June 2016

Jubliant June

So far June has been blessed with beautiful weather in Copenhagen: blue skies and warm rays from above. This seems very fitting alongside the many victory images that crowd the #lifeatitu instagram feed from thesis students who have finally handed in their labours of love. Right now it seems as if the Danish weather is celebrating alongside the students, making June a jubliant month so far. Despite the fact that ITU is winding down for the summer break of July, we feel pretty jubliant in ETHOS as well, as we have a lot of great announcements to make!

In this month's newsletter you can read about the upcoming publicETHOS on GIS technology, about our upcoming datasprint series, "Representing History through Data", to be held next semester with the Danish Royal Library and HUMlab and about our new research intern, Jan Redzisz, who will be joining the lab for 10 weeks from June. It is also our great pleasure to inform you that ETHOS Lab will be hosting the first ever ETHOS Summer Lab this July. Not quite a summer school, the summer lab will be five days of wild experimentation which we're looking very much forward to. 

ETHOS Lab will be closed in July, with the exception of the summer lab. We wish you a great summer, and look forward to seeing you again in August where we have some exciting things planned already. Until July you can still reach us facebook, via e-mail or stop by the lab IRL, ITU Copenhagen 1C05. 

Best wishes,

ETHOS Lab

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Teaching: publicETHOS on Geographical Information Systems

For May's publicETHOS we have invited the Danish company Informi GIS to tell us about the use and value that GIS systems can provide. 

GIS technology is a huge part of modern mapping efforts, and so is very relevant to gain an understanding of. Informi GIS works with the world leader in GIS solutions, Esri, and uses their tool ArcGis. The presentation will also cover the benefits of this particular software. 

Sign up is not required, but you can join the facebook event here

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Research: ETHOS Summer Lab

We are proud to announce the very first ETHOS Summer Lab, which will take place from 11-15 July 2016, at ITU. 

The summer lab is five days dedicated to working on experimental projects related to technology, the digital and speculation in general. It's an opportunity to try something just for the heck of it and geek out over cool projects together with likeminded people. The theme of the first ever summer lab will be experimentation, and participants can either come up with their own idea or join in on someone else's. So far, submitted projects range from exploring algorithms online to capturing brain data! 

There are still a few available spots left at the summer lab, and the deadline is 10 June. If it sounds like something that might be of interest to you, then read more and sign up here

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Services: "Representing History through Data" - A Datasprint Series

In collaboration with The Royal Library and the Humanistic Faculty Library's lab for digital humanities, HUMlab, ETHOS Lab is proud to present the datasprint series "Representing History through Data", which will take place in the fall of this year.

The motivation for the datasprint series is that 2017 is the 100-year anniversary of the sale of the Danish West-Indie Islands. To mark the occasion the historical archives are being digitalised, and we wish to explore how digital methods and visualisation techniques can represent history by using this data. Representation is a difficult topic however, and so the event hopes to attract both students from the ITU and the Faculty of Humanities, to foster debate about issues of post-colonialism, interpretation, representation, etc. 

We are really excited to be collaborating with these two organisations as partners, and hope that the collaboration will yield interesting interdisciplinary experience and outcomes for the participants. You can read more about the project and the datasprints and sign up to participate here

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Research: Introducing Jan Redzisz, Research Intern

 From June and on ETHOS Lab will be guested by Jan Redzidz who will be working as a research intern in the lab for 10 weeks. Welcome Jan!

Jan is an Applied Cultural Analysis graduate from University of Copenhagen who comes from a multidisciplinary background comprised of areas of human development, consulting, and people-centered design. Jan's main focus lies in engaging future users of robotics and Artificial Intelligence into more democratised debate through means of speculative design (ethnographic games and workshops).

At ETHOS Lab, Jan will investigate the potential of employing Actor Network Theory, semiotics and data visualisation in mapping of the users' cultural biases towards future tech, which might play an important role in better navigation around inevitable shift in Human Robot Interaction (HRI) brought by rapid influx of social robotics.

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In Other News

• Bernard Rieder (Associate Professor, University of Amsterdam) posted some timely and important reflections concerning APIs and democratic transparency on his blog in light of Instagram's recent changes to how you can access their data. 

• Oracle has donated a SunFire V445 server to ETHOS Lab. The donation is greatly appreciated and we are working with the IT Department to have it installed. The server will be used for data collection and analysis related to digital metods. 

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