Celebrating Ada Lovelace this year, Vasiliki Tsaknaki (Assistant Professor, ITU), Co-head of Lab Marisa Cohn (Associate Professor, ITU) and Lab Manager Marie Blønd designed an experiment in the form of an online workshop on Materializing Data with Macrame.
To warm up to the workshop in one of our Research Group meetings, Vasiliki introduced the ways that knots, tying, and textile arts like macrame, have (might) contributed to computational aesthetics and reflections. Prior to the workshop, we collected data on gender distribution at ITU for both students and staff, consisting of both "raw" and visualized versions, making them available to participants in the Macrame kits distributed before the workshop to participants.
Attempting to materialize data in macrame, the experiment was conducted to reflect on what happens when we put data into our hands to think and work with through string, beads, and tying knots. Exploring possible paths to visualizing gender data with macrame knots, we were simultaneously asking how data is produced, designed and communicated. Thinking through how tying and knots might be a way of transmuting and interpreting data on gender representation at our own institutions. More on this below and in the next newsletter...
A new cohort of Junior Researchers in the lab is working on exciting projects. The projects range from ecological visions, #activism, CPR-registry to forms of learning and hackathons. Read more about the projects and Junior Researchers below and do not hesitate to engage with their brilliant minds.
Python Study Group is running in covid-19 safe-mode which means a combination of online Discord and offline ITU meet-ups as planned. Thank you to Veronika and the volunteers for being agile in a difficult time for gatherings. Your engagements in giving ITU students the possibility for learning programming in an informal and supportive environment is especially important in these pandemic times. Veronika will have a blogpost in the next newsletter on the unusual experience this semester and last session for the study group will be on the 25th November.
Blogpost includes reflections on the ETHOS Lab & RethinkIT's experimental DataWalk in Amager Fælled by Luuk Blum. Luuk is active in both communities and frames his reflections with critical inquiries from three years of studying MSc in Digital Innovation & Management at the IT University.
Former Junior Researcher, now working for Demant, has a blog post on the blindspots of needing ethnographic enquiry when implementing algorithms in decision-making processes.
Finally, as part of a series 'mastering disaster', Lab intern and junior researcher Benedicte Lange from MCTS, reflects on the semi-automatic process of doing transcