News

29 May 2025
Call for Participation: Pre-conference & Autumn School “Synthetic Imaginaries“
Synthetic Imaginaries: The Cultural Politics of Generative AI
Call for Participation: Pre-conference & Autumn School “Synthetic Imaginaries“

Synthetic Imaginaries: The Cultural Politics of Generative AI

University of Siegen | 8–12 September 2025 | extended deadline for submision: 30 June 2025

Synthetic Imaginaries: The Cultural Politics of Generative AI is an international event that will explore the cultural, political, and methodological dimensions of generative AI and synthetic media through a combination of conference talks, hands-on workshops, and collaborative projects. Topics include deepfakes, avatars, cultural biases in training data, feminist and postcolonial critiques, and the aesthetics of AI-generated content.

Apply here

 

About | Program Highlights | Proposal Submission | Venue | Program | Contact

About the Autumn School

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI), big data processing, and synthetic media has profoundly reshaped how culture is produced, made sense of, and experienced today. To ‘synthesize’ is to assemble, collate, and compile, blending heterogeneous components into something new. Where there is synthesis, there is power at play. Synthetic media—as exemplified by the oddly prophetic early speech synthesizer demos—carry the logic of analog automation into digital cultures where human and algorithmic interventions converge. Much of the research in this area—spanning subjects as diverse as augmented reality, avatars, and deepfakes—has revolved around ideas of simulation, focusing on the manipulation of data and content people produce and consume. Meanwhile, generative AI and deep learning models, while central to debates on artificiality, raise political questions as part of a wider social ecosystem where technology is perpetually reimagined, negotiated, and contested: What images and stories feed the datasets that contemporary AI models are trained on? Which imaginaries are reproduced through AI-driven media technologies and which remain latent? How do synthetic media transform relations of power and visibility, and what methods—perhaps equally synthetic—can we develop to analyze these transformations? 

The five-day event at the University of Siegen—organized by the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centers Media of Cooperation and Transformations of the Popular together with the Center of Digital Narratives in Bergen, the Digital Culture and Communication Section of ECREA and the German National Research Data Infrastructure Consortium NFDI4Culture—explores the relationship between synthetic media and today’s imaginaries of culture and technology, which incorporate AI as an active participant. By “synthetic,” we refer not simply to the artificial but to how specific practices and ways of knowing take shape through human-machine co-creation. Imaginaries, in turn, reflect shared visions, values, and expectations—shaping not only what technologies do but how they are perceived and made actionable in everyday life. 

The event opens with a one-day conference and moves into hands-on workshops and collaborative projects. With multiple opportunities for exchange across disciplines, we encourage especially early-career researchers and PhD students to present their ideas during the conference and join a project led by international facilitators and data designers. We invite submissions of short abstracts (max. 500 words) for presentations engaging with questions and provocations related—but not limited—to topics such as: 

Critical data studies perspectives on AI: how data infrastructures, labeling, and curation shape the outputs we call “synthetic”; Cultural afterlives of training data: how racialized, gendered, or colonial imaginaries persist in synthetic media outputs; Methodological uses of GenAI: the politics that we buy in when repurposing AI as a method, from inherited bias to epistemic tensions; Synthetic personhood and likeness: exploring deepfakes, AI-generated avatars, and the power of (in)authenticity; Online cultures and platforms: how AI-generated content circulates across platforms—from memes and art to fan fiction, music, and poetry; Postcolonial and feminist critiques of AI: challenging universalist assumptions in generative models and interrogating whose knowledge is made (in)visible; Clichés, formulas, and repetition in GenAI outputs: how AI-generated stories and images rely on familiar tropes, visual styles, and narrative conventions; The aesthetics of noise in AI-generated content: repetition, glitch, randomness, and their role in producing or disrupting meaning; GPTs as infrastructural components: how generative pretrained transformers operate as configurable, customizable, and task-oriented agents embedded in platform infrastructures; Prompting and/as probing: prompting as a form of critical intervention, shaping co-authorship, sense-making, and research design; The ethics of training AI: from historical records and religious texts to indigenous cosmologies and oral traditions—what are the implications of using culturally sensitive knowledge to train generative models? Generative AI and Memory: synthetic media as a means of reimagining the past—through deepfake testimonies, interactive historical simulations, and other forms of computational memory-making; Generative AI in activist contexts: can AI be used for resistance or reimagining community—in the face of its environmental footprint and complicity in extractive systems? 

