[bestbits] 2nd call: Show Me Your Dashboard - Digital Methods Winter School 2015 - Univ. of Amsterdam

[uva.liliana.bounegru at gmail.com]

This is the second call for participation in the Digital Methods Winter School
at the University of Amsterdam, 12-16 January 2015. The deadline for
applications is 8 December 2014.

Together with Nathaniel Tkacz on dashboard critique (Univ Warwick) and Carolin
Gerlitz on social media metrics (Univ Amsterdam), new speakers have confirmed
from SumOfUs, UNICEF, TckTckTck, Climate Action Network and the Dutch design
agency Clever Franke. We are also joined by the Density Design Lab, Milan.

SHOW ME YOUR DASHBOARD
New Media Monitoring and Data Analytics as Critical Practice
Digital Methods Winter School, Data Sprint and Mini-Conference

12-16 January 2015 | Digital Methods Winter School
Digital Methods Initiative | http://www.digitalmethods.net/
Media Studies | University of Amsterdam
https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/WinterSchool2015

The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), Amsterdam, is pleased to announce its
7th annual Winter School, on New Media Monitoring and Data Analytics as
Critical Practice. The format is that of a data sprint, with hands-on work on
media monitoring with data analytics, and a Mini-conference, where PhD
candidates, motivated scholars and advanced graduate students present short
papers on digital methods and new media related topics, and receive feedback
from the Amsterdam group of DMI researchers and international participants.
Participants need not give a paper at the Mini-conference to attend the Winter
School.

The focus of this year's Winter School is on how online media monitoring is
currently done by non-governmental (NGOs) such as treealerts.org, and it seeks
to identify practices that could fill in the notion of critical data
analytics. For the occasion we have invited academics to present on the state
of the art of online media monitoring by focusing on three areas where there
is both innovation as well as repurposing of techniques normally associated
with marketing, business intelligence and the work of digital agencies: issue
discovery and language placement (who's carrying the conversation), engagement
and public fund-raising (when do images and other engagement formats ‘work’?)
and crisis communication (who is making the calls when there is a breakdown?).
At the Winter School social media analysts and communications specialists from
NGOs will present on the state of the art of media monitoring, their current
analytical needs and what the Internet can continue to add with respect to new
data sources as well as monitoring techniques. We will also ask each of the
organizations to show us their dashboards.

The first day kicks off with Nathaniel Tkacz from the University of Warwick
who will talk about Dashboards and Data Signals, and the desire to control the
data deluge. The second keynote speaker is Carolin Gerlitz from the University
of Amsterdam who will talk about new media metrics critique. Next a series of
online media monitoring dashboards and methods will be presented. The Dutch
design agency Clever Franke will show TrendViz. Soenke Lorenzen of Greenpeace
International, Eoin Dubsky of SumOfUs, Dounia Kchiere of UNICEF, and Christian
Teriete of TckTckTck will be talking about media monitoring at their
respective organisations. Next will be project pitches by Ria Voorhaar of the
Climate Action Network, Danie Stockmann of Leiden University, Jonathan Gray of
the Open Knowledge Foundation, and Alberto Abellan of Social Alto Analytics.

After the the first day of talks as well as dashboard show and tell, the data
sprint commences, whereupon the attendees, including analysts, designers and
programmers, undertake empirical projects that address the state of the art in
NGO online media data analysis. We work on projects that seek to meet the
current analytical needs. The week closes with presentations of the outcomes
as well as a festive celebration. During the week there is also an evening of
talks and a debate with Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, at the nearby
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Science.

