April 2017

Lab Life in April!

The ETHOS Lab is always shaped by the people in the lab and their research interests. Themes for experimentation this semester are taking form and revolve around voice and image recognition as well as exploring the recently coined 'fake news' through digital methods and concepts of populism.

One of our Junior Researchers, Anette, has been setting up an experiment using volunteers communicating with the Google Home voice-recognition device. Ethnographically she is experimenting with what it means to interact with voice-prompt in everyday life. 

As a social event we attended Science & Cocktails to hear about Artificial Intelligence and our Friday Q&A session was geek'ing out to Rasmus Rosendal's presentation on his thesis inquiring discourses and practices of Data Journalism. 

On the note of data journalism and populism, the 4th week in April is setting the scene for technological intervention in so-called 'Fake News'. IT University will be hosting a debate on 'Can Technology Save us from Fake News?' which participants from the 'fake news datasprint with TANTLab and Digital Social Science Lab will be joining. We want to extend the invitation to anyone interested in digital methods and datasprints to join the debate and the fake news data sprint from 24-28th April. The datasprint is dedicated to collaborating with Danish journalists to test out ‘Fieldguides’ developed collaboratively with Digital Methods Initiative, Amsterdam. If you want to read more about datasprints, check out former Junior Researcher Cæcilie Laursen’s project on data sprints in Copenhagen. 

The project Mapping Colonial Copenhagen has been renamed to 'Mapping A Colony' and is being shaped by interesting discussions on how to re-present the colonial past through stories, geographies and particularly interesting people from different temporalities. In this process our partner Uncertain Archives has been involving people and places from the former West Indies, now US Virgin Islands, to participate and be included in the mapping process and data collection. Artist La Vaugh Belle from the islands gave a talk on her experience, remembrance and artistic expressions of connecting with the Danish colonial past on the islands and through visiting Copenhagen.

Oh yes! If you missed the talk 'Remember when nobody knew you were a dog' on Anonymity, Identity and Location by associate professor Jeremy Birnholtz, from Northwestern University, then it is now available here.

Coming up on the 5th May, our next PublicETHOS talk is in Danish, presented by Pernille Tranberg on 'Data Ethics - the New competitive advantage'.

Heading for holidays, we wish you all a happy easter! 

Spring Greetings from the ETHOS Lab.
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Teaching: publicETHOS #17 - Workshops on Tableau

Tableau is a useful tool for data analysis and visualisation, and in ETHOS Lab we are fond of it due to available free student licenses, easy drag and drop functionality and ability to quickly display data in many different ways.

To explore how this tool may facilitate your data analysis work, we have invited dedicated Tableau partner Inviso to do a workshop series. First workshop will be a two-hour introduction to the tool. A week later, the 2nd workshop will be focusing on combining different datasets and you can bring your own dataset and get help with your analysis and visualisations. The series is open to all.

#1 Workshop on Thursday 20th April 12-14
#2 Workshop on Friday 28th April 12-14 
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Research: Junior Researcher Experimentation

As we are now settled firmly in the spring semester, our new junior researcher have scoped their projects and begun working on them in style. Following their progress on our weekly meetings is as exciting as ever. We have projects about trust and AI, implementation of speech recognition, fake news and anonymisation of data.

Data gathering taking place across the projects are very diverse and includes everything from generating face recognition data categories to doing fieldwork in collaboration with Mirsk while observing municipalities' workpractices. Experimental set-ups with Google Home devices are set up and preparations are made for participatory observations at upcoming hyphe event and datasprint on fake news. 

Junior Researcher profiles are now on our webpage
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Services: Digital Methods Workshop

In the course Digital Democratic Citizenship, ETHOS Lab, represented by Bastian Jørgensen and Marie Blønd, conducted a digital methods workshop for a session dedicated to presenting multiple research methods. The students were introduced to the Netvizz for Facebook for data collection and visualisations in Gephi. 

Check out our video tutorials on using Gephi
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Cæcilie Laursen - What is a data sprint?

PublicETHOS 5th May on Data Ethics

Our first Public ETHOS in Danish and on Data Ethics takes place in Auditorium 2 from 10-11.30 on the 5th May - open to all. Journalist and consultant Pernille Tranberg will be presenting her take on data ethics as a competitive advantage in future concerns of individual's privacy. Privacy concerns are developing into a form of societal responsibility challenging the provision of digital trust. Using national and international cases mirrored in data laws, Pernille argues that consumer tendencies reveal demands for controlling your own data, creating a market for privacy tech and data ethical companies. This talk is part of the ITU professional master course "Visionær ledelse i den datadrevne organisation". We have kindly been given the english version of her book 'Data Ethics - The New Competitive Advantage' - stored in our Lab Library. 

Stay updated through the Facebook event
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Writing Sessions

Writing is a craft and one of the key requirements in conveying any research. It is also a vital part of academia and requires creativity but also scientific robustness. ETHOS Lab acknowledges this deskwork as an analytical process that needs to be taken seriously and we are therefore starting up weekly #shutupandwrite sessions after Easter on Tuesdays from 10-12.

This initiative was kicked-off by a thesis writing workshop by co-head of lab Rachel Douglas-Jones, also co-teaching the course 'Writing Innovation Studio'. Rachel has successfully been organising #shutupandwrite sessions for ETHOS Lab researchers and refers to the blog 'The Thesis Whisperer' by Dr. Inger Mewburn, Director of Research Training at the Australian National University for inspiration.

No matter what you are writing on - please join in the sessions. 

#Shutupandwrite is scheduled in the ETHOS calendar. 

In Other News

• ITU's BUILDLab is hosting Nasa Space App Challenge 2017 on 28-30th April

• Datasprint on Fake News hosted by TantLab takes place from 24-28 April - registration obligatory

• International Journalism Festival 5-9 April focusing on the theme ‘Fake News’ - follow on Twitter #ijf17talks and streaming on: http://www.journalismfestival.com/programme/2017

• Irina Shklovski is talking at the IDA on the 26th April from 4-8 pm on “Kvinder der styrker - Women’s take on Tech” (Primarily in Danish). You can sign up until 21st April 

• Call for Participation for Digital Methods Summer School 2017 ‘Digital Methods for Visual Research’ in Amsterdam from 26 June – 7 July 2017 . https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/SummerSchool2017

• Available Phd postion at Dept of computer and information science, NTNU, Trondheim on the theme of Big Data with a work practice perspective. The empirical setting is within oil and gas within the Sirius research centre http://sirius-labs.no/

• Our opening hours are Tuesday - Thursday at 12.30-16:00 but we are closed during Easter break (10 - 17 April). You are welcome to drop us an email on ethos@itu.dk 
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