 

Program highlights

The event blends three complementary formats:

Mix questions!

Monday, 8 September

Day one begins with a keynote by Jill Walker Rettberg and opens space for emerging questions—think of it as an idea hub. Accepted abstracts will be grouped into thematic sessions curated by the organising team. Presenters will be connected via email ahead of time to coordinate their contributions. Each presentation will be set to 10 minutes to allow ample time for discussion, collective thinking, and exchange. The emphasis is on dialogue, not polished conclusions.  

Mix methods!

Tuesday, 9 September-Thursday, 11 September 

The next three days—featuring a workshop by Gabriele De Seta and an artistic intervention by Ángeles Briones and DensityDesign Lab—are about exploring new methods—hands-on! We invite you to join a team of interdisciplinary scholars and data designers in probing new methodological combinations. Each of our project teams will present a research question alongside a specific method to be collaboratively explored. Participants will not only learn how to design prompts and work with AI-generated text and images but also how to critically account for genAI models as platform models. All projects draw on intersectional approaches, combining qualitative and quantitative data to explore the synthetic dimensions of AI agency—whether as content creator, noise generator, hallucinator, research collaborator, data annotator, or style imitator. Please bring your laptops. The project titles will be announced soon. 

Synthesize!

Friday, 12 September  

The final day is dedicated to sharing, reflecting, and synthesizing the questions, methods, and insights developed throughout the week. Project teams will present their collaborative processes, highlight key takeaways, and discuss how their ideas and approaches shifted through hands-on experimentation with methods.

 

Proposal Submission

Please submit your proposal (max. 500 words) outlining how your work aligns with the event’s theme by 30.06.2025, using this form. Please note that the number of participants will be limited to maintain focused and engaging discussions. All submissions will be peer-reviewed.

The event is free of charge, though attendees are responsible for arranging and covering their travel and accommodation in Siegen. Limited travel support is available (two to three stipends ranging from €500 to €700). Early-career researchers and PhD students are invited to apply; stipends will be awarded by the NFDI4Culture consortium based on the strength of the justification, particularly concerning critical ethical engagement with AI research data, as well as the distance and cost of travel. Short summaries of the presented work will be published on the NFDI4Culture website.

A certificate of participation will be issued for both the conference presentation and the hands-on workshop sessions.

Updated Timeline with extended deadline:
Submit your proposal by 30 June 2025.
Notification of acceptance by July 15 2025.
Registration by August 1 2025.

 

Venue

Universität Siegen
Campus Herrengarten
AH-A 217/18
Herrengarten 3
57072 Siegen

 

Contact

Dr. Elena Pilipets
elena.pilipets[at]uni-siegen.de
ecreadigitalculture[æt]gmail.com

 

The Autumn School is organized by the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centers 1187 Media of Cooperation and 1472 Transformations of the Popular together with the Center of Digital Narratives in Bergen, the Digital Culture and Communication Section of ECREA and the German National Research Data Infrastructure Consortium NFDI4Culture.

15 May 2025
Call for Participants for research study on smart homes
How “smart” is your home?
Call for Participants for research study on smart homes

How “smart” is your home?

A research study by Stephan Habscheid, Dagmar Hoffmann, Tim Hector, Niklas Strüver, (all University of Siegen, SFB 1187)

 

The project team of B06 “Un/desired observation in interaction” is looking for participants for a research study on “smart homes”. Do you have smart home devices, or want to buy new smart home devices soon? Then consider participating in this study.

 

→ To the website of project B06

 

 

About the study

We want to investigate ‘smartness’ in your everyday life. To gain insights into everyday life with smart devices in general, we would like to accompany and record you as you set up or use your smart home devices. We use the results and data exclusively for research purposes. The data collected will be processed confidentially following the highest data protection standards. In publications, strict anonymization or obfuscation of the participants is ensured.

For the study, we are looking for

  • households with smart speakers, smart kitchen appliances (e.g. a Thermomix), networked electronics (e.g. light bulbs, thermostats, door locks or sockets), digital energy controls for a solar panel or similar devices/applications
  • households that do not use such devices yet but are planning to purchase them and would let us accompany them in setting up and using them.

In case you want to participate, we will offer you an expense allowance of between 30 and 180 euros, depending on the extent of your participation.

