DASH Archives - November 2015

Dear All,

The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) will host its 8th annual Winter School from 11th January to 15th January 2016 at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. Below please find the call for participation. The application deadline is 10th December.

This year’s theme is ‘Otherwise Engaged’, which implies two projects. The first refers to the (interface) politics of attention whereby online services are variously vying to gain recognition through jumpy banners, push notifications and metrification, including those little red badge numbers on the iPhone that call for labouring and at least marking as read. The other sense refers to how engagement online is currently measured, and how it may be thought of differently and critically if one substitutes return visits and retention rates for forms of political engagement.

For this edition keynote speakers will include Lilie Chouliaraki , Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics (LSE) and winner of the International Communication Association's 2015 Outstanding Book Award; as well as Phil Turner , Reader at the Institute for Informatics and Digital Innovation at Edinburgh Napier University. There will also be a performance and reception for Metahaven's  latest book Black Transparency .

The format is that of a data sprint, with hands-on work on engagement metrics in for political, social and media research, together with 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 DMI researchers and international participants. Participants need not give a paper at the Mini-conference to attend the Winter School.

As of this year, the DMI Winter School is officially a part of the University of Amsterdam Summer School  programme and there are opportunities for scholarships if your home university belongs to LERU or/and U21 networks.   

Feel free to forward the call to interested individuals.


#### Otherwise Engaged.
#### Critical Analytics and the New Meanings of Engagement Online

Digital Methods Winter School 2016
11-15 January 2016

Digital Methods Initiative
University of Amsterdam
Turfdraagsterpad 9
1012 XT Amsterdam
the Netherlands

Digital Methods Winter School, Data Sprint and Mini-Conference

The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), Amsterdam, is holding its annual Winter School on Critical Analytics and the Meanings of Engagement. The format is that of a data sprint, with hands-on work on engagement metrics for political, social and media research, together with a programme of keynote speakers 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 DMI researchers and international participants. Participants need not give a paper at the Mini-conference to attend the Winter School. For a preview of what the event is like, you can view short video clips from previous editions of the Summer School in 2015  and 2014 .

For this edition keynote speakers will include Lilie Chouliaraki , Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics (LSE) and winner of the International Communication Association's 2015 Outstanding Book Award; as well as Phil Turner , Reader at the Institute for Informatics and Digital Innovation at Edinburgh Napier University. There will also be a performance and reception for Metahaven's  latest book Black Transparency .

‘Otherwise engaged’, the title of the Winter School, implies two projects. The first refers to the (interface) politics of attention whereby online services are variously vying to gain recognition through jumpy banners, push notifications and metrification, including those little red badge numbers on the iPhone that call for labouring and at least marking as read. The other sense refers to how engagement online is currently measured, and how it may be thought of differently and critically if one substitutes return visits and retention rates for forms of political engagement.

Given the medium's power to distract and produce continuous partial attention, the term engagement appears oxymoronic when discussing online attention. However, “user engagement metrics” on the web, such as unique visitors, click-throughs, page views, duration and returns, have been joined by social media measures as likes, shares, comments, liked comments summed to indicate most engaged with content. In Google Analytics an entire vocabulary and set of measures exist to capture engagement. More conceptually the idea that content enlivens and animates, continually, has led to distinctions between liveness and liveliness, where the latter would be considered more meaningful engagement. Whilst there is thus the question of when there is only an appearance of engagement and when one is truly engaged, we are also interested in disengagement, and developing metrics for attention-less content, and that which makes one leave the scene.

There is also the question of the relationship between engagement metrics and more established notions of political engagement. Is the online making one more of a remote observer than an on-the-ground actor, as political engagement theorist have discussed over and again in terms of slacktivism and clicktivism. Are there techniques to grasp content and activity that lead to apathy? The accompanying data sprint will seek to work with engagement metrics (and create others) to capture the meaning of activity, inquiring into when one is fully, multiply or otherwise engaged, with data from online media organisations (and selected new-form journalism) as well as campaigning by NGOs. 

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.

