Events archive : Digital and Social Media : University of Sussex

Digging into Data

The Digital and Social Media Theme, in collaboration with the Environment and Health Theme, arranged a meeting of Sussex researchers to scope interest in collaborative research exploiting large data sets in the context of humanities and the social sciences to novel effect. The meeting, held in April 2011, identified existing expertise at Sussex in techniques for the visualisation of data, computational linguistics using written text and sound media, image recognition, data mining and crowd sourcing. Potential applications identified included the analysis of data about key national monuments and of large health datasets from a life history perspective.

Cultural Encounters

Ten researchers from across campus met in March 2012 to discuss Cultural Encounters in connection with a call from HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) for a joint research programme.

Cultural encounters can be accompanied by profound displacements and reconfigurations at social and political levels, resulting in conflict, segregation, and the creation of diasporas. Yet cultural encounters also enable new forms of community and collective identity, and have stimulated large-scale innovation and renovation across European society. They have resulted in new forms of knowledge and profound transformations in cultural practices, as well as in new forms of communication and imagination. Sussex researchers explored potential avenues for research on these issues.

Digital Ways of Knowing

A workshop on the role of digital systems in research practice was held in June 2012. During the workshop, researchers from across campus discussed a range of conceptual and practical questions regarding the place of digital systems in their research. If the digital is the language of our time, how does this shape the conditions of contemporary perception, knowledge, creativity and expertise in different disciplines or fields? How do digital ways of knowing help and hinder researchers in different areas? How do digital systems, technologies or languages shape academic disciplines or research areas? What are the advantages and opportunities offered by this and what are the difficulties? This event was also supported by the Environment and Health Theme and the ACCA.

SuShi (Sussex-Southampton initiative)

The Theme supported the SuShi (Sussex-Southampton Initiative) seminar on ‘Temporality and value at the intersection of arts and technology: advancing theoretical and methodological development’in May 2012.

The collaboration between Sussex and Southampton examines the roles of arts, design and media in this shifting locus for innovation, exploring how creative artists, media, materials and technologies interact to contribute to the improvement of human societies. This event, supported by Digital and Social Media and ACCA, focused on temporality and the creation of value and threw a spotlight on the arts and creative industries in areas such as new modes of communication, playfulness in the stimulation of design, aesthetics, curation and archiving. Speakers included Josephine Bosma on ‘Open values and multiple temporalities through open cultures’, Andy Cameron on ‘Values systems in art and advertising: notions of craft versus concept’, Sean Cubitt on ‘Ecomediation and the politics of no politics’ and Pierre Guillet de Monthoux and Martin Gylling on ‘Temporal (and spatial) processes and invention processes’. A twin event was hosted by Southampton.

Exploring Visual Research

The interdisciplinary workshop, held in June 2012, provided an opportunity for doctoral researchers at Sussex to explore methodological issues associated with different visual research methods, as well as providing some practical opportunities to explore their use and development. Workshops were given by Dr Caroline Bassett on The Nature of Visual Research, Dr Raminder Kaur & Dr Ben Rogaly on The Dramas of Seeing and Being Seen in Theatre, Sue MacLaine and John Walker on The Use of Video in the Oral History of Deaf Sign Language Users, Dr John Pryor and Takeshi Miyazaki on Stimulated Recall and Dr Benjamin Zeitlyn on Using Art-Based Methods for Research with Children. This event was supported by the School of Education and Social Work in collaboration with the Digital and Social Media Theme.

Expertise

In November 2012 the Digital Economy Communities and Culture Network + ran a scoping workshop exploring expertise in the context of digital transformation in relation to cultures and communities. This event was run as part of a programme of activities designed to better understand what skills, knowledge and competencies are needed by cultural organizations and communities to enable fuller and more autonomous engagements with digital media.

Digital Media Technologies and their Cultural, Social and Political Impacts

As part of the University's 50th anniversary, we celebrated our academic rigour with a series of six Sussex Conversations featuring leading thinkers of our age. The Digital and Social Media conversation took place in May 2012. The debate addressed the developments in digital technologies that are shaping the public and private life of societies and citizens, and reorganising cultural and political relations.

Some of the key questions included:

- What kinds of digital technologies will emerge in the next 50 years – and what kind of technologies should we create?

- How can we better understand the potential cultural, social and political impacts of these technologies?

- Is the digital revolution producing a new cultural cleavage between the arts and sciences? What kinds of convergence can be, or should be developed?

The conversation brought together computer scientists, communications, media and cultural theorists, sociologists and artists to explore whether the old divide between the ‘two cultures’ of art and science is now re-inscribed in digital terms.

You can watch the discussion on the Sussex Conversations webpage.

Keep Researching: A Symposium Exploring the Research Potential of The Keep

In May 2013, the Digital and Social Media research theme and the Culture and Heritage research theme ran the first of a series of annual meetings to explore the research potential of The Keep, a new state-of-the-art historical resource centre based near Falmer. The Keep is a new purpose built home for the archives and historical resources of East Sussex and Brighton & Hove, and the Special Collections of the University of Sussex, including the internationally renowned Mass Observation Archive.

This new resource will gather together several prominent collections of material that will offer new synergies for research bids and collaboration. The papers delivered were partly to explain the contents of the new building and partly to discuss possible avenues of research activity.

Presentations were given by Sussex researchers who have experience using selected resources from the six miles of archives that The Keep will hold. There were also presentations on the future holdings by Fiona Courage (Special Collections), Christopher Whittick (East Sussex Records Office) and Kevin Bacon (Brighton and Hove Museums). Judy Burg, University Archivist at Hull History Centre also contributed to the discussion by talking about how Hull History Centre is used by researchers and how the centre has developed since opening in 2010.

Visit the East Sussex Record Office website for further information on The Keep.

Further information on the Keep Researching symposium is available here: Keep Researching Report [DOCX 22.96KB].

SOUNDday

In June 2013 the Digital and Social Media Research Theme supported a SOUNDday at The Basement, Brighton. The event brought together radio producers, community activists, academics, archivists, sound artists and others who work with sound. The day began with a panel discussion and Q&A chaired by Melita Dennett, focussing on the following questions:

Why do people STILL continue to listen to radio in a digital era in which we are overwhelmed by multi-platform media consumption choices?

HOW do people listen to radio and listen generally?

Has the way people listen changed and if so, what consequences does this have for us as producers/sound specialists?

The panel consisted of Kate Lacey ,Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at University of Sussex; Lance Dann, Sound designer, radio producer, academic and commissioning editor at Resonance 104.4FM; Sarah Gorrell, Sony award winning presenter at BBC Sussex; and David Hendy, Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Sussex.

Volunteers from amongst the delegates went out and collected 30 seconds of sound from the nearby North Laine area. These collected sounds were then used to create a piece of music that was performed live by Sarah Angliss.

A series of presentations were given in the afternoon, starting with Margaretta Jolly (University of Sussex) who spoke on Sisterhood and After the first national oral history project of the women's liberation movement created in partnership with the British Library. This was followed by Daniel Nathan and Nats Spada (Brighton's Juice 107.2) who discussed how to 'publish' live and podcast radio online and then make it searchable/playable on any internet connected music player, phone, games console or TV. Vivenie Niragira (founder Brighton based charity RYICO) gave a presentation on Keeping Memories an oral history project documenting the experiences of members of the Rwandan community living in the UK. David Hendy (University of Sussex) gave the last presentation of the day on recording sound on location and practical/editorial issues arising from this, based on his experiences of recording for his recent BBC Radio 4 series Noise: a human history.

Digital Humanities Series 2011-2012

The Digital and Social Media theme ran a year-long programme of events exploring issues in the Digital Humanities.

This series aimed to introduce faculty and postgraduate researchers in the Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences to data sources, analytical techniques, and representation tools associated with digital technologies. It was comprised of seminars as well as practical workshops that taught new techniques.

The following events have taken place:

Searching for the truth in Computing?: Issue Crawler and Cultural Research

This first event in the Digital Humanities series was held on 8th June 2011. An interactive workshop called 'Searching for the truth in Computing?: Issue Crawler and Cultural Research' was led by Aristea Fotopoulou from the School of Media, Film and Music.

Aristea Fotopoulou has used Issue Crawler, a web search, issue-network location and visualisation tool designed by the govcom Foundation, to explore networks of women's organisations in London as part of her doctoral research into feminism, sexuality and digital mediation.

In this workshop Aristea explored how digital mapping technologies can elucidate the way networks organise around specific issues and whose voices prevail online. She also explained how computer maps might give a different sense of the social life of an issue, and of a network, than personal accounts would - for instance those derived through ethnographic methods.

Aristea took participants through the steps involved in designing, producing and carrying out an Issue Crawl. She considered how results can be integrated into other material, and also discussed how these kinds of tools can be adapted for other humanities/cultural studies research projects.

Searching for the truth in Computing?: Issue Crawler and Cultural Research

What is Digital Humanities?

The lecture mapped the terrain of work developing under the banner of the digital humanities – and asked how its claims to be innovative relate to its methods, its approach, or the objects it seeks to investigate.The following workshop was based on Version Variation Visualization - a crowd sourcing project on global rewriting of Othello.

David Berry is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at Swansea University. He is interested in the methodological and theoretical challenges of studying digital media, particularly through an approach broadly conceived as cultural political economy. See also the computational turn blog.

What is Digital Humanities?