 

Participation involves:

  • The video recording of the use of smart home devices in certain situations, e.g. when cooking and playing games, during everyday conversations or when friends and acquaintances visit.
  • If possible, video recording of the initial setup of smart home devices (unpacking, installation, connecting to the smartphone and placement in the home).
  • The recording of all smart home applications in your home as well as various interviews with you and other household members.
  • Screen recording will also be carried out in certain situations to determine the connection between the smart home device and your smartphone.

Cameras and audio recording devices will be provided by us.

 

Participation requirements: All members of your household must be at least 16 years old.

 

 

Contact

If you have any questions, please send an e-mail to the project team: ipa-studie[æt]uni-siegen.de.

 

Download Post card

Download Poster

25 February 2025
CfP: Co-Design Workshop on Social Interaction in Semi-Automated Traffic
Co-Design Workshop on “Social Interaction in Semi-Automated Traffic”
CfP: Co-Design Workshop on Social Interaction in Semi-Automated Traffic

Co-Design Workshop on “Social Interaction in Semi-Automated Traffic”

by Shadan Sadeghian (University of Siegen) and Md Akib Shahriar Khan (University of Siegen)

Are you interested in sharing your experiences, ideas, and perspectives on communication and collaboration in evolving traffic systems? We seek participants for our user study on “Co-Design Workshop on Social Interaction in Semi-Automated Traffic”, led .

 

 

Central Information

Da️te: Wednesday, March 5, 2025
Time: 1.00 pm – 4.30 pm
Location: 
University of Siegen,  Kohlbettstraße 15, 57072 Siegen

 

Download PDF

 

About the workshop

This Co-Design Workshop will explore how road users – pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, and others – interact in semi-automated traffic environments. Through creative and interactive activities, participants can share their experiences, ideas, and perspectives on communication and collaboration in evolving traffic systems.

 

Who can participate?

We welcome participants from all backgrounds – no prior knowledge or expertise is required, just a willingness to contribute your thoughts!

 

How to apply?

To appreciate your time and contributions, participants will receive a compensation of €40. Spots are limited, so please register as soon as possible using the following link: ➞ register here

Selected participants will be contacted with further details.

 

About project P05

Project P05 – “Social Interaction in Semi-Automated Road Traffic explores how increasing automation transforms social interactions in road traffic. By integrating multimodal sensing technologies, it examines prosocial behaviors, new communication methods, and human-machine cooperation in mixed traffic. Through field studies and simulations, the project aims to develop guidelines for safer and more inclusive automated mobility.

The project is led by Shadan Sadeghian. She is an assistant professor on Interactive Autonomous Systems at the University of Siegen.

Md Akib Shahriar Khan is a doctoral researcher in project P05 and in the Interactive Autonomous Systems group at the Universität Siegen. 

24 February 2025
Call for Participation: Spring School on Media Climate Justice
“Media Climate Justice: Research, Skillsharing, Hacking”
Call for Participation: Spring School on Media Climate Justice

“Media Climate Justice: Research, Skillsharing, Hacking”

organized by Julia Bee (Ruhr-Universität Bochumg & SFB 1187) and the Research at Risk working group

How does media shape our understanding of the climate crisis? What role do they play in activism and political mobilization? The Spring School “Media Climate Justice: Research, Skillsharing, Hacking” (April 11-13, 2025, Ruhr University Bochum) invites you to discuss these questions in a practical way. Organized by the Research at Risk working group, the Spring School offers workshops, inputs and networking opportunities for all interested parties from science, journalism, activism and art.

 

➞ Summer School website

 

Central Info

April 11 – 13, 2025

AK Research at Risk
Department of Media Studies
Ruhr University Bochum
Universitätsstr. 150
44780 Bochum 

Registration: until March 31, 2025 via email to mail[æt]mediaclimatejustice.org

→ Program

About the Spring School

How we perceive the climate catastrophe and the associated ecological crises depends largely on how they are negotiated in the media. It is therefore also a question of the media whether and how people can be politicised or mobilised for climate justice. We highlighted this at our first Spring School in spring 2024 on climate, media and anti-fascism.

Now we want to continue our efforts to connect activism, journalism, art and science – and go beyond analyses: This time, the focus is particularly on digital research practices, climate journalism and climate activism on Tiktok: we’re learning some skills for sharing! For our programme, we have invited Correctiv’s climate editorial team and the research collective Tactical Tech, among others. We will be looking at climate narratives, migration and the far-right appropriation of the climate discourse. There will also be a workshop on climate justice issues in teaching at the university. In addition to inputs and workshops, there will be a performance on Saturday evening. Afterwards, we hope to raise a glass with you.