The theme of the 2015 Winter School furthers the analytical collaboration
between the Digital Methods Initiative and NGO media analysts, including
Soenke Lorenzen of Greenpeace International. Previously workshop facilitators
and collaborators have included representatives from Human Rights Watch,
Association for Progressive Communications, Women on Waves, Carbon Trade
Watch, Corporate Observatory Europe and Fair Phone. In preparation for the
sprint we also have developed how-to worksheets on New Media Monitoring and
Tooling that take as their case studies NGO issue mappings with digital
methods. Upon conclusion we aim to compile the Sprint projects from the Winter
School, and combine them with the how-to sheets to produce an open access
publication on NGO media monitoring. All participants are invited to
contribute.
Digital Methods Winter School Data Sprint
A data sprint is a workshop format for intensive, empirical project work,
where analysts, programers, designers and subject matter experts collaborate
to output research. This year's data sprint is devoted to new media monitoring
with data analytics, and particularly its critical practice. Broadly speaking,
media monitoring is understood as the process of reading, watching or
listening to the editorial content of media sources on a continuing basis, and
then identifying, analyzing and saving materials that contain specific themes,
topics, keywords, names, forms or formats. Monitoring the editorial content of
news sources including newspapers, magazines, trade journals, TV shows, radio
programs and specific websites is by far the most common form of media
monitoring, but most organizations increasingly monitor social media online,
and its impact on the diffusion of news in all media or in online conversation
(including the comment space) more generally. Most companies, government
agencies, not-for-profit organizations utilize media monitoring as a tool to
study the "meaning of mentions" of their organization, its campaigns and
slogans, and gain some sense of the composition of their audiences, and what
animates them (or keeps them quiet).

During the first day of the data sprint academics studying online media
monitoring will present the state of the art of the field, focusing on three
areas: issue discovery and issue language placement (who is the carrying the
conversation, and which voices are continually elided?), engagement and
fundraising communication (how are audiences and funders reacting to so-called
'faces of need' and other formats and calls for engagement?) and crisis
communication (when there is a breakdown, who makes the calls?).
Representatives from leading NGOs will present to the attendees how they
practice online media monitoring, the look of their dashboards and the
analytical needs that drive them. What are these experts able to accomplish
with the techniques available to them, and which questions remain unanswered?
What are the critical media monitoring practices and questions that are
specific to NGOs? How to conceptualize and operationalize issue discovery,
engagement for fundraising and crisis monitoring? We will ask the NGO
communications experts to address these questions. We also will ask them what
they think digital methods and issue mapping may add to the outputs of media
monitoring.

The conversations with the experts will serve as starting points for winter
school attendees - including analysts, designers and programmers - to develop
into empirical projects that aim to answer research questions, and develop
further techniques for media monitoring online.
Digital Methods Mini-Conference at the Winter School
The annual Digital Methods Mini-Conference at the Winter School, normally a
one-day affair, provides the opportunity for digital methods and allied
researchers to present short yet complete papers (5,000-7,500 words) and serve
as respondents, providing feedback. Often the work presented follows from
previous Digital Methods Summer Schools. The mini-conference accepts papers in
the general digital methods and allied areas: the hyperlink and other natively
digital objects, the website as archived object, web historiographies, search
engine critique, Google as globalizing machine, cross-spherical analysis and
other approaches to comparative media studies, device cultures, national web
studies, Wikipedia as cultural reference, the technicity of (networked)
content, post-demographics, platform studies, crawling and scraping, graphing
and clouding, and similar.
Key dates
The deadline for application is 8 December 2014. To apply please send along a
letter of motivation as well as your CV to winterschool [at]
digitalmethods.net, with DMI Winter School in the subject header.
Notifications will be sent on 9 December. If you are participating in the
Mini-conference the deadline for submission of paper titles, abstracts and
bios is also 8 December, with DMI Mini-conference & Winter School in the
subject header. Please send your materials to winterschool [at]
digitalmethods.net
. To attend the Winter School, you need not participate in the Mini-
conference. Deadline for submission of complete papers (5,000-7,500 words)
 is 6 January 2015. The program and schedule are available on 7 January.
Fees & Logistics
The fee for the Digital Methods Winter School 2015 is EUR 295. Bank transfer
information will be sent along with the notification on 9 December 2014. The
Winter School is self-catered. The venue is in the center of Amsterdam with
abundant coffee houses and lunch places. Participants are expected to find
their own housing (airbnb and other short-stay sites are helpful). During the
week there is an evening at the Royal Academy with Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia.
The Winter School closes on Friday with a festive event, after the final
presentations. Here is a guide to the Amsterdam new media scene. For further
questions, please contact the organizers, Liliana Bounegru, Natalia Sanchez
and Saskia Kok, at winterschool at digitalmethods.net.
About DMI
The Digital Methods Winter School is part of the Digital Methods Initiative,
Amsterdam, dedicated to reworking method for Internet-related research. The
Digital Methods Initiative holds the annual Digital Methods Summer Schools
(eight to date), which are intensive and full time 2-week undertakings in the
Summertime. The 2015 Summer School will take place 29 June - 10 July 2015. The
coordinators of the Digital Methods Initiative are Sabine Niederer and Esther
Weltevrede (PhD candidates in New Media & Digital Culture, University of
Amsterdam), and the director is Richard Rogers, Professor of New Media &
Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam. Liliana Bounegru is the managing
director. Digital methods are online at http://www.digitalmethods.net/. The
DMI about page includes a substantive introduction, and also a list of Digital
Methods people, with bios. DMI holds occasional Autumn and Spring workshops,
such as recent ones on mapping climate change and vulnerability indexes as
well as on studying right-wing extremism and populism online. There is also a
Digital Methods book (MIT Press, 2013), papers and articles by DMI researchers
as well as Digital Methods tools.

