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Whether it’s a dog, a cat, or a smart speaker, all of them require some time to settle into households. Modern mundane life is brimming with a variety of new data-driven technologies: digitally connected media such as vacuum robots, smart speakers, drones, and kitchen appliances are supposed to augment the practices they are involved in. As people integrate these technologies into their lives through a process of domestication, they adapt to them and are influenced by their presence. The thematic issue “Taming Digital Practices. On the Domestication of Data-Driven Technologies” of Digital Culture & Society, edited by Tim Hector, David Waldecker, Niklas Strüver, and Tanja Aal combines domestication research with empirical analysis of current digital and interconnected media, focusing on the process of taming with an emphasis on practices. In doing so, the issue brings together interdisciplinary perspectives, including media studies, sociology, anthropology, and human-computer interaction, among them a number of contributions from the CRC Media of Cooperation.
Edited by Tim Hector, David Waldecker, Niklas Strüver of the subproject B06 “Un-/desired Observation in Interaction: “Intelligent Personal Assistants” (IPA)“ (IPA)” and Tanja Aal of the subprojetc A05 “The Cooperative Creation of User Autonomy in the Context of the Ageing Society”.
We welcome you back to our new semester and winter program. We already have quite an eventful year behind us with two MGK-colloquia, the annual conference, numerous retreats, rehearsals, a summer school and several guests in our Media Practice Theory series. For the winter term, we look forward to another very appealing and interesting program: The Research Forum features a couple of post-cocs and docs and their projects and a presentation of the GfM Special Issue on „Testing“. We will have two conferences in November and continue our successful Media Practice Theory Series with Jacob Gaboury and Michael Dieter in December. Also, Nina ter Laan, Carla Tiefenbacher and Martin Zillinger organize the hybrid lecture series “60 Minutes Anthropology: Sensing and Sense Making in the Mediterranean”, which will complement the program of the Research Forum.
In the latest publication “Unboxing Spain’s Colonial Past in the Rif – Situating memory work and transborder publics in a Domestic Basement Archive in Madrid” of our Working Paper Series, the author Carla Tiefenbacher analyzes the archival practices of the inhabitants of the northern moroccan city of Al Hoceima. To fully understand the practices surrounding the operation and coercion of colonialism in Spain and northern Morocco, she explores ongoing trans-mediterranean and spanish memory activism by considering collecting practices with the help of the experiences of the inhabitants collected over several changes of power and the preserved objects.
As part of the subproject “Digital Publics and Social Transformations in the Maghreb,” Carla Tiefenbacher currently writes her master’s thesis on archival practices and memory infrastructures among the last Spanish colonizers in northern Morocco. She is currently completing the interdisciplinary course “Culture and Environment in Africa” at the University of Cologne. She holds a B.A. in Liberal Arts and Sciences from the University of Freiburg and is a trained mediator and grief counselor.
The paper “Unboxing Spain’s Colonial Past in the Rif – Situating memory work and transborder publics in a Domestic Basement Archive in Madrid” is published as part of the Working Paper Series of the CRC 1187, which promotes inter- and transdisciplinary media research and provides an avenue for rapid publication and dissemination of ongoing research located at or associated with the CRC. The purpose of the series is to circulate in-progress research to the wider research community beyond the CRC. All Working Papers are accessible via the website or can be ordered in print by sending an email to: info[æt]sfb1187.uni-siegen.de.
Forget crypto! We need a new money for the European public. Sebastian Gießmann, principal investigator of A01, makes a plea for the digital euro on the science pages of the FAZ:
The exhibition “Reinventing Touch. Sensory practices in digital childhoods” was on show in Siegen in May and June 2023, presenting camera ethnographic research from the project “Early Childhood and Smartphone” to the general public. Specialists in the field of childhood studies and education were able to visit the exhibition in September 2023 during the 31st annual conference of the German Educational Research Association (GERA)’s subdivision Primary Education Research.
Participatory exhibits and video installations offered visitors different ways to immerse themselves in and explore, as co-researchers, themes around sensory practices in digital childhoods. Published at the same time, the book Reinventing Touch, which features the perspectives of researchers from different disciplines, served as the exhibition catalogue, while the exhibition transposed the themes raised in the book into live encounters in three-dimensional space. In both cases, diverse perspectives were brought into dialogue with one another.
Information about the exhibits
With Annika Gruhn and her children. Photo: Pip Hare.
Carolin Gerlitz, Sprecherin des SFB und Teilprojektleiterin von A03, P03 und MGK, und Sebastian Gießmann, Teilprojektleiter von A01, zeichnen für das aktuelle Heft der Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft zum Thema TEST verantwortlich. Sie fragen, wie sich Medien und Tests wechselseitig konstituieren. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit erfahren dabei Politiken des Testens. Gerlitz und Gießmann schlagen vor, Tests als offene Situationen zu verstehen, in denen mit teils etablierten, teils sich erst während des Testens etablierenden Maßstäben soziotechnische Bewertungen erfolgen und Entscheidungen getroffen werden. Für einen medienkulturwissenschaftlichen Begriff des Tests gilt: In den Mikroentscheidungen des verteilten und verteilenden Testens steht das Soziale selbst auf der Probe. Die in diesem Heft versammelten Beiträge verdeutlichen: kein Test ohne Medien – kein Medium ohne Test.
Mit Beiträgen von David Bucheli, Gabriele Schabacher, Sophie Spallinger, Stefan Rieger, Daniela Holzer, Christoph Borbach, Noortje Marres und Philippe Sormani.
Das Heft erscheint im Open Acess.
Konzeption und Beiträge werden am Mittwoch, den 29. November im Rahmen des SFB Forschungsforums vorgestellt.
We look happily back at this year’s Mixing Methods Summer School to recap what our participants have accomplished.
During the summer school “More Than Data: Positionality and Situatedness in Digital Research”, two groups contributed to the practical tracks: “Mapping the Misappropriation of Images of Transbodies” and “#letztegeneration meets #klimakleber: Mapping TikTok Imaginaries of Climate Activism and Climate Change Denial”. With facilitators Aikaterini Mniestri, Elena Pilipets, and Julia Bee, our contributors explored questions of positionality in the process of obtaining, visualizing, and interpreting online-ethnographic and visual platform data. The week of explorations opened with a welcome address by Carolin Gerlitz and a keynote by Gabriele Colombo titled ‘Unfolding data: lists, catalogues, supercuts, and other visual formats for digital research.’ In addition, a workshop by Jason Chao and Elena Pilipets, ‘Memespector: Web Detection and the Multi-Situatedness of the Digital Image,’ introduced participants to different methods of contextualizing image collections.
The first group, ‘Mapping Misappropriation’, used a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the misappropriation of the images of trans content creators across the internet. The main results confirmed the initial hypothesis that the images published by trans content creators on their public accounts have been misappropriated to different ends.
Figure 1: Mapping Misappropriation of Trans bodies: the image of Jamie Raines and its online contexts
The project’s main results indicate the presence of these images on Russian adult sites and their resurgence in hate speech on platforms like 4chan. News articles with varying degrees of transphobia were collected and grouped based on their content. The project integrated web locations of these images into visualizations for better understanding. These findings emphasize the significance of this topic in new media and digital methods, calling for further examination of the misuse of images depicting minoritized bodies online.
The second group, ‘TikTok imaginaries’, explored a collection of 632 TikTok videos, focusing on the contemporary online imaginaries of climate activism and climate change denial. Using TikTok video metadata, participants worked with extracted video frames and associated information, including co-hashtags, stickers, and sounds. AI-assisted speech-to-text conversion and computer vision-generated image annotations were employed to locate different forms of embodiment in TikTok performances. By removing background, de-contextualized human and nonhuman bodies ranging from microphones and vehicles to hands, gloves, uniforms, and safety vests were then re-contextualized and collectively re-arranged in collages.
Figure 2: From Decontextualization to Recontextualization: Re-imagining ‘bodies that stick’ in connection to the power dynamics they enact
Combining methods of ethical fabrication with feminist approaches, some social connections and power relations surfacing through data were re-imagined, while others remained intact in their linkages to one another and their TikTok-mediated contexts. Diverse positionalities, arising from TikTok performances and our research interventions, prompted us to critically assess the influence and ‘weight’ of affectively charged associations that stick onto activists’ bodies. In de-constructing the hateful rhetoric of climate change deniers, ethical considerations arise. These include both avoiding the normative reproduction of systemic violence and the necessity to support activists through inventive approaches that go beyond digital amplification.