All interested parties from university, activism, journalism, art and civil society are cordially invited! Journalists, people interested in research, committed people – spread the word & come along.

 

About Research at Risk

Research at Risk is a working group in media and performance studies that understands research as a practice of knowledge production, exchange and criticism, which is not only facilitated by academics, but also by activists, journalists, artists and others. We work in the field between climate justice and antifascist coalition building with a strong emphasis on intersectional approaches. In 2022 and 2023 Research at Risk invited a variety of speakers to present and discuss different ways in which individual researchers as well as critical research as such are put at risk. For this purpose, we organized two lecture series on flight and scholarship as well as petro fascism. Departing from these conversations we are continuing our work in this practice-oriented spring school to tackle the above-mentioned interceptions between right wing politics and anti-climate sentiment. 

 

 
 

 

07 November 2024
Call for Participations: Winter School on AI Methods
AI Methods: From Probing to Prompting, 4-7 February, 2025 
Call for Participations: Winter School on AI Methods

AI Methods: From Probing to Prompting, 4-7 February, 2025 

The Collaborative Research Center 1187 “Media of Cooperation” organizes the one-week winter school at the University of Siegen and invites graduate students, postdoc researchers, and media studies scholars interested in the intersections of AI methods, digital visual methodologies, visual social media, and platforms. The Winter School aims to explore questions centering on the implications of AI methods for new forms of sense-making and human-machine co-creation. Please register via the registration form until December 15 2025.

 

 

About the Winter School

As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies rapidly evolve, the ways in which we perceive and process information are fundamentally changing. The shift from computational vision, recognition, and classification to generative AI lies at the core of today’s technological landscape, fueling societal debates across different areas—from open-source intelligence and election security to propaganda, art, activism, and storytelling. 

Computer vision, a sophisticated agent of pattern recognition, emerged with the rise of machine learning, sparking critical debates around the fairness of image labelling and the deep-seated biases in training data. Today, models like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and more recently, Grok are not just recognizing—they are generating patterns, synthesizing multimodal data from websites, social media, and other online sources to produce oddly familiar and yet captivating results. This shift introduces significant ethical questions: How can we critically repurpose the outputs of AI models that are always rooted in platform infrastructures? Which methodological challenges and creative possibilities arise when the boundaries between context and scale become indistinct? Are patterns and biases all there is? And how about scaling down

The one-week winter school at the University of Siegen organized by the Collaborative Research Center “Media of Cooperation” invites participants to explore these questions centering on the implications of AI methods for new forms of sense-making and human-machine co-creation. The winter school is practice-based and brings together conceptual inputs, workshops, and sprinted group projects around two collaborative methods: probing and prompting. 

Probing involves repurposing AI systems to explore their underlying mechanisms. It is a method of critical interrogation—for example, using specific collections of images as inputs to reveal how contemporary computer vision models process these inputs and generate descriptions. Probing not only serves to problematize the hidden architectures of AI but also allows us to critically assess their different ‘ways of knowing’—how can alternative computer vision features such as web detection or text-in-image recognition help us contextualize and interpret visual data? 

On the other hand, prompting refers to the practice of engaging GenAI models through input commands to generate multimodal content. Prompting emphasizes the participatory aspect of AI, framing it as a tool for human-machine co-creation, but it also shows the models’ limitations and inherent tensions. AI-generated creations captivate us, yet they also pose the risk of hallucination or what philosopher Harry Frankfurt might call “bullshit”— statements the models confidently present as facts, regardless of their detachment from reality.

The first day of the Winter School will be hybrid. Project group work will be taking place on site.

 

Program highlights

Participants will have the opportunity to explore and attune these methods to different research scenarios including tracing the spread of propaganda memes/deepfakes, analyzing AI-generated images, and ‘jailbreaking’ or prompting against platforms’ content policy restrictions. A blend of research practice and critical reflection, the winter school features

a keynote by Jill Walker Rettberg (University of Bergen) on “Qualitiative methods for analysing generative AI: Experiences with machine vision and AI storytelling”

two hands-on workshops on mixed techniques for probing and prompting facilitated by Carlo de Gaetano (Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences), Andrea Benedetti (Density Design, Politecnico di Milano), Elena Pilipets (University of Siegen), and Marloes Geboers (University of Amsterdam) 

two project tracks intended to combine AI methods with qualitative approaches and ethical data storytelling.

