June, a promissory note for summer...

@ethosITU: ETHOS on Twitter

ETHOS Lab is now on Twitter under the handle @ethosITU. We tweet about our activities and events and about digital methods and data visualization. We are working to build our presence and get a finger on the pulse of what is going on, so if you follow us we will follow you back. 

Teaching: publicETHOS #2 - Navigating in the Wild

ETHOS Lab is proud to host yet another publicETHOS event, this time entitled Navigating in the Wild, on June 22, 13:00 in Aud3. This event will focus on whether and how academic skills and competencies are useful in the world outside of the university. Three students from the Digital Innovation and Management programme will speak about their experiences with this theme, after which there will be a moderated debate. There will also be a workshop about translating competencies to one’s CV or Linkedin.

We encourage all students and teaching researchers to participate. Read about and sign up for the workshop here. 

Interesting Tools: Kimono and MonkeyLearn

At ETHOS Lab we spend a lot of time working with and trying off digital tools. Most of the tools we work with are developed by researchers. This is important, since these are open source and they ensure transparency with regards to the results of the tools. We do however also like to keep an eye on the commercial market for digital tools. Here we have recently noted two interesting tools: Kimono and MonkeyLearn. 

Kimono is a web-scraping tool, which can turn (almost) any website into a source of data. MonkeyLearn is a machine learning programme that can be trained to classify different texts. They are currently both in beta and so free to use, and they can also be combined. We recommend checking them out!

Research: Conference Brief – Cohn & Winthereik at Nordic STS

From the 27th to the 29th of May the 2nd Nordic STS Conference was held at Aalborg University. The two heads of ETHOS Lab, Marisa Cohn and Brit Winthereik, convened a panel called ‘Engaging with digital methods.’  Read our report from the panel here.

Services: Big Data Superheroes?

The ITU has recently begun a cooperation with Hitachi Consulting over the latter’s project to build what has tentatively been entitled the “SmartCopenhagen Big Data Marketplace.” Hitachi aims to build an infrastructure for big data in the greater Copenhagen area in the form of a marketplace. In the end of May, Hitachi visited the ITU to host a workshop about their project. ETHOS Lab was there, and we learned a lot about the ambitious project.

Whilst exciting in scope, the project also raises a lot of questions.  If you want to learn more about the project, we have condensed our takeaways from the day in a blog post which you can read here. 

Digital Methods Initiative Tutorials - Now on Youtube

The Amsterdam-based Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) collaboration, led by Richard Rogers, have recently uploaded a ton of lectures and tutorials to Youtube. Rogers is generally credited with having founded digital methods as a research agenda, both by way of his influential book ‘Digital Methods’ and by the many practical studies undertaken by the DMI. The DMI’s research ranges from using Wikipedia as a cultural indicator to creating the well-known IssueCrawler, used for mapping issue networks on the web. They have done many interesting studies, so we definitely recommend checking their resources out.  

You can find and subscribe to DMI’s Youtube channel here.