September 2019

Welcoming the Crowds

The crowd in the IT University atrium is buzzing with anticipation as the semester rolls in. Student prerequisites have never been higher and classes have never been more crowded. On paper, it appears that the ITU's dream of an equal representation of genders for the Masters in Software Design has reached equilibrium for the new cohort of students. The future is in the making and critical thinking has never been more important. Welcome to a new semester!

A new round of the Navigating Complexity course starts up and Python Study Group will be available for any ITU students or faculty longing for hands-on-experience with coding in an environment of community learning. Mace Ojala, involved in both, will be giving a lab-presentation on his experience from the Digital Methods Initiative. The Initiative recently announced the "death" of Bernhard Rieder's Netvizz tool that made it possible to pull limited Facebook Data. RIP Netvizz! Social Science One seems to be the only official and limited remedy for researchers using facebook data.

If you are a student eager to join an academic community as a Junior researcher in the lab, then please apply before September 23! We encourage students from all disciplines and programmes to join and are eager to read your project ideas and motivations for joining.

The concept of 'crowd' will be explored in a small-group lab discussion when Associate Professor in Social Anthropology Cori Hayden visits us for the session 'reconsidering collectives in the age of the digital mediation'.

Techfestival is continuing their quest to start 'a new conversation on humans and technology' in the Meatpacking District of Copenhagen. Thus, ETHOS Lab will be contributing along with PitLab and VirtEU. Katja De Vries, Associate Professor in Sociology of Law will be joining our session on a creative response to the General Data Protection Regulation. We encourage everyone to join the exploration of GDPR where co-director Rachel Douglas Jones will introduce Erasure Poetry as a protest art, inspired by Sarah Howe.

Our previous GDPR Erasure Poetry events at Oxford University and ITU resulted in a publication of 200 samples of GDPR Deletion Poetry Chapbooks that are now all gone! They have made their way to curious organizations and data subjects across Denmark and the world!

Scroll down to 'Other News' as interesting visits from artists and the Techplomacy Initiative are hidden there.

Stay tuned!
ETHOS Lab
www.ethos.itu.dk

APPLY NOW: Junior Researchers

We are open for applications to become Junior Researcher in ETHOS Lab. Are you a student interested in researching the social, ethical and/or political perspectives of contemporary technology and data practices? Send us a 1-page project description with motivation to ethos@itu.dk.
Read more about getting involved with ETHOS Lab. Any further questions are very welcome, please direct them to Lab Manager Marie mblo@itu.dk or stop by during our opening hours.

Teaching:
Hands-on- Coding

On popular demand, our Python Study Group is back this semester! This study group is dedicated to collectively exploring programming in Python. It is open to all ITU staff and students (including alumni and project partners) and will run for 8 weeks, starting September 19, 2019 in 5A14-16. No prior coding skills are required. We follow the book 'Learn Python the hard way', and we will do our best to gather (volunteers needed) a team of people who can help support the self-study environment. Read more on our website, sign-up here or ping Lab TA and study group coordinator Veronika Skotting on VESK@itu.dk.

When: Every Thursday 17:30-19:00, from 19 Sept.

Where: 5A14-16

TechFestival:

GDPR Erasure Poetry - join in!

It is Time for another Creative Response to GDPR!

ETHOS Lab is hosting a session on GDPR deletion poetry at the Techfestival in Copenhagen.

The General Data Protection Regulation is brought up for discussion and artful deletion with researcher in sociology of law, Katja De Vries and Lab Director Rachel Douglas-Jones. Participants will learn about the history of Erasure Poetry as a form of protest art and its role in different traditions, before making their own GDPR poem.

The exploration prompts questions of what GDPR mean for citizens in their everyday worlds. Read more on the official Techfestival x ETHOS Lab Facebook event.

When: Thursday,15 September 10:00-12:00

Where: 5e, Slagtehusgade 5e, 1715 Copenhagen

Attendance via Techfestival - get your Techfestival wristband here. ITU Student Discount code: ITUTECH19

Also check out:
PITLAB: Taking back our things & our data
VIRT-EU: Unforeseeable Futures, Ethics and New technologies

Mace reports from Digital Methods Initiative

Mace Ojala was ETHOS Lab representative at this year's Digital Methods Initiative’s (DMI) summer school.