See you in the winter time in Amsterdam!
Image credit:
Online resonance of the international climate change issue agenda, EMAPS data
sprint, Amsterdam, April 2014.

This is the second call for participation in the Digital Methods Winter School
at the University of Amsterdam, 12-16 January 2015. The deadline for
applications is 8 December 2014.

Together with Nathaniel Tkacz on dashboard critique (Univ Warwick) and Carolin
Gerlitz on social media metrics (Univ Amsterdam), new speakers have confirmed
from SumOfUs, UNICEF, TckTckTck, Climate Action Network and the Dutch design
agency Clever Franke. We are also joined by the Density Design Lab, Milan.

SHOW ME YOUR DASHBOARD
New Media Monitoring and Data Analytics as Critical Practice
Digital Methods Winter School, Data Sprint and Mini-Conference

12-16 January 2015 | Digital Methods Winter School
Digital Methods Initiative | http://www.digitalmethods.net/
Media Studies | University of Amsterdam
https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/WinterSchool2015

The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), Amsterdam, is pleased to announce its
7th annual Winter School, on New Media Monitoring and Data Analytics as
Critical Practice. The format is that of a data sprint, with hands-on work on
media monitoring with data analytics, and a Mini-conference, where PhD
candidates, motivated scholars and advanced graduate students present short
papers on digital methods and new media related topics, and receive feedback
from the Amsterdam group of DMI researchers and international participants.
Participants need not give a paper at the Mini-conference to attend the Winter
School.

The focus of this year's Winter School is on how online media monitoring is
currently done by non-governmental (NGOs) such as treealerts.org, and it seeks
to identify practices that could fill in the notion of critical data
analytics. For the occasion we have invited academics to present on the state
of the art of online media monitoring by focusing on three areas where there
is both innovation as well as repurposing of techniques normally associated
with marketing, business intelligence and the work of digital agencies: issue
discovery and language placement (who's carrying the conversation), engagement
and public fund-raising (when do images and other engagement formats ‘work’?)
and crisis communication (who is making the calls when there is a breakdown?).
At the Winter School social media analysts and communications specialists from
NGOs will present on the state of the art of media monitoring, their current
analytical needs and what the Internet can continue to add with respect to new
data sources as well as monitoring techniques. We will also ask each of the
organizations to show us their dashboards.

The first day kicks off with Nathaniel Tkacz from the University of Warwick
who will talk about Dashboards and Data Signals, and the desire to control the
data deluge. The second keynote speaker is Carolin Gerlitz from the University
of Amsterdam who will talk about new media metrics critique. Next a series of
online media monitoring dashboards and methods will be presented. The Dutch
design agency Clever Franke will show TrendViz. Soenke Lorenzen of Greenpeace
International, Eoin Dubsky of SumOfUs, Dounia Kchiere of UNICEF, and Christian
Teriete of TckTckTck will be talking about media monitoring at their
respective organisations. Next will be project pitches by Ria Voorhaar of the
Climate Action Network, Danie Stockmann of Leiden University, Jonathan Gray of
the Open Knowledge Foundation, and Alberto Abellan of Social Alto Analytics.