We thank everyone for their participation and contributions!
The new three part short series of publications »Defining Digitalities I – III« in the Working Paper Series by Thomas Haigh and Sebastian Gießmann asks “What’s Digital about Digits?” (No. 30, July 2023), “What’s Digital About Digital Communication?” (No. 31, July 2023) und “What’s Digital About Digital Media?” (No. 32, July 2023). In asking these questions the short series focuses on defining what digitality is by using a historical approach to the topic and analysing the reading and writing practices that lie within it.
The first paper »What’s Digital about Digits?«, written by Thomas Haigh, argues that digitality is not a feature of an object itself, but of the way that object is read (whether by human or by machine) as encoding symbols chosen from a finite set. Thomas Haigh then comes to the conclusion that digitality is constituted through reading practices.
No. 31 and No. 32 were written by Thomas Haigh and Sebastian Gießmann. In »What’s Digital About Digital Communication?« they continue to work on media and communication systems by looking at the historical broadening of the concept of digitality to include non-numerical systems of representation such as those used to encode text and pictures.
Furthermore, the third paper »What’s Digital About Digital Media?« discusses digitality as a feature of the practices used to read and write symbols from a medium, not a physical property of the medium itself and explores the limited interchangeability of representations between different encodings of the same symbols, connecting the purported immateriality of digitality to this actual fungibility of material representations.
Dr. Sebastian Gießmann is principal investigator of the CRC subproject A01 »Digital Network Technologies between Specialization and Generalization« and Reader in Media Theory at the University of Siegen. In 2023, he serves as visiting professor for cultural techniques and history of knowledge at Berlin’s Humboldt University. His book Connectivity of Things: Net- work Cultures Since 1832 is forthcoming in MIT Press’s Infrastructures series. Gießmann’s work intertwines practice theory (which he helped to establish within media studies), cultural techniques, Science and Technology Studies, and grounded histories of (digital) media. He is principal investigator of a major research project on the history of network infrastructures within Media of Cooperation.
Ph. D. Thomas Haigh is associated investigator of the same subproject a Professor of History and Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee and vis- iting Comenius Professor at Siegen University. Haigh has published extensively on many aspects of the history of computing and won several prizes for his articles. He is the primary author of A New History of Modern Computing (MIT, 2021) and ENIAC in Action (MIT, 2016) and the editor of Histories of Computing (Harvard 2011) and Exploring the Early Digital (Springer, 2019). Learn more at www.tomandmaria.com/tom.
The short series »Defining Digitalities« is a pre-publication of their upcoming book of the same title and published as part of the Working Paper Series of the CRC 1187, which promotes inter- and transdisciplinary media research and provides an avenue for rapid publication and dissemination of ongoing research located at or associated with the CRC. The purpose of the series is to circulate in-progress research to the wider research community beyond the CRC. All Working Papers are accessible via the website or can be ordered in print by sending an email to: info[æt]sfb1187.uni-siegen.de
The new publication “‚Anything can happen on a smartphone…‘ – Mutual explorations of digitalization and social transformation in Morocco’s High Atlas through On/Offline Theatre Ethnography” by Nina ter Laan in collaboration with Marike Mahtat-Minnema discusses the use of (online) theatre as an ethnographic research tool. Drawing from an existing collaborative study, they discuss (digital) media use and social transformation in a Moroccan village situated in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. Their project constitutes as a solution for the challenges imposed by Covid restrictions. The working paper describes the process, motivations, design, and outcomes of the project, as well as the controversies, opportunities, and struggles that arose during the theatre work.
Nina ter Laan is postdoctoral researcher within the research project B04 Digital Publics and Social Transformation in the Maghreb, working at the University of Cologne. Her research centers on aesthetic practices, religion, materiality, and heritage production, in conversation with politics of belonging, with a particular focus on Morocco. She is interested in the exploration of art forms as a subject and a method of research.
The paper »‚Anything can happen on a smartphone…‘« is published as part of the Working Paper Series of the CRC 1187, which promotes inter- and transdisciplinary media research and provides an avenue for rapid publication and dissemination of ongoing research located at or associated with the CRC. The purpose of the series is to circulate in-progress research to the wider research community beyond the CRC. All Working Papers are accessible via the website or can be ordered in print by sending an email to: info[æt]sfb1187.uni-siegen.de.
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