On September 18 from 10-11 Mace will be sharing a small presentation for lab affiliates on his experience and the projects he worked on for the 2 weeks in Amsterdam.

Working with digital methods has been one of the lab's long lasting interest. Several people in the lab's community have been affiliated with DMI and used their developed tools for academia. Mace is both TA in the lab and on the course Navigating Complexity Mapping & Decision Making and we are therefore very excited to finally host a small session opening up the discussion on methods, tools and projects.

When: Wednesday 18 September 10-11

Where: ETHOS Lab (3A30)

Research:

Cori Hayden

ETHOS LAB is excited to welcome Associate Professor Cori Hayden on the theme of Ethnography and the Crowd: reconsidering collectives in an age of digital mediation. It will be in the format of a small group discussion about collectivity, affect and the crowd. Using prepared readings, Cori will discuss the shifting assumptions about "the social", providing some much needed historical depth to the concept of the "crowd".

Drawing on the ETHOS Lab's project of making space for conversation across disciplines, we invite ethnographers, anthropologists, STS-ers and social media researchers. The theorisation and research of the collectivity - and its status - will be our focus, with an emphasis on discussing what it means to design a research project that "gets at" the crowd.

When: Friday 13 Sept from 10-12

Where: ETHOS LAB, 3A30

Any questions, please e-mail Director of the Lab, Rachel Douglas-Jones, rdoj@itu.dk

Teaching:

NavCom

A new autumn semester means a fresh cohort of students getting familiar with the Navigating Complexity course--from which ETHOS Lab spawned in 2015.

The team this year counts lab affiliates Baki Cakici, Pedro Ferreira, Marisa Cohn and among others lab assistants Simy Kaur and Mace Ojala who will also be assistant lecturers.
Lab Manager Marie will be presenting ETHOS Lab and how students may draw on the lab in connection with Navigating Complexity (and other courses) in the lecture on 12 September at 12:00 in Aud. 2

Other News & Info

Techfestival
Copenhagen 5-7 September '19
Sessions hosted by the IT University:

ETHOS LAB: GDPR Erasure Poetry
PITLAB: Taking back our things & our data
VIRT-EU: Unforeseeable Futures, Ethics and New technologies.

Data As Relation Project: Artists in Residency
The award-winning artist duo Kirsten Astrup and Maria Bordorff, whose work centers on infrastructures of the welfare society, have entered into a collaboration with the Data as Relation project located in the Technologies in Practice group at the ITU.
From September 9-20, they will take up residency in room 3A58 from around 9am to 4pm and share their work on digital infrastructures, the welfare state, and what it means to be working with researchers (and possible other topics) with people passing by.
If you are interested in the collaboration feel free to drop by for a chat.
The artist duo won the Remmen Fonden Art Prize earlier this year with their video ' Quivery Heart' (Urolige Hjerte). Watch it here using the password 'please-watch-in-HD'.

TechPlomacy Initiative
Nikolaj Juncher Wædegaard, Head of Secretariat & Deputy to Denmark’s Tech Ambassador (Copenhagen) is going to give a talk on Denmark’s TechPlomacy Initative on September 18th, 13.00 – 14.00 in 5A 14-16.
All ITU students, associates and colleagues of ETHOS Lab are welcome at 13.00 sharp. This talk is also part of the GBI (Global Business Infomatics) bachelor course of IT, Globalization and Culture.Read more on the TechPlomacy Initiative here.

PhD Calls
2 PhD Fellowships for the INTRANSIT Centre at Oslo University
2 PhD Fellowships for medical education for data-intensive healthcare. Copenhagen University/Deakon University

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Videos from former publicETHOS events
Opening hours are Tuesday and Thursday at 12.30-16:00 in 3A30
Software licenses: NViVo licenses are out - write to it@itu.dk for license key