Applications: Key dates

The deadline for application is 10 December 2015. To apply please send along a letter of motivation, your CV (including postal address), a headshot photo, 100-word bio as well as a copy of your passport (details page only) to winterschool [at] digitalmethods.net . Please indicate whether you would like to follow the Digital Methods Winter School for 6 ECTS credits, or the non-credits option. Notifications of acceptance will be sent on 11 December. If you are participating in the mini-conference the deadline for submission of your paper is 5 January. The mini-conference takes place on Friday 15 January 2016. Please send your mini-conference paper to winterschool[at]digitalmethods.net 
. To attend the Winter School, you need not participate in the mini-conference. The full program and schedule of the Winter School and Mini-conference are available on 7 January 2016.

Fees & Logistics

The fee for the Digital Methods Winter School 2016 is EUR 595, or if you would like to receive 6 ECTS credits the fee is EUR 695. Bank transfer information will be sent along with the notification on 11 December 2015. Students at the University of Amsterdam do not pay fees. For those taking the course for credits, see the official course catalogue entry . Participants from LERU  as well as U21  universities receive atuition waver of EUR 500 . 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), or we have available accommodations at the Student Hotel:
The Student Hotel Amsterdam
Jan van Galenstraat 335
1061 AZ Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Tel: +31 20 760 4000 
info-amsterdam [at] thestudenthotel.com 
Arrival: 10 January 2016
Departure: 16 January 2016
EUR 290 (This is a new, specially discounted rate!)
The Student Hotel Amsterdam West website 

If you would like to have accommodations at the Student Hotel, please write to Simone Lorenz at simone.lorenz [at] thestudenthotel.com . Please also inform the Winter School organizers that you are staying at the Student Hotel when applying on 10 December.

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, Jonathan Gray and Natalia Sanchez at winterschool[at] digitalmethods.net 
.

Please bring your laptop computer, your European plug as well as the VGA adaptor for connecting to the projector.

About DMI

The Digital Methods Winter School is part of the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), Amsterdam, dedicated to developing methods for Internet-related research. The Digital Methods Initiative holds the annual Digital Methods Summer Schools  (nine to date), which are intensive and full time, 2-week undertakings in the Summertime. The 2016 Summer School will take place from 27th June to 8th July 2016.
The Digital Methods  book (MIT Press, 2013) provides an introduction to the methodological outlook that frames and informs the work of the DMI. This is accompanied by a companion volume about mapping social and political issues with digital methods: Issue Mapping for an Ageing Europe  (Amsterdam University Press, 2015), which is also freely available on the web  as an open access monograph. Further information and resources about digital methods can be found at digitalmethods.net  - including links to example projects , publications  andtools  as well as an introductory "founding narrative " about the Digital Methods Initiative and details about associated researchers .
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.
Social
For those of you that use Twitter we are using the #DMI16 hashtag  as the backchannel for communication. Some pictures from Winter School 2015 . Here is the Facebook Group  from last year's Winter School. Here are pictures from a variety of DMI Summer and Winter School  flickr streams.

Dr. Carolin Gerlitz
Assistant Professor in New Media
Program Director MA New Media & Digital Culture

University of Amsterdam
Turfdraagsterpad 9
1012 XT Amsterdam

http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/c.gerlitz/ 

On behalf of Paul Thomas 
The Fourth International Conference on Transdisciplinary Imaging at the Intersections of Art, Science and Culture
THE ATEMPORAL IMAGE
Location: Plymouth University
Date:  1, 2, 3 July, 2016

Abstract Deadline is the 29 January 2016
 “He could see the tall, peeling yellow building at the periphery of his range of vision. But something about it struck him as strange. A shimmer, an unsteadiness, as if the building faded forward into stability and then retreated into insubstantial uncertainty. An oscillation, each phase lasting a few seconds and then blurring off into its opposite, a fairly regular variability as if an organic pulsation underlay the structure. As if, he thought, it’s alive.”
(Phillip K Dick. 1969)

Our contemporary quotidian lives are becoming increasingly indebted to virtual platforms for social exchange and cultural mediation. The ubiquity of social media has necessitated the birth of virtual graveyards; frozen digital reliquaries marking the cessation of our online busywork. Museums and culture conservationists are hurriedly digitising material fragments of the Anthropocene in an anxious contest against time and entropy. In this world the family photo-album is no longer an object but a well pool of dematerialised data.

·      To what extent has time’s unrelenting persecution of matter and, by historical virtue of necessity, culture, been circumvented in the digital age?

·      What is time to the dematerialised image?

·      Does the cloud and distributed data networks shift the agency of time as it shifts the image?

·      Has the duration of the gaze been supplanted by a sequence of fleeting glances as the mechanics of our biological bodies struggle clumsily to fix upon a new frenetic landscape of hypermediated imagery?
The figurative freezing of digital data is a far cry from the corporeal terminus we have historically conceived of as death. In its epitaphic state even the digital graveyard is full of life; of reading, relaying and revival. Even these (a)temporarily static fields of data serve to nourish a complex bio-digital ecology that decomposes, blooms and flourishes in a new non-terrestrial time, unbound by the phenomenal cycles of the stars. The age of information has given rise to a new breed of temporality whereby nothing ever dies but is only defrag’d, retrieved, restored and remixed. The Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference is calling for papers that explore how this new temporality informs and plays out across contemporary visual culture.
Participants are asked to address aspects of the atemporal at least one of the following areas:

  *   the still image
  *   the immersive image
  *   the sound as image
  *   hypermediacy and the iconic character of the image
  *   politics of the image and/or image making in a transdisciplinary context
  *   life sciences and bioart in relation to the living image
  *   distributed and networked image
  *   The trans-scalar image(inary), from the nano to the astronomical image
  *   Artificial and computer vision
  *   moving still
  *   image as time, real-time and glitch-time
  *   archival, permanency and immediacy
  *   aesthetics and proliferation of the image
The conference invites papers that respond to the above provocation in areas related to: Media Arts, Painting, Drawing, Curating, Installation, Film, Video, Photography, Computer/data Visualization/sonification, Real-time Imaging, Intelligent Systems and Image Science.
Timing and Duration:
Conference will be held over three days from July 1, 2, 3 2016
Location:
i-DAT / Plymouth University
Roland Levinsky Building,
Drake Circus, Plymouth,
PL48AA, Devon, UK
Conference email: transimage2016@gmail.com
Conference website: www.transimage.i-DAT.org
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Call for Nominations: 2016 SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art

The deadline of December 15 2015 is rapidly approaching. Time to submit your nominations for the award through the ACM SIGGRAPH website. Do not assume that someone else is nominating your choice for the award - take action!

Visit the URL listed below and click on Artist Award Chair. Please include as much information about your nominee as possible, including web links.

http://www.siggraph.org/participate/awards

Nominations not submitted through the SIGGRAPH website will not be considered. Thank you.

Description
The Distinguished Artist Award is awarded annually to an artist who has created a substantial and important body of work that significantly advances aesthetic content in the field of digital art.
Please note: not all qualities are required

Nominations
Nominations are due by December 15, 2015 and should include:
 •    Name(s) of the individual(s) being nominated (address and/or phone number and/or email address are also appreciated).
 •    References to websites with the artist's works and texts when applicable  (multiple references are welcome).
 •    Nominator's name, address, telephone number, fax number, and email address.

A statement by the nominator describing the significance of the artist's contributions according to the following criteria (not all criteria are mandatory):

 1.    The Artist has been contributing internationally to the digital arts for more than Twenty (20) years.
 2.    The Artist has produced important work(s) that is(are) referenced in digital art history/theory papers/books.
 3.    The Artist has established an unexplored area in the field of digital art/media art.
 4.    The Artist has been advancing the use of digital technologies in creative expression.
 5.    The Artist has contributed to the history and/or theory and/or practice of digital art through  writing and presentations at conferences and symposia.

Thanks!

Sue Gollifer
Chair, Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art
ACM SIGGRAPH

University of Brighton
School of Art, Design and Media

Director, ISEA International HQ

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Paul Brown
http://www.paul-brown.com == http://www.brown-and-son.com
UK Mobile +44 (0)794 104 8228
Skype paul-g-brown
====
Honorary Visiting Professor - Sussex University
http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/ccnr/research/creativity.html
====