Track 1 “Fabricating the People: Probing AI Detection for Audio-Visual Content in Turkish TikTok” led by Lena Teigeler and Duygu Karatas (both University of Siegen)

Track 2 “Jail(break)ing: Synthetic Imaginaries of ‘sensitive’ AI” led by Elena Pilipets (University of Siegen) and Marloes Geboers (University of Amsterdam) 

 

Track I: Fabricating the People: Probing AI Detection for Audio-Visual Content in Turkish TikTok

Lena Teigeler & Duygu Karatas

Several brutal femicides in Türkiye in 2024 led to a wave of outrage, showing in protests both on the streets and on social media. The protesters demand the protection of women against male violence, measures against offenders and criticize the government under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for not standing up for women’s rights, as demonstrated, for example, by Türkiye’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention in 2021. One of the cases leading to the protest was allegedly connected to the Turkish “manosphere” and online “incel” community. The manosphere is an informal online network of blogs, forums, and social media communities focused on men’s issues, often promoting views on masculinity, gender roles, and relationships. At the core of these groups often lie misogynistic, and anti-feminist views. Many groups foster toxic attitudes toward women and marginalized groups. Incels, short for “involuntary celibates,” are one subgroup belonging to the broader manosphere, formed by men who feel unable to form romantic or sexual relationships despite wanting them, often blaming society or women for their frustrations.

The project investigates how the cases of femicide are discussed and negotiated in Turkish TikTok by protesters and within the manosphere and explores how these videos make use of generative AI. The use of AI in video creation can range from entire scene generation, over the creation of sounds or deepfaking, to editing and stylisation. The project takes a sample of TikToks associated with the recent wave of femicides as the starting point and makes use of AI methods for two purposes: 1) To detect the usage of generative AI within a sample of TikToks with the help of image labeling. This can range from fully-generated images, videos or sound, to the usage of tools and techniques used within the creation and editing process. We compare different models for detection purposes. 2) With the help of Web Detection, we trace the spread of videos and images across platform borders and content elements that are assembled or synthesized within TikToks.

The aim of the project is to create a cartography of AI based methods for the investigation of audio-visual content. It is part of the DFG-funded research project “Fabricating the People – negotiation of claims to representation in Turkish social media in the context of generative AI”.

Track II: Track 2 Jail(break)ing: Synthetic Imaginaries of ‘sensitive’ AI 

Elena Pilipets & Marloes Geboers 

The rapid evolution of AI technology is pushing the boundaries of ethical AI use. Newer models like Grok-2 diverge from traditional, more restrained approaches, raising concerns about biases, moderation, and societal impact. This track explores how three generative AI models—X’s Grok-2, Open AI’s GPT4o, and Microsoft’s Copilot—reimagine controversial content according to—or pushing against—the platforms’ content policy restrictions. To better understand each model’s response to sensitive prompts, we use a derivative approach: starting with images as inputs, we generate stories around them that guide the creation of new, story-based image outputs. In the process, we employ iterative prompting that blends “jailbreaking”—eliciting responses the model would typically avoid—with “jailing,” or reinforcing platform-imposed constraints. Jail(break)ing, then, exposes the skewed imaginaries inscribed in the models’ capacity to synthesize compliant outputs: The more iterations it takes to generate a new image the stronger the latent spaces of generative models come to the fore that lay bare the platforms’ data-informed structures of reasoning.

Addressing the performative nature of automated perception, the track, facilitated by Elena Pilipets and Marloes Geboers, examines six image formations collected from social media, which then were used as prompts to explore six issues: war, memes, art, protest, porn, synthetics. In line with feminist approaches, we attend specifically to the hierarchies of power and (in)visibility perpetuated by GenAI, asking: Which synthetic imaginaries emerge from various issue contexts and what do these imaginaries reveal about the model’s ways of seeing? To which extent can we repurpose generative AI as a storytelling and tagging device? How do different models classify sensitive and ambiguous images (along the trajectories of content, aesthetics, and stance)? 

Facilitators will combine situated digital methods with experimental data visualization techniques tapping into the generative capacities of different AI models. The fabrication and collective interpretation of data with particular attention to the transitions between inputs and outputs will guide our exploration throughout. Participants will learn how to: 

  • Conduct “keyword-in-context” analysis of AI-generated stories to identify patterns or “formulas” within issue-specific imaginaries (where, who/what, and how).
  • Perform network analysis of AI-generated tags, where input keywords are tags for the original images and output keywords are tags for AI-regenerated images.
  • Design prompts to generate canvases that synthesize vernaculars of different transformer models. 

