3 - 14 July 2023 

 

In-person 

Opening Time:
3 July at 9.15am Amsterdam time. Please be punctual!

Opening Day Location:
To be announced

Everyday location:
Digital Methods Initiative
University of Amsterdam
Turfdraagsterpad 9
1012 XT Amsterdam

 

Digital Methods Initiative - Summer School 2023
 

The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), Amsterdam, is holding its annual Summer School on the 'Prompting and other algorithmic curiosities'. The format is that of a (social media and web) data sprint, with tutorials as well as hands-on work for telling stories with data. There is also a programme of keynote speakers. It is intended for advanced Master's students, PhD candidates and motivated scholars who would like to work on (and complete) a digital methods project in an intensive workshop setting. For a preview of what the event is like, you can view short video clips from previous editions of the School.

Prompting and other algorithmic curiosities

Algorithmic auditing and probing are methodologies to tease out discriminatory, offensive and other undesirable outputs of AI-driven systems and may lead at once to critiques of reinforcement and reification as well as to subsequent efforts at debiasing, retraining, patching, editing and other means to moderate the content. One aspect of the auditing that is less well understood is how best to trigger the systems to show how well thought through the safeguards are. Journalistic and scholarly work on probing Google’s autocompletion has been undertaken for years, yet more attention is paid to the sometimes shocking outputs than how to elicit them. ‘Prompting’ strategy (and ‘prompt design’) may be considered elicitation methods for learning the machine’s capacity for offence and other auditing interests. Or more dramatically perhaps, how to learn what lurks within the machine? The Digital Methods Summer School is dedicated to machine curiosity and its methods.

 

Information

For all details about this Summer School Course, please visit the Digital Methods website below. 

Instructions, project descriptions and welcome package (as they become available)

 

Course information:

• Dates: 3-14 July 2023
• Tuition fee: € 895
• Registration deadline: rolling admissions until 16 May 2023
• Academic director: Richard Rogers
• Organizers: Guillén Torres, Kamila Koronska
• Academic level: all graduate levels - Master's, PhD candidates and professionals/scholars
• Credits: 6 ECTS 
• Field of study: New Media and Digital Culture
• Location: In-person. University of Amsterdam, Media Studies, Turfdraagsterpad 9, 1012 XT Amsterdam, the Netherlands

School philosophy

The Digital Methods Winter School is exploratory and experimental. It is not a setting for ‘just’ tool training or for principally tool-driven research. Substantive research projects are conceived and carried out. Participants are encouraged to ‘span time with their issue’ and the materials. In other words, we heed Alexander Galloway’s admonition about data and tool-driven work: “Those who were formerly scholars or experts in a certain area are now recast as mere tool users beholden to the affordances of the tool — while students spend ever more time mastering menus and buttons, becoming literate in a digital device rather than a literary corpus.”[1] We encourage device and corpus literacy! The device training we ask you to do prior to the School through online tutorials, and at the School itself, in a kind of flipped learning environment (if you'll excuse the overused phrase), we would like to believe that you have familiarised yourself already with the tools (and are driven, to complete the thought). During the School we will discuss and tinker with the nitty-gritty, aim to invent new methods, techniques and heuristics and create the first iterations of compelling work to be shared.

[1] Alexander Galloway (2014). The Cybernetic Hypothesis, Differences. 25(1):107-131. See page 127.

About the Summer School

The Digital Methods Summer School, a part of the Digital Methods Initiative, is directed by Professor Richard Rogers, Chair in New Media & Digital Culture, Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. The Summer School is one training opportunity provided by the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI). DMI also has a Winter School, held in early January. Both Schools have a technical staff as well as a design staff, drawn from the ranks of Density Design in Milan. The Schools also rely on a technical infrastructure of servers hosting tools and storing data. 

In a culture of experimentation and skill-sharing, participants bring their laptops, learn method, undertake research projects, make reports, tools and graphics and write them up on the Digital Methods wiki. The School concludes with final presentations. Often there are subject matter experts from non-governmental or other organizations who present their analytical needs and issues at the outset and the projects seek to meet those needs, however indirectly.

Please see previous Digital Methods Summer Schools, 2007-2022. See also previous Digital Methods Winter Schools, 2009-2023.

The Digital Methods Initiative was founded with a grant from the Piet Mondriaan Foundation, the public cultural funding organization. The Digital Methods Summer and Winter Schools are self-sustaining.

Credits and completion certificate

Completion certificate and transcript for 6 ECTS are granted to participants who follow the School program, and complete a significant contribution to a School project as evidenced by co-authorship of the project report as well as final (joint) presentation slides. Templates for the project report as well as for the presentation slides are supplied. Please note that certificates of completion and the transcripts are the same. There are no other certificates or proof of participation supplied.