with a specific focus on networked and digital forms. This has led him to analyze notions of political openness in web-based communities, the practice of ‘mass collaboration’, experimental economic platforms, software forking, trolling, and emerging forms of governance in network cultures, among other things. His current work is on 1) the rise of ‘dashboard interfaces’ and 2) the relationship between media and economy.