The project builds on our earlier work, developing ethnographic approaches to explore cross-model assemblages of algorithmic processes, training datasets, and latent spaces.

 

Registration

Please register via the form above until December 15. Your registration will be confirmed by December 20, 2024. Participation is limited to 20 people.

Venue

University of Siegen
Campus Herrengarten
Herrengarten 3
room: AH-A 125 
57072 Siegen

ContactElena Pilipets

 

20 June 2024
Call for Abstracts: En/Countering Tracking (Special issue of Computational Culture)
Official call for abstracts
Call for Abstracts: En/Countering Tracking (Special issue of Computational Culture)

Official call for abstracts


“En/Countering Tracking: Resisting spatiotemporal media operations in computational culture”

A special issue of Computational Culture, a Journal of Software Studies
Edited by Kathrin Friedrich and Sebastian Randerath

The deadline for submissions is September 15, 2024.

Tracking takes place ubiquitously and at different scales – from satellite-based wildlife tracking (Benson 2010) to automated monitoring of supply chain workers through radio-frequency identification (RFID) (Hayles 2009; Kanngieser 2013) and to ubiquitous self-surveillance through self-tracking apps (Lupton 2021). With the expansion of sensor-based geomedia as well as embodied computing, tracking also becomes a key media operation for environmental sensing or virtual reality experiences (Egliston and Carter 2022; Gabrys 2019). The computational logics of tracking result in new aesthetic and operational regimes that diminish sensory perception and privilege logics of calculation, which in turn co-constitute mobile forms of (non-)human action and tactical interventions (Crandall 2010; Hansen 2015).

Countering tracking has become a key form of resisting the logics of computational culture. Subversive encounters have emerged in recent years as counterpoints to the hegemonic logics of web infrastructures (Christl and Spiekermann 2016), platform labor (Heiland 2021) and racial capitalism (Russell and De Souza 2023). These attempts to counter tracking take forms that range from investigative visualizations (Fuller and Weizman 2021) or provoking glitches in tracking infrastructures (Leszczynski and Elwood 2022) to uncovering web-based tracking (Sharelab 2015), building counter-infrastructures for labor resistance (Qadri and D’Ignazio 2022), or using sensors and satellite images for critical investigations (Ballinger 2023; Boyd et al. 2018).

Countering tracking becomes a resistant media operation itself, disentangling hegemonic spatiotemporal regimes and their socio-political forces. These forms of countering tracking challenge existing theoretical approaches to the critical analysis of tracking and open up new perspectives on subversion and resistance in computational culture. How is countering tracking by means of tracking possible in different contexts and in relation to software, infrastructures and aesthetics?

We invite critical encounters through and of tracking, enabling new perspectives on computational infrastructures, software, (non-)human aesthetics and operative interactions, by means of theoretical reflections, critical making or activism. We aim at gathering submissions that 1) render existing tracking operations perceivable; 2) disrupt tracking infrastructures; or 3) operationalize tracking itself for resistance. The special issue invites theoretical, conceptual and performative approaches from fields such as media studies, visual studies, artistic research, sociology and critical geography to address the question of how tracking becomes a repressive, subversive or activistic media operation. 

 

Topics and projects might include:  

  • Inventive methods that repurpose tracking infrastructures, sensors, software and data to research computational culture
  • Detailed empirical and critical studies exploring the relations of en/countering tracking in computational culture
  • En/countering tracking in labor resistance and platform capitalisms
  • Critical theoretical conceptualization of tracking or countering for the study of computational culture
  • Critical explorations of the chronopolitics, timescapes and spatiotemporal regimes of tracking
  • Activist media, countersurveillance, tactical media, decolonial, (glitch) feminist and resistant epistemologies of tracking
  • En/countering relations between political economy, racialized capitalism and tracking
  • Visual cultures, (in-)visualities and aesthetics of en/countering tracking
  • En/countering tracking in media art and artistic activism

 

Schedule:

750-word abstracts should be emailed to en_countering_tracking@uni-bonn.de by September 15, 2024. Abstracts will be reviewed by the special issue editors and the Computational Culture editorial board.

Authors of selected abstracts will be notified by October 30, 2024 and invited to submit full manuscripts by March 1, 2025. These manuscripts are subject to full blind peer review according to Computational Culture’s policies. Possible costs for proofreading incurred by the authors are not covered by the editors or the journal. There are no open access or processing charges for this special issue. 

