Open Panel EASST/4S 2020: Digital Experiments in the Making

Digital Experiments in the Making I:

Tuesday, Aug 18 2020, 6:00 to 7:40pm CET

Place: virPrague, VR 07, Program link.

Epistemological And Ethical Considerations

When designing and re-inventing digital infrastructures and reflecting their role, epistemological as well as ethical considerations frame the experiments conducted. What are the digital modes of knowledge production in STS? What kind of agencies do code, platforms and tools have within this...Read more

Life In The Trading Zone Of Digital STS

The last two decades have seen digital STS engaging with a range of computational techniques for data harvesting, analysis and visualization. Inevitably, this has created new patterns of collaboration between STS and adjacent fields, as well as new types of projects that attempt to combine...Read more

Code Ethnography And The Materiality Of Power In Digital Communication Infrastructures

The aim of this paper is to introduce code ethnography, a method to examine code as a sociotechnical artifact, in consideration of its inherent social, political and economic implications. It aims to help social science scholars capture critical aspects of digital communication infrastructures...Read more

Transforming Code Into Voice: Toward A Material Semiotic Critical Code Studies Of Weizenbaum’s ELIZA Program

This paper takes up an exploration of the use of critical code studies in STS. I argue that STS methods call for a different use of critical code studies from the ways in which it has been primarily used in the digital humanities and literary code studies (Marino, 2014). Instead, I propose...Read more

Panel Sessions

Within this PECE essay, the abstracts and pre-recorded talks of the panel "Digital Experiments in the Making: Methods, Tools, and Platforms in the Infrastructuring of STS" are grouped according to the sessions within the EASST/4S conference. The conference programme is available here.

Digital Experiments in the Making II:

Tuesday, Aug 18 2020, 8:00 to 9:40pm CET

Place: virPrague, VR 07, Program link.

Collaborative Creation Of Infrastructures For STS Research

STS researchers use digital infrastructures and technologies on a regular basis. But what is behind that? What infrastructures are out there that are developed for STS research? How does the accompanying design and development influence the ways we “do STS”? What role do collaborative approaches...Read more

Platforms For Experimental Collaborative Ethnography And STS

This presentation will share the history, purpose and projects of the Platform for Experimental, Collaborative Ethnography (PECE, pronounced “peace”), open source software designed with STS perspective. While originally designed to provide digital workspace for the Asthma Files (a cluster of...Read more

Curating A Digital Platform, Researching The Knowledge Infrastructures Of Public Health

This paper will present a digital platform experiment at the intersection of STS and public health. Originally based on a project that focused on epidemiological risk scores as knowledge translation devices in public health, the platform addresses the formation of "life by the algorithm" more...Read more

Inhabiting The Algorithm. The Making Of A Smartphone App To Explore How People Became Habituated To Algorithmic Profiling And Recommendation Systems

This paper presents some findings of the interdisciplinary project ‘Algorithmic Identities.’ This project was devised to study how people feel, react and thematise the extraction of digital data and algorithmic inferences about their personhoods. Considering the proprietary, opaque and...Read more

Doing Data Together: Intervening In Urban Planning With Digital Methods

One year ago researchers from TANTLab and employees from GEHL architects decided on pursuing an experiment together. Driven by a shared interest in bringing social issues into the technical paradigm of ‘the smart city’ we set ourselves the task of making the diversity of Copenhagen’s social...Read more

Panel Abstract: Digital Experiments in the Making

Digital Experiments in the Making: Methods, Tools, and Platforms in the Infrastructuring of STS Digital infrastructures are ubiquitous in the technosciences and in everyday life, and have become crucial objects of analysis for diverse STS researchers and their arrays of approaches. Digital...Read more

Digital Experiments in the Making III:

Thursday, Aug 20 2020, 6:00 to 7:40pm CET

Place: virPrague, VR 12, Program link.

Researching Methods, Tools, And Platforms Within The Datalogical Turn

As a matter of research, digital infrastructures and technologies as well as data sets play a large role. But how to look at them from an STS perspective? How to adopt the datalogical turn to emerging and ongoing developments from the technological side? What data is available and helpful for STS...Read more

Locating And Timing Matters Of Attention Through Wikipedia: Technical, Epistemological And Political Considerations

Wikipedia has become a ubiquitous digital knowledge infrastructure and thereby a locus for politics by other means. As the primary online reference, it is central in our everyday life digital information ecosystem. Because of its uniqueness, it constitutes not only an essential object of study,...Read more

Knowing Infrastructure: Critically Engaging The Wayback Machine As Source For STS Research

From documenting human rights abuses to studying online advertising, web archives are increasingly positioned as critical resources for a broad range of scholarly Internet research agendas. And yet, web archives as research infrastructures remain relatively understudied. In this paper we reflect...Read more

New Perspectives In Digital Platform Governance: Qualitative Studies Of Open Access Platforms

We propose a set of three new conceptual tools to analyse the role of digital platform ‘insiders’, adding to debates on the understanding of digital governance as a socially embedded phenomenon through the study of open access academic platforms. Rather than framing these debates as a...Read more