Digital Methods and Software Studies after Narrative Intelligence

In the third event of the Digital Humanities series, Warren Sack, University of Santa Cruz California gave an open workshop on ‘Digital Methods and Software Studies after Narrative Intelligence’ at the Attenborough Centre Creativity Zone.

In his presentation, Warren Sack explored an example of how digital methods might be pursued otherwise by using a different slice of computer science (specifically, programming language design) in order to study digital processes as well as digital objects. The case Sack presented addressed an open question in new media theory: What is the difference between databases and narratives? Are they representative of two forms of incommensurable knowledge

Warren Sack is a software designer and media theorist whose work explores theories and designs for online public space and public discussion.

Digital Methods and Software Studies after Narrative Intelligence

Sound Studies and the Digital Humanities

In the fourth event of the Digital Humanities series, Jonathan Sterne, McGill University gave an open lecture exploring and linking his work on sound and interventions in Sound Studies with the digital humanities project.

Jonathan is the author of:

The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003)

His new book will be:

MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012)

For more on Jonathan’s work refer to http://sterneworks.org/

The University of Sussex has a Music and Sonic Media MA. If you would like to read more about this Masters Programme please refer to the Department of Music.

Sound Studies and the Digital Humanities

Moving Humans: Motion, Place and the Digital Humanities

Kirk Woolford’s (MFM) January 2012 workshop focused on different forms of data collection and analysis from human movement including GPS, tracking, mapping, and motion capture in the Digital Humanities. The workshop also included Stuart Dunn, research fellow in the Centre for E-Research and now a lecturer in Digital Humanities at Kings College London. More information about Stuart and his projects in the area of visualisation, GIS and digital humanities can be obtained by looking at his profile.

Moving Humans: Motion, Place and the Digital Humanities

Digital Languages: Using corpora for your research questons (via Sketch Engine)

Adam Kilgarriff’s master class in January 2012 explored patterns in texts when working with the digital humanities. With the advent of computers and the web, people working with language can explore it as never before. We can now ask our computers to find lots of examples of a word, phrase, or grammatical construction, and with advanced tools we can also find the core terms for a domain, or the words most often occurring in a construction, or automatically prepare draft dictionary entries. Adam introduced two tools - Sketch Engine, for exploring corpora, and WebBootCaT - for building them - and showed how they can be used to address a range of tasks in linguistics and lexicography, including, for example, contrasting different varieties of English, or identifying the distinctive vocabulary of a particular author.

Digital Languages: Using corpora for your research questons (via Sketch Engine)

Supporting young people in becoming creators of multimodal and interactive narratives

This workshop took place in February 2012 and was led by Katy Howland, Informatics. Research was presenting on designing tools to support young people in creating multimodal and interactive narratives in the form of computer games. Building computer games can be a motivating vehicle for creative expression for young people, and there is potential for them to develop valuable communication skills through the activity. Currently, games are occasionally examined as texts in schools, but there are generally no opportunities for pupils to become creators of such narratives; they tend to remain only consumers. The talk described the design and development of software tools to support young people in building their own narrative-based games. There were demonstrations of games created and a discussion followed on the cross-disciplinary issues that are raised through this work.

Supporting young people

Reborn Digital? Film and Moving Image Studies

This lecture and workshop was given by Catherine Grant of Film Studies for Free in February 2012. It focussed on the possibilities offered by digital technologies for researching and 'writing' audiovisually and explored the increasing use of film and video forms as the medium of their own study.

Computerised non-linear editing tools can translate into Film and Moving Image Studies some of the distinct research techniques of the digital humanities, such as defamiliarisation through format-shifting, automated visualisation and randomisation; more objective searching of large amounts of digitised material. But what might it mean for such research that these and other digital tools can also aid in the production, exhibition and distribution of unusually immersive and affective forms of film theory and criticism?

Reborn Digital? Film and Moving Image Studies

In the Aftermath of the Cybernetic Hypothesis

Alexander Galloway workshop took place in May 2012. In an essay from 2001, the French collective Tiqqun speaks of what they call the cybernetic hypothesis: "[A]t the end of the twentieth century the image of steering, that is to say management, has become the primary metaphor to describe not only politics but all of human activity as well." The cybernetic hypothesis is a vast experiment beginning in the overdeveloped nations after World War II and eventually spreading to swallow the planet in an impervious logic of administration and interconnectivity. What are the origins of the cybernetic hypothesis, and what are its futures? This talk offers a media archeology of cybernetics through an exploration of nineteenth-century chronophotography, the history of the pixel, developments in computer modeling, bit arrays and grid systems, and that most enigmatic cybernetic device, the black box. Instead of contributing to the many heroic histories of cybernetics that already populate the cultural imagination, this talk aimed to uncover an alternative history of digital systems via an examination of the aesthetics and politics of control.

In the Aftermath of the Cybernetic Hypothesis