Programm of the Autumn School now online
We are delighted to announce the programme for the forthcoming Autumn School, Synthetic Social Media: Studying Platform-Embedded AI, taking place at the University of Siegen, 22–25 September.
The programme is organised around three themes: AI Slop / Slopification (Day 1), Chatbot / Appification (Day 2), and Persona / Affective Infrastructure (Day 3), featuring presentations by Stijn Peeters, Marloes Geboers, Salvatore Romano, Carine Roos, Giorgia Arbuti, Natalia Stanusch, Tanja Sihvonen, Jimmy Mäkelä, Natalia Sánchez-Querubín, Nuppu Pelevina, Lilli Sihvonen, Elena Pilipets, and Marcus Bösch.
The three themes are brought into conversation through keynotes by Gabriele De Seta, Esther Weltevrede, Sara Messelaar Hammerschmidt, and Carolin Gerlitz, followed by collaborative method-mapping workshops in breakout groups supported by data designers Ángeles Briones and Riccardo Ventura.
Reflecting on synthetic/human-machine co-created data, participants will brainstorm ways to combine different methodological pathways, analytical techniques, and research tools to study platform-embedded AI through qualitative inquiry and critical technical practice. The workshops integrate hands-on data exploration and visual mapping on Miro boards, using methodological prototyping as a mode of inquiry. Each workshop is tailored to the day’s theme, exploring questions of field access/data collection, research tool inscriptions, sense-making/sensing, methodological frictions, and the ethical challenges posed by synthetic data and AI-mediated environments. The specific affordances of the media phenomena at hand are central. Our main interest is to explore how these affordances inform the method(s).
The Autumn School concludes (on Day 4) with a collective reflection on the outcomes of the method mapping workshops, bringing together the insights and questions that emerged over the course of the programme.
Venue
Universität Siegen | Campus Herrengarten
AH-A 217/18 | Herrengarten 3 | 57072 Siegen