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!
ZIZI PAPACHARISSIAffective Publics and COVID-19:
Solidarity and Distance
Thursday 28 January 2021, 15:00CET (2pm UK; 9am EST; 11pm JST)In this talk, I explain how affective publics help us connect, disconnect and identify ourselves during times of crisis, upheaval, and uncertainty. Information is central to the formation of affective publics, as these publics are convened around unique and emotively charged renderings of information that fall together into liminal narratives. I discuss what the concept means in pandemic times. I then turn to the post-pandemic moment and discuss the meaning of technology for democracy. This talk draws from Affective Publics (OUP, 2014) and the forthcoming After Democracy (YUP, 2021).
Dr. Zizi Papacharissi is Professor and Head of the Communication Department, Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and University Scholar at the University of Illinois System. Her work focuses on the social and political consequences of online media. She has published nine books, over 70 journal articles and book chapters. Zizi is the founding and current Editor of the open access journal Social Media and Society and serves on the editorial board of fifteen journals. She has collaborated with Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Oculus and has participated in closed consultations with the Obama 2012 election campaign. She sits on the Committee on the Health and Well-Being of Young Adults, funded by the National Academies of Science, the National Research Council, and the Institute of Medicine in the US, and has been invited to lecture about her work on social media in several Universities and Research Institutes in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Her work has been translated in Greek, German, Korean, Chinese, Hungarian, Italian, Turkish, and Persian. Her 10th book, titled After Democracy (Yale University Press), will be out in early 2021.
MARK CARRIGANPost-Pandemic Scholarship:
Some Initial Thoughts
Thursday 11 February 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.
WHITNEY PHILLIPSThe Apex Predator President:
Using Ecological Metaphors to Reframe Harm Online
Thursday 18 February 2021, 15:00CET (2pm UK; 9am EST; 11pm JST)When people talk about harm online, they often focus on abusers, antagonists, and other high-profile manipulators. Up to a point, this makes sense; abusers, antagonists, and high-profile manipulators do an enormous amount of damage. However, we miss a great deal—about our networks and ourselves—if we focus solely on the people who set out to do harm. Using Donald Trump as a case study, this talk will explore an ecological approach to harm, one that considers the reciprocal relationship between the worst, most abusive, most toxic actors and the rest of the ecosystem. Approaching harms from such a frame helps illustrate the interdependence of people, their tools, and the broader media environment—and helps better identify what can be done in response.
Whitney Phillips is currently an assistant professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse university. Phillips’ research explores antagonism and identity-based harassment online; the relationship between vernacular expression, state and corporate influences, and emerging technologies; political memes and other forms of ambivalent civic participation; and digital ethics, including journalistic ethics and the ethics of everyday social media use. Her first book, This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture (MIT, 2015), won the Association of Internet Researchers 2015 Nancy Baym best book award. She is currently working on her latest book, together with prof. Ryan M. Milner, from the College of Charleston.
NICK COULDRYFrom the Myth of the Mediated Centre to the Myth of Big Data:
Reflections on Media's Role in Social Order
Thursday 25 February 2021, 15:00CET (2pm UK; 9am EST; 11pm JST)This talk will look back on the author’s theoretical writings on media, first on television, then on social media, and most recently on processes of datafication. The lecture will bring out the common theme that unites all this work, which is social order, and media’s contribution to social order. While this theme was implicit in his earlier work on ritual and myth, Couldry will explain how he has been able to make this theme more explicit in recent work, through drawing on the work of the German sociologist Norbert Elias. This approach can integrate an appreciation of the material aspects of technology and infrastructure, while holding on, as Elias also insisted, to a human and ethical perspective, in considering the consequences of changes in social order for everyday life. Towards the end of the talk Couldry will consider the implications of processes of datafication for the institutions we have, until now, known as media and the hermeneutic perspective on the world which, until now, they have represented. Can this perspective survive the spread of datafication? Or can we plausibly look to media institutions’ narratives for one source of resistance to datafication?