After the the first day of talks as well as dashboard show and tell, the data
sprint commences, whereupon the attendees, including analysts, designers and
programmers, undertake empirical projects that address the state of the art in
NGO online media data analysis. We work on projects that seek to meet the
current analytical needs. The week closes with presentations of the outcomes
as well as a festive celebration. During the week there is also an evening of
talks and a debate with Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, at the nearby
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Science.

The theme of the 2015 Winter School furthers the analytical collaboration
between the Digital Methods Initiative and NGO media analysts, including
Soenke Lorenzen of Greenpeace International. Previously workshop facilitators
and collaborators have included representatives from Human Rights Watch,
Association for Progressive Communications, Women on Waves, Carbon Trade
Watch, Corporate Observatory Europe and Fair Phone. In preparation for the
sprint we also have developed how-to worksheets on New Media Monitoring and
Tooling that take as their case studies NGO issue mappings with digital
methods. Upon conclusion we aim to compile the Sprint projects from the Winter
School, and combine them with the how-to sheets to produce an open access
publication on NGO media monitoring. All participants are invited to
contribute.
Digital Methods Winter School Data Sprint
A data sprint is a workshop format for intensive, empirical project work,
where analysts, programers, designers and subject matter experts collaborate
to output research. This year's data sprint is devoted to new media monitoring
with data analytics, and particularly its critical practice. Broadly speaking,
media monitoring is understood as the process of reading, watching or
listening to the editorial content of media sources on a continuing basis, and
then identifying, analyzing and saving materials that contain specific themes,
topics, keywords, names, forms or formats. Monitoring the editorial content of
news sources including newspapers, magazines, trade journals, TV shows, radio
programs and specific websites is by far the most common form of media
monitoring, but most organizations increasingly monitor social media online,
and its impact on the diffusion of news in all media or in online conversation
(including the comment space) more generally. Most companies, government
agencies, not-for-profit organizations utilize media monitoring as a tool to
study the "meaning of mentions" of their organization, its campaigns and
slogans, and gain some sense of the composition of their audiences, and what
animates them (or keeps them quiet).

During the first day of the data sprint academics studying online media
monitoring will present the state of the art of the field, focusing on three
areas: issue discovery and issue language placement (who is the carrying the
conversation, and which voices are continually elided?), engagement and
fundraising communication (how are audiences and funders reacting to so-called
'faces of need' and other formats and calls for engagement?) and crisis
communication (when there is a breakdown, who makes the calls?).
Representatives from leading NGOs will present to the attendees how they
practice online media monitoring, the look of their dashboards and the
analytical needs that drive them. What are these experts able to accomplish
with the techniques available to them, and which questions remain unanswered?
What are the critical media monitoring practices and questions that are
specific to NGOs? How to conceptualize and operationalize issue discovery,
engagement for fundraising and crisis monitoring? We will ask the NGO
communications experts to address these questions. We also will ask them what
they think digital methods and issue mapping may add to the outputs of media
monitoring.

