First Mixing Methods Summer School at the SFB – Researchers explore “Breaching Experiments“
The first Mixing Methods Summer School of the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB 1187) “Media of Cooperation” took place online from 26 to 30 July 2021 and focused on “Breaching Digital Media / Respecifying Ethnomethodology”. Situated within the intern graduate school (MGK), the Summer School invited Ph.D candidates from the SFB 1187. Based on the concept of “Research Sprints”, the participants not only explored digital media and data practices in a contrastive and project-oriented way using different methods but also reflected upon the limits and possible combinations of different methodological approaches.
The breaching experiments were accompanied by three keynotes from the fields of digital sociology, media studies, and human-computer interaction. Noortje Marres argued for a situational analytics in her talk about “An interpretative methodology for the study of social life in computational settings”, Anne Rawls spoke about “Revealing Order through Disorder: Garfinkel’s Breaching Tutorials and Studies of Difficulty and Difference” and Kristina Lindström and Åsa Ståhl presented recent work from their project “Un/Making Matters, Practices and Imaginaries”. The SFB’s first Mixing Methods Summer School concluded with a joint presentation of the “Breaching” results.
Led by Loup Cellard, one of two facilitators of the Summer School, and Robin de Mourat, the first group with Daniela van Geenen, Stefan Laser, Fernando van der Vlist, Jason Chao and Danny Lämmerhirt examined the fitness app Strava and its tracking conditions for sports activities such as jogging, swimming and cycling. With the use of breaching experiments, they were able to uncover leaks and limitations of the app while revealing its digital functionality. A second research group, consisting of Tim Hector, Niklas Strüber, Yarden Skop, Marcus Burkhardt, Susanne Förster, and Tatjana Seitz, focused on breaching the chatbot Replika, which revealed a number of linguistic inconsistencies, technical problems, and political incorrectnesses. The third research group by Max Kanderske, Hendrik Bender, Regina Wuzella, Benedikt Merkle and Timo Kaerlein, led by Philippe Sormani, the second faciltator of the Summer School, dealt with questions of ethnomethodology. Their breaching focused on the Google AIY Vision Kit and its image recognition software which was pushed to its limits.
The next Mixing Methods Summer School is scheduled for 2023.