Nick Couldry is a sociologist of media and culture. He is Professor of Media Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and since 2017 also a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He is the author or editor of fifteen books including The Mediated Construction of Reality (with Andreas Hepp, Polity, 2016), Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice (Polity 2012) and Why Voice Matters (Sage 2010). His latest books are The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating Life for Capitalism (with Ulises Mejias: Stanford UP, 2019) and Media: Why It Matters (Polity: 2019).
JOSÉ VAN DIJCKGoverning Public Values in a Platform Society
Thursday 4 March 2021, 15:00CET (2pm UK; 9am EST; 11pm JST)The growing pains of digitization involve intense struggles between competing ideological systems and contesting societal actors—market, government and civil society—raising important questions about responsibility and accountability. While two large ecosystems rule the global online world—a Chinese and American-based ecosystem—the latter has overwhelmingly penetrated Western-European societies, disrupting markets and labor relations, transforming social and civic practices, and affecting democracies. Online platforms paradoxically bypass the institutional processes through which European democratic societies are organized, while at the same time they clash with local, national, and supra-national governments over who controls data-flows and algorithms.
This lecture concentrates on the position of European (private and public) interests vis-à-vis the interests of an American-based online ecosystem, driven by a handful of high-tech corporations. Public values and the common good are the very stakes in the struggle over the platformization of societies around the globe. At the heart of the online media’s industry’s surge is the battle over information control: Who owns the data generated by online social activities? Who is responsible for anchoring public values in an online world? Particularly in the European context, governments and civil society organizations can be proactive in negotiating public values on behalf of citizens and consumers.
José van Dijck is a distinguished university professor at the University of Utrecht (The Netherlands). She was the president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences from 2015 until 2018. She was a visiting professor at MIT (USA), University of Toronto (CAN), Stockholm University (SWE) and University of Technology, Sydney (AUS). She received an honorary doctorate from Lund University (SWE).
Van Dijck’s academic field is media studies and digital society. Her work covers a wide range of topics in media theory, media and communication technologies, social media, and digital culture. She is the (co-)author and (co-)editor of ten books and over one hundred journal articles and book chapters. Van Dijck’s book The Culture of Connectivity. A Critical History of Social Media (Oxford UP, 2013) was distributed worldwide and was translated into Spanish, Chinese and Farsi. Her latest book, co-authored by Thomas Poell & Martijn de Waal is titled The Platform Society. Public values in a connective world (Oxford University Press, 2018).
CHARLES ESSShould You Kick a Robot Dog?
Research Ethics in Human-Machine Communication
Thursday 11 March 2021, 15:00CET (2pm UK; 9am EST; 11pm JST)Much of contemporary research ethics is grounded in and focused on Human Subjects protections, starting with norms of respect for persons (as autonomous beings), beneficence, and justice. Human-Machine Communication (HMC), however, attends to the complexities of interactions between Humans and Machines, such as AI systems and social robots. The initial view that "it's just a machine" suggests that these devices are owed no particular ethical duties or responsibilities, especially as these are classically grounded in human autonomy (well beyond the reach of current devices) and affiliated duties of respect and care. But as HMC research unfolds, in tandem with the ever growing sophistication and capacities of these devices, important ethical dilemmas are increasingly evoked, e.g., by emerging concerns with direct and indirect duties potentially owed such devices, and as complicated by ethics of care entailed by interactions with devices designed to read and respond to human emotions and affect. I will explore some of these issues by way of specific examples, including robot dogs and the further complications of research ethics when the human subjects are children and thus vulnerable and due more extensive protections.
Charles Ess (PhD, Pennsylvania State University, USA) is Emeritus Professor in Media Studies, Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo. He has received awards for teaching and scholarship. His research and publications emphasize cross-cultural and ethical perspectives in Internet Studies, and Information and Computing Ethics. His many books include Digital Media Ethics (Polity Press, 3rd edition in 2020). Ess has served as an ethics advisor for a number of research projects, such as: Responsible Ethical Learning with Robotics – REELER (H2020). Ess has held guest professorships in Norway, Germany, Denmark, and France, and is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religion, Drury University (Springfield, Missouri, USA). Ess is a founding member of the International Association for Computing and Philosophy (IACAP); he has served as Vice-President and then President of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), and as President (2012-2016) of the International Society for Ethics in Information Technology (INSEIT).