The conversations with the experts will serve as starting points for winter
school attendees - including analysts, designers and programmers - to develop
into empirical projects that aim to answer research questions, and develop
further techniques for media monitoring online.
Digital Methods Mini-Conference at the Winter School
The annual Digital Methods Mini-Conference at the Winter School, normally a
one-day affair, provides the opportunity for digital methods and allied
researchers to present short yet complete papers (5,000-7,500 words) and serve
as respondents, providing feedback. Often the work presented follows from
previous Digital Methods Summer Schools. The mini-conference accepts papers in
the general digital methods and allied areas: the hyperlink and other natively
digital objects, the website as archived object, web historiographies, search
engine critique, Google as globalizing machine, cross-spherical analysis and
other approaches to comparative media studies, device cultures, national web
studies, Wikipedia as cultural reference, the technicity of (networked)
content, post-demographics, platform studies, crawling and scraping, graphing
and clouding, and similar.
Key dates
The deadline for application is 8 December 2014. To apply please send along a
letter of motivation as well as your CV to winterschool [at]
digitalmethods.net, with DMI Winter School in the subject header.
Notifications will be sent on 9 December. If you are participating in the
Mini-conference the deadline for submission of paper titles, abstracts and
bios is also 8 December, with DMI Mini-conference & Winter School in the
subject header. Please send your materials to winterschool [at]
digitalmethods.net
. To attend the Winter School, you need not participate in the Mini-
conference. Deadline for submission of complete papers (5,000-7,500 words)
 is 6 January 2015. The program and schedule are available on 7 January.
Fees & Logistics
The fee for the Digital Methods Winter School 2015 is EUR 295. Bank transfer
information will be sent along with the notification on 9 December 2014. The
Winter School is self-catered. The venue is in the center of Amsterdam with
abundant coffee houses and lunch places. Participants are expected to find
their own housing (airbnb and other short-stay sites are helpful). During the
week there is an evening at the Royal Academy with Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia.
The Winter School closes on Friday with a festive event, after the final
presentations. Here is a guide to the Amsterdam new media scene. For further
questions, please contact the organizers, Liliana Bounegru, Natalia Sanchez
and Saskia Kok, at winterschool at digitalmethods.net.
About DMI
The Digital Methods Winter School is part of the Digital Methods Initiative,
Amsterdam, dedicated to reworking method for Internet-related research. The
Digital Methods Initiative holds the annual Digital Methods Summer Schools
(eight to date), which are intensive and full time 2-week undertakings in the
Summertime. The 2015 Summer School will take place 29 June - 10 July 2015. The
coordinators of the Digital Methods Initiative are Sabine Niederer and Esther
Weltevrede (PhD candidates in New Media & Digital Culture, University of
Amsterdam), and the director is Richard Rogers, Professor of New Media &
Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam. Liliana Bounegru is the managing
director. Digital methods are online at http://www.digitalmethods.net/. The
DMI about page includes a substantive introduction, and also a list of Digital
Methods people, with bios. DMI holds occasional Autumn and Spring workshops,
such as recent ones on mapping climate change and vulnerability indexes as
well as on studying right-wing extremism and populism online. There is also a
Digital Methods book (MIT Press, 2013), papers and articles by DMI researchers
as well as Digital Methods tools.

See you in the winter time in Amsterdam!
Image credit:
Online resonance of the international climate change issue agenda, EMAPS data
sprint, Amsterdam, April 2014.

This is the second call for participation in the Digital Methods Winter School
at the University of Amsterdam, 12-16 January 2015. The deadline for
applications is 8 December 2014.

Together with Nathaniel Tkacz on dashboard critique (Univ Warwick) and Carolin
Gerlitz on social media metrics (Univ Amsterdam), new speakers have confirmed
from SumOfUs, UNICEF, TckTckTck, Climate Action Network and the Dutch design
agency Clever Franke. We are also joined by the Density Design Lab, Milan.

SHOW ME YOUR DASHBOARD
New Media Monitoring and Data Analytics as Critical Practice
Digital Methods Winter School, Data Sprint and Mini-Conference

12-16 January 2015 | Digital Methods Winter School
Digital Methods Initiative | http://www.digitalmethods.net/
Media Studies | University of Amsterdam
https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/WinterSchool2015

The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), Amsterdam, is pleased to announce its
7th annual Winter School, on New Media Monitoring and Data Analytics as
Critical Practice. The format is that of a data sprint, with hands-on work on
media monitoring with data analytics, and a Mini-conference, where PhD
candidates, motivated scholars and advanced graduate students present short
papers on digital methods and new media related topics, and receive feedback
from the Amsterdam group of DMI researchers and international participants.
Participants need not give a paper at the Mini-conference to attend the Winter
School.

