May 2016

Ides of May

The ITU and hence also ETHOS Lab is filled with the sound of concentration - clacking of keyboards, groups discussing and muttering, coffee machines whirring - as the university has entered into exam mode. For many the exams mark a transition from one state into another: from semester to holidays, or more dramatically, from life as a university student to that of newly graduated. In this way, May is proving to be an "ides" in the lives of many of the students at ITU and in ETHOS Lab.

We feel this keenly in the lab, as some of our talented Junior Researchers and volunteers are putting last touches on their thesis projects. On the 3rd of May the lab had the pleasure of hosting a poster session with Doctors Geoffrey Bowker and Steven Brown, where these thesis students presented their work in progress. You can read more about that in the newsletter below.

Some students have already finished and defended their thesis work, and they have been invited to write about their research on the lab's blog, Metadata. That's turned into some great posts on using STS theory to understand copyright enactment and internet piracy and on using digital methods to perform textual analysis on large bodies of text. You can read about these projects below.

Life in the lab does not come to a standstill however, just because exams are upon us. We have been hosting Datasprints with our partner organisation Analyse & Tal and will be keeping our opening hours in order to service students in need of exam assistance through May and June.

Despite the busyness of exams, stay in touch: feel free to comment on our facebook and twitter posts or stop by the lab IRL, ITU Copenhagen 1C05.

Best regards & good luck,

ETHOS Lab

Teaching: Research posters released!

As previously announced ETHOS Lab held a poster session on 3 May with Geoffrey Bowker and Steven Brown in attendance. Six students with five Master's projects had submitted abstracts and created some impressive posters detailing their findings and work so far.

The projects covered a diverse range of topics, from "living maps" to "tracing data", and from retailers' use of omnichannel to accountability in the sharing economy.

In addition to the students and the two visiting scholars, many members of the ETHOS research group showed up and contributed to the discussion. The whole thing was captured on Twitter by Rachel Douglas Jones, who has turned the experience into a story via Storify. You can access both the Story and all of the posters via the ETHOS page.

Research: Piracy and Copyright as seen from an STS perspective

Junior Researcher Alexander Leise-Hansen recently defended his Master's thesis entitled 'To Whom it may Concern: Studying the Practice of Sending Personally Adressed Letter with Claims of Copyright Violation.' Congrats to Alexander!

We asked him if he would like to write an abbreviated version of the thesis for our blog, Metadata, and he luckily agreed. The result is now online on our blog, and in it Alexander outlines why his research allows him to claim that you aren't a pirate when you use access a copyrighted feature film online.

Provocative stuff! Read the blog post on Metadata here.

Services: Datasprint w. Analyse & Tal

ETHOS Lab has been collaborating with the consultancy Analyse & Tal for several months now, and the collaboration picked up in April and May where we held a series of three datasprints with the Copenhagen based company.

The challenge we choose to tackle concerns nothing other than Student Housing in Denmark! A topic that most students can definitely relate to, as Copenhagen and Denmark in general is notoriously difficult for students to find housing in. Over three sessions we have brainstormed how to explore the topic with digital methods, and we are pretty excited with what we've come up with! We can't say too much just yet, but based on our current analysis of the data we believe to be able to argue that there is a great need for Danish politicians to intervene and create better conditions for students in regards to housing.

We will be hosting one more sprint in June, and then we hope to be able to publish our findings in time for the new student uptake in July/August. Keep your eyes peeled!

In Other News

• DIM students Sebastian Frandsen, Lars Thomsen and Nikolaj Nielsen used the software ANTA from ETHOS Lab in their thesis project on technical innovation in the financial sector. With the software they were able to identify thematic overlaps in three distinct bodies of scientific literature, which confirmed their suspicions. You can read about their use of the software on the Metadata blog here.