HANNAH METZLERCollective Emotions During the COVID-19 Outbreak
Thursday 25 March 2021, 15:00CET (2pm UK; 9am EST; 11pm JST)The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the world's population to sudden challenges that elicited strong emotional reactions. While investigations of responses to tragic one-off events exist, studies on the evolution of collective emotions during a pandemic are missing. We analysed the digital traces of emotional expressions in tweets during five weeks after the start of outbreaks in 18 countries and six different languages. We observed an early strong upsurge of anxiety-related terms in all countries, consistent with the notion that social sharing amplifies initial emotional responses. Sadness-terms rose and anger-terms decreased about two weeks later in most countries, when casualties increased and social distancing measures were implemented. Positive emotions remained relatively stable. Our results show some of the most enduring changes in emotional expression observed in long periods of social media data. This kind of time-sensitive analyses of large-scale samples of emotional expression have the potential to inform mental health support and help tailor risk communication.
Hannah Metzler is a postdoc at the Complexity Science Hub, Vienna, and the Public Health Centre at Medical University of Vienna. She did her PhD in cognitive neuroscience at Sorbonne University and École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Hannah’s research interests lie in the field of social cognition and behavior, including social power and affiliation, nonverbal and intergroup behavior, emotion, face perception and stress responses. Hannah is part of the open science community and strives to make research more transparent and reproducible. In her current research, Hannah applies social computational science approaches to investigate emotions and social behavior at the collective level, as well as potential contributions of the media to suicide prevention.
DEEN FREELONHashtag Heroes vs. Disinfo Dystopia:
The Left, the Right, and the Truth About Social Media Activism
Thursday 8 April 2021, 15:00CET (2pm UK; 9am EST; 11pm JST)Recent scholarship has generated two distinct impressions of US-based social media activism, one for the ideological left and one for the right. For the left, the dominant mode of engagement is hashtag activism, which entails coordinated online and offline protest campaigns linked by hashtagged slogans. The right channels its priorities through a densely networked, hyperpartisan media ecosystem that makes frequent use of disinformation and other false claims. The respective empirical records underlying these portrayals are very solid, yet questions remain about how exclusively these strategic repertoires cling to ideological fault lines. In particular, there appears to be little extant research on either conservative hashtag-based activism or on left-leaning disinformation. A comprehensive understanding of social media activism demands further explorations of these possibilities, especially in the critical areas of mis- and disinformation.
Suggested reading: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6508/1197
Deen Freelon is an associate professor in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies political uses of social media and other digital technologies. He is also a principal researcher for UNC's interdisciplinary Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP). He has authored or co-authored more than 50 journal articles, book chapters and public reports, in addition to co-editing one scholarly book. An expert in multiple programming languages including R, Python, and PHP, Freelon has written research-grade software applications for a range of computational research purposes. He formerly taught at American University in Washington, D.C.
BROOKE FOUCAULT WELLES#HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice
Thursday 15 April 2021, 15:00CET (2pm UK; 9am EST; 11pm JST)The proliferation of social media has given rise to widespread study and speculation about the impact of digital technologies on politics, activism, and social change. Key among these debates is the role social media play in shaping the contemporary public sphere, and by proxy, our societies. Maligned by some as “slacktivism,” I will argue social media platforms such as Twitter create unique opportunities for often-excluded voices to challenge the terms of public debate. Using the evidence from Twitter hashtag networks such as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo, I will demonstrate how hashtag activism complements other forms of activism to change the terms of mainstream public debates about race and gender justice in the United States.
Brooke Foucault Welles is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies and a core faculty member of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University. Combining computational social science and network science with the theories of communication studies, Foucault Welles studies how online communication networks enable and constrain behavior, with particular emphasis on how these networks enable the pursuit of individual, team, and collective goals.
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.