 

Computational Culture is an online open-access peer-reviewed journal of interdisciplinary enquiry into the nature of cultural computational objects, practices, processes and structures.
For the full CfA visit: 

 

Any queries can be addressed to the special issue editors at: en_countering_tracking@uni-bonn.de

18 June 2024
Call for Contributions for “The Datafied Web”
Official call for contributions | Call for contributions PDF
Call for Contributions for “The Datafied Web”

Official call for contributions | Call for contributions PDF


“The Datafied Web”:
6th RESAW Conference (5-6 June 2025, Siegen University)

The deadline for submissions is 15 October 2024.

Do you remember the beginnings of early metrics in the 90s, the birth of web counters, those digital pioneers that marked and started to quantify the pulse of online activity, the novelty of seeing website visits measured in real-time, eye-catching graphics becoming the currency of online attention, and the early days of companies like Webtrends, Urchin and DoubleClick?

We invite scholars, researchers, web archivists to contribute to the 6th RESAW conference on the topic of “The Datafied Web”, through a historical lens. We would like to delve into the historical roots, trends, and trajectories that shaped the data-driven paradigm in web development and to examine the genealogies of the datafied and metrified web. Historical studies of trajectories towards a databased web and the emergence of platform-driven mobile ecosystems are very welcome, as well as case studies for instance related to the development of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and the evolution of data-sharing practices. Uncovering the early forms of analytics software, their origins, and the role they played in shaping the web landscape, and examining the historical context, aesthetics and role of web counters, analytics tools, mobile sensing and other metrics may also help us deepen our understanding of online interactions, past publics and audiences, and their (uneasy) trajectories. “The datafied web” also raises questions related to methods and (web) archives allowing to research this evolution: what are for instance the challenges and methodologies involved in archiving the metrified and increasingly mobile web, including the back-end infrastructure?  

This theme also invites us to trace the historical trajectory of data surveillance and the evolution of data capturing practices on the web. Complementary are issues related to the historical development of tracking mechanisms, cookies, and the creation of digital footprints, as well as the evolution of companies relying on metrics, and the development of financialized web spaces and their implications. By investigating historical controversies and debates surrounding the increasing datafication of the web and uncovering historical instances of innovative data use or resistance practices against the datafication of the web, this conference also aims at reconstructing vivid and key debates that are transversal to the history of the web. How did the datafied web provide for the sensory media environments that we are now living in?

Finally, we wish to discuss innovative research methodologies for uncovering the historical dimensions of the datafied and metrified web, as well as methods that are approaching web archives as data (from an archiving and research perspective) and explore them through distant reading, metadata, seed lists, and other methods. Plus, we want to encourage everyone to think about datafication as a practice of sensing and sense-making that creates, sustains, and undermines media environments.

 

Theme scope and conference topics of the RESAW Conference

We encourage submissions addressing the conference theme ‘Histories of the Datafied Web’ through the following themes:

Infrastructures

  • histories and genealogies of the datafied and metrified web, including its platformization within capitalism(s)
  • aesthetics and design of the early metrified web
  • the rise of data surveillance and data capture as an industry
  • histories of APIs, data-sharing, and advertising technologies
  • the rise of web counters, web analytics, and other web metrics
  • histories of trackers, cookies, digital footprints, etc.

Publics

  • methods and approaches towards audience of the past web
  • historical controversies surrounding the datafication and platformization of the web
  • histories of uses of data or practices of resistance to datafication and platform economies
  • the rise of the financialization of the web, and its political economy
  • histories of automation, virality, and popular practices on the web

Archives

  • archiving the metrified web and back-end infrastructure of the web
  • methodologies for writing histories of the datafied and metrified web
  • web archives as data (archiving and documentation, distant reading, use of metadata, seed lists…)
  • web archiving data practices and challenges

After the conference, the organizers will invite relevant contributors to participate in a special issue of Internet Histories related to the topic “The Datafied Web”. 

Submissions that explore other aspects both within and outside of the general conference theme, are also welcome.

 

Submissions for the RESAW Conference

The deadline for submissions is 15 October 2024.

Submissions are welcome from all fields and disciplines, and we would particularly encourage postgraduate students and early career researchers to participate. We also encourage contributions that highlight non-Western and non-hegemonic developments. Contributions on practical challenges of web archiving in current moments of crisis are also very welcome.