The focus of this year's Winter School is on how online media monitoring is
currently done by non-governmental (NGOs) such as treealerts.org, and it seeks
to identify practices that could fill in the notion of critical data
analytics. For the occasion we have invited academics to present on the state
of the art of online media monitoring by focusing on three areas where there
is both innovation as well as repurposing of techniques normally associated
with marketing, business intelligence and the work of digital agencies: issue
discovery and language placement (who's carrying the conversation), engagement
and public fund-raising (when do images and other engagement formats ‘work’?)
and crisis communication (who is making the calls when there is a breakdown?).
At the Winter School social media analysts and communications specialists from
NGOs will present on the state of the art of media monitoring, their current
analytical needs and what the Internet can continue to add with respect to new
data sources as well as monitoring techniques. We will also ask each of the
organizations to show us their dashboards.

The first day kicks off with Nathaniel Tkacz from the University of Warwick
who will talk about Dashboards and Data Signals, and the desire to control the
data deluge. The second keynote speaker is Carolin Gerlitz from the University
of Amsterdam who will talk about new media metrics critique. Next a series of
online media monitoring dashboards and methods will be presented. The Dutch
design agency Clever Franke will show TrendViz. Soenke Lorenzen of Greenpeace
International, Eoin Dubsky of SumOfUs, Dounia Kchiere of UNICEF, and Christian
Teriete of TckTckTck will be talking about media monitoring at their
respective organisations. Next will be project pitches by Ria Voorhaar of the
Climate Action Network, Danie Stockmann of Leiden University, Jonathan Gray of
the Open Knowledge Foundation, and Alberto Abellan of Social Alto Analytics.

After the the first day of talks as well as dashboard show and tell, the data
sprint commences, whereupon the attendees, including analysts, designers and
programmers, undertake empirical projects that address the state of the art in
NGO online media data analysis. We work on projects that seek to meet the
current analytical needs. The week closes with presentations of the outcomes
as well as a festive celebration. During the week there is also an evening of
talks and a debate with Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, at the nearby
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Science.

The theme of the 2015 Winter School furthers the analytical collaboration
between the Digital Methods Initiative and NGO media analysts, including
Soenke Lorenzen of Greenpeace International. Previously workshop facilitators
and collaborators have included representatives from Human Rights Watch,
Association for Progressive Communications, Women on Waves, Carbon Trade
Watch, Corporate Observatory Europe and Fair Phone. In preparation for the
sprint we also have developed how-to worksheets on New Media Monitoring and
Tooling that take as their case studies NGO issue mappings with digital
methods. Upon conclusion we aim to compile the Sprint projects from the Winter
School, and combine them with the how-to sheets to produce an open access
publication on NGO media monitoring. All participants are invited to
contribute.
Digital Methods Winter School Data Sprint
A data sprint is a workshop format for intensive, empirical project work,
where analysts, programers, designers and subject matter experts collaborate
to output research. This year's data sprint is devoted to new media monitoring
with data analytics, and particularly its critical practice. Broadly speaking,
media monitoring is understood as the process of reading, watching or
listening to the editorial content of media sources on a continuing basis, and
then identifying, analyzing and saving materials that contain specific themes,
topics, keywords, names, forms or formats. Monitoring the editorial content of
news sources including newspapers, magazines, trade journals, TV shows, radio
programs and specific websites is by far the most common form of media
monitoring, but most organizations increasingly monitor social media online,
and its impact on the diffusion of news in all media or in online conversation
(including the comment space) more generally. Most companies, government
agencies, not-for-profit organizations utilize media monitoring as a tool to
study the "meaning of mentions" of their organization, its campaigns and
slogans, and gain some sense of the composition of their audiences, and what
animates them (or keeps them quiet).

