DIGSUM invites you all to our spring 2021 online seminar series, DIGZOOM, featuring a lineup of world-leading scholars in the area of digital social research. These are trying times, and this is a way to offer a space for exchange and dialogue in this field, as we hope for better days. 🦄
This is a broad invitation, and anyone, anywhere, who is interested in these topics should feel welcome to attend as many sessions as you like. We in fact encourage you to. We are proud to be able to offer such an impressive lineup of speakers! 🎉 This a somewhat unique opportunity.
Browse our programme below, and register for the ones you want to attend (the sooner the better).
If you want to make extra sure not to miss out, you can add the entire DIGZOOM series to your calendar, with an *ics file that can be downloaded here. You still need to register for each seminar, however.
See you there!
MARK CARRIGANPost-Pandemic Scholarship:
Some Initial Thoughts
Thursday 22 April 2021, 15:00CET (2pm UK; 9am EST; 11pm JST)Are we all digital scholars now? Social distancing has normalised digital scholarship within higher education to an unprecedented degree, as what was called a decade ago ‘the coming social media revolution in the academy’ has now come to pass due to the disruption brought about by COVID-19 and associated public health responses. However, the radically mundane nature of our reliance on digital platforms under these conditions raises questions concerning scholarship which are at risk of being overlooked due to the time, energy and resources being consumed by remote teaching.
I argue that a renewed reflexivity concerning knowledge production is essential under these conditions, orientated towards the development and maintenance of a social infrastructure for scholarship which shifts the burden of labour from individuals and collectives. I develop this argument through a reflection on the first six months of the Post-Pandemic University: an online magazine, podcast hub and event series supporting dialogue about how the university will be changed by this crisis.
Mark Carrigan is a Digital Sociologist based in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, where he leads activities within the Culture, Politics and Global Justice research cluster and works as an embedded researcher within the Digital Learning Working Group. He currently directs the Post-Pandemic University project which is an international network comprising an online magazine, podcast hub and conference series
CHRIS BAILBreaking the Social Media Prism:
How to Make our Platforms Less Polarizing
Thursday 29 April 2021, 15:00CET (2pm UK; 9am EST; 11pm JST)In an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most important tools we have to understand each other. We use social media as a mirror to decipher our place in society but, as Chris Bail explains, it functions more like a prism that distorts our identities, empowers status-seeking extremists, and renders moderates all but invisible. His recent book Breaking the Social Media Prism challenges common myths about echo chambers, foreign misinformation campaigns, and radicalizing algorithms, revealing that the solution to political tribalism lies deep inside ourselves.
Drawing on innovative online experiments and in-depth interviews with social media users from across the political spectrum, Bail explains why stepping outside of our echo chambers can make us more polarized, not less. Bail takes you inside the minds of online extremists through vivid narratives that trace their lives on the platforms and off—detailing how they dominate public discourse at the expense of the moderate majority. He introduces new apps and bots to help readers avoid misperceptions and engage in better conversations with the other side. Providing data-driven recommendations for strengthening our social media connections, Breaking the Social Media Prism shows how to combat online polarization without deleting our accounts.
Chris Bail is Professor of Sociology, Public Policy, and Data Science at Duke University, where he directs the Polarization Lab. A leader in the emerging field of computational social science, Bail’s research examines fundamental questions of social psychology, extremism, and political polarization using social media data, bots, and the latest advances in machine learning.
Bail is the recipient of Guggenheim and Carnegie Fellowships. His research appears in top journals, such as Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Sociological Review. His book, Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream, received three awards and resulted in an invitation to address the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Bail regularly lectures to audiences in government, business, and the non-profit sector. He also consults with social media platforms struggling to combat polarization.
Bail is passionate about building the field of computational social science. He is the Editor of the Oxford University Press Series in Computational Social Science and the co-founder of the Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science, which are free training events designed to introduce junior scholars to the field that are held concurrently in seven universities around the world each year. Chris also serves on the Advisory Council to the National Science Foundation's Social Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate, and helped create Duke's Interdisciplinary Data Science Program.