Possible formats

  • Individual papers of 15 minutes (500-word abstract).
  • Panel sessions consisting of three individual papers of 15 minutes, introduced by a chair (500-word abstract for each paper, a brief 300-word description of the purpose of the panel).
  • Other unconventional proposals like sessions of lightning talks, roundtables, etc., are welcome (300-word abstract).
  • A session “My PhD in 5 Minutes” is foreseen (please apply by providing a 300-word abstract).

Acceptance of submissions is based on double-blind peer review.

Possible formats for the pre-conference day

  • Submissions related to web archives are welcome from all fields and disciplines, and we would particularly encourage workshops related to tools, hands-on, as well as training sessions and demos.
  • A whole pre-conference (500-word abstract)
  • Workshops, demos and other formats related to web archives practices, methods, tools, demos (500-word abstract, specifying the expected duration)

Submissions

The deadline for submissions (including the pre-conference day) is 15th October 2024.

To submit a proposal :
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=resaw2025

Timetable

  • 15 October 2024: Deadline for submissions
  • 15 December 2024: Notifications of acceptance
  • 25 January 2025: Programme
  • March 2025: Registrations open (fees: 90 euros for advanced scholars, 50 euros for PhD students)
  • 4 June 2025: Pre-conferences and demos
  • 5-6 June 2025: Conference at Siegen University

 

The RESAW conference is organized by the CRC 1187 Media of Cooperation in collaboration with the RESAW Conference Committee

The conference is funded in part, by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) – Projektnummer 262.513.311 – SFB 1187 Medien der Kooperation and in part by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR), [INTER/DFG/23/17960744/DIGMEDIA].

17 March 2024
Call for Participation: Master Class for Media Ethnography (Siegen, June 27-28)
Call for Participation: Master Class for Media Ethnography (Siegen, June 27-28)

June 27, 2024 14:00-19:00 / June 28, 2024   9:00-13:00

In advance: individual telephone conversation to discuss reference to your own project and materials.

The aim of this master class is to experience the experimental approach of camera ethnography and to try out arranging research (with reference to Wittgenstein) together by referring to the diversity of research fields which will be represented in the workshop. Participants are encouraged to bring some of their own research material to this workshop.

Filming as an epistemic practice

In our everyday use of media, we simply believe that we can capture something with a camera and share it with each other. However, if we assume that the goal of research is to get beyond the state of what is known and seen so far, then we are dealing with epistemic things that are not yet visible at first and therefore cannot just be recorded with a camera. With this consideration, Bina E. Mohn, the founder of camera ethnography, refers to the sociological laboratory studies of the 1980s and 1990s. Starting from a premise of the not (yet) visible marks the departure from strategies of camera use that assume visibility exists a priori. Camera ethnography offers a manageable representation-critical approach based on a situated methodology and can be understood as a continuous reflexive process of working on visibility and seeing. Camera ethnography lends itself particularly well to the study of nonverbal practices and socio-material constellations. Furthermore, camera ethnography is particularly suitable for an adoption of the format “übersichtliche Darstellung” (Wittgenstein): In this context, filmic arrangements serve as an attempt to answer the question of how social practices can be lived, named, and understood here and now, and there and then. For viewers of camera-ethnographic publications, this offers an opportunity to discover unexpected things about the diversity and possibility of social phenomena and practices.

The basic book by Bina E. Mohn „Kamera-Ethnographie. Ethnographische  Forschung im Modus des Zeigens. Programmatik und Praxis“ has been published in 2023, is open access and underpins this master class. Important references of the camera-ethnographic approach include Bruno Latour (science-in-the-making), Karin Knorr-Cetina (epistemic cultures), Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (experimental systems), Clifford Geertz (“thick description”), Ludwig Wittgenstein (language games and “übersichtliche Darstellung”), and Karen Barad (agential realism and intra-action).

 

Requirements for participation

  • Experience in ethnographic fieldwork, regardless of the medium
  • Readiness to change perspectives and media and to experiment.

 

Registration for the master class

Contact and registration: wiesemann@erz-wiss.uni-siegen.de

Registration deadline: May 15, 2024. Participation will be bindingly confirmed by the organizers by May 20, 2024. Please briefly answer these questions when registering:

  • Which research project am I currently working on and which practices in this field am I particularly interested in?
  • What questions do I have about media ethnographic theory and practice?
  • Which materials would I like to bring to the master class on camera ethnography?

Bina will be available to make more detailed arrangements with each of you via telephone.

Venue

University of Siegen
Campus Lower Castle
US-S 001 / 002
Obergraben 25
Siegen

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