During the first day of the data sprint academics studying online media
monitoring will present the state of the art of the field, focusing on three
areas: issue discovery and issue language placement (who is the carrying the
conversation, and which voices are continually elided?), engagement and
fundraising communication (how are audiences and funders reacting to so-called
'faces of need' and other formats and calls for engagement?) and crisis
communication (when there is a breakdown, who makes the calls?).
Representatives from leading NGOs will present to the attendees how they
practice online media monitoring, the look of their dashboards and the
analytical needs that drive them. What are these experts able to accomplish
with the techniques available to them, and which questions remain unanswered?
What are the critical media monitoring practices and questions that are
specific to NGOs? How to conceptualize and operationalize issue discovery,
engagement for fundraising and crisis monitoring? We will ask the NGO
communications experts to address these questions. We also will ask them what
they think digital methods and issue mapping may add to the outputs of media
monitoring.

The conversations with the experts will serve as starting points for winter
school attendees - including analysts, designers and programmers - to develop
into empirical projects that aim to answer research questions, and develop
further techniques for media monitoring online.
Digital Methods Mini-Conference at the Winter School
The annual Digital Methods Mini-Conference at the Winter School, normally a
one-day affair, provides the opportunity for digital methods and allied
researchers to present short yet complete papers (5,000-7,500 words) and serve
as respondents, providing feedback. Often the work presented follows from
previous Digital Methods Summer Schools. The mini-conference accepts papers in
the general digital methods and allied areas: the hyperlink and other natively
digital objects, the website as archived object, web historiographies, search
engine critique, Google as globalizing machine, cross-spherical analysis and
other approaches to comparative media studies, device cultures, national web
studies, Wikipedia as cultural reference, the technicity of (networked)
content, post-demographics, platform studies, crawling and scraping, graphing
and clouding, and similar.
Key dates
The deadline for application is 8 December 2014. To apply please send along a
letter of motivation as well as your CV to winterschool [at]
digitalmethods.net, with DMI Winter School in the subject header.
Notifications will be sent on 9 December. If you are participating in the
Mini-conference the deadline for submission of paper titles, abstracts and
bios is also 8 December, with DMI Mini-conference & Winter School in the
subject header. Please send your materials to winterschool [at]
digitalmethods.net
. To attend the Winter School, you need not participate in the Mini-
conference. Deadline for submission of complete papers (5,000-7,500 words)
 is 6 January 2015. The program and schedule are available on 7 January.
Fees & Logistics
The fee for the Digital Methods Winter School 2015 is EUR 295. Bank transfer
information will be sent along with the notification on 9 December 2014. The
Winter School is self-catered. The venue is in the center of Amsterdam with
abundant coffee houses and lunch places. Participants are expected to find
their own housing (airbnb and other short-stay sites are helpful). During the
week there is an evening at the Royal Academy with Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia.
The Winter School closes on Friday with a festive event, after the final
presentations. Here is a guide to the Amsterdam new media scene. For further
questions, please contact the organizers, Liliana Bounegru, Natalia Sanchez
and Saskia Kok, at winterschool at digitalmethods.net.
About DMI
The Digital Methods Winter School is part of the Digital Methods Initiative,
Amsterdam, dedicated to reworking method for Internet-related research. The
Digital Methods Initiative holds the annual Digital Methods Summer Schools
(eight to date), which are intensive and full time 2-week undertakings in the
Summertime. The 2015 Summer School will take place 29 June - 10 July 2015. The
coordinators of the Digital Methods Initiative are Sabine Niederer and Esther
Weltevrede (PhD candidates in New Media & Digital Culture, University of
Amsterdam), and the director is Richard Rogers, Professor of New Media &
Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam. Liliana Bounegru is the managing
director. Digital methods are online at http://www.digitalmethods.net/. The
DMI about page includes a substantive introduction, and also a list of Digital
Methods people, with bios. DMI holds occasional Autumn and Spring workshops,
such as recent ones on mapping climate change and vulnerability indexes as
well as on studying right-wing extremism and populism online. There is also a
Digital Methods book (MIT Press, 2013), papers and articles by DMI researchers
as well as Digital Methods tools.

See you in the winter time in Amsterdam!
Image credit:
Online resonance of the international climate change issue agenda, EMAPS data
sprint, Amsterdam, April 2014.