30 June - 11 July 2025 

 

In-person 

Opening Time:
30 June 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 2025
 

The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), Amsterdam, is holding its annual Summer School on 'Social media at a crossroads, and the sensitivity of AI platforms'. 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.

This year’s Digital Methods Summer School has two related themes. The first is ‘social media at a crossroads’ and the second the ‘sensitivity of AI platforms’; they are related given that mainstream social media seem to lost their normative compass while AI platforms strive to improve theirs through enhanced content moderation. AI platform are now occasionally called ‘oversensitive’, however. This oversensitivity charge is reminiscent of attacks on Dorsey’s Twitter and other social media platforms with active content moderation. How to consider the rising critique of the oversensitivity of AI platform moderation in light of the turn to free-for-all expression on social media? The Summer School takes up this larger question, but first breaks it down into the two individual areas of study.

 

Social media at a crossroads

Does the current crisis in social media seem novel? Fake news, data breaches, trolling, neo-reactionary takeovers and other style shifts and infrastructural setbacks have long overtaken the participatory culture, platform cooperativism, produsage, neo-pluralistic potentials and other more buoyant notions from past digital cultures. But when Meta announced in January 2025 it was re-orienting its content moderation policies to filter only the most egregious violations of its standards and also end its fact checking program, it perhaps marked a breaking point with respect to any prospective redemption of social media. Dressed up in masculine vitalism and aesthetics Meta’s announcements follow on from the trenchant criticism directed at X/Twitter. The EU has found it in breach of its regulations by using ‘dark patterns’ in advertising and blocking researcher data access, and a recent Berkeley study found that since Musk’s takeover hate speech rose by 50%. And yet, Meta headily pointed to X’s content moderation style as its own guide! Will Instagram and Meta’s other platforms follow X’s slide, empirical questions we would like to explore at the Summer School.

 

The sensitivity of AI platforms

The second is the so-called sensitivity of AI guardrails which refer to the strength level of the moderation and filtering built into AI platforms. AI chatbots, trained to be 3H’d (harmless, helpful, honest) can be sycophantic and overly polite. At the same time these platforms, while racing for new performance levels, continue to build content moderation APIs and other in-built measures to filter out a variety of harmful and offensive content. The filtering work may be easier to perform (compared to social media platforms) given that it’s sentence completions rather than user posts that are affected. Users are not cancelled, their posts are not shadow banned. (But they do experience refusals to complete prompts.) Will the moderation backlash experienced by social media platforms come to AI platforms?

Content moderation critique continues to find porous guardrails on AI platforms. While Llama appears to be highly sensitive, Falcon seems to be more permissive, for example. Will AI platforms follow social media and position themselves on the free speech spectrum? Given the challenges of universal moderation speech norms, will they turn to personalisation as the answer? These and similar questions about the state of content moderation online motivate the Summer School.

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: 30 June -11 July 2024
• Tuition fee: € 895
• Registration deadline: rolling admissions until 19 May 2024
• Academic director: Richard Rogers
• Organizers: Kamila Koronska, Varvara Boboc
• 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, 2007-2024. See also previous Digital Methods Winter Schools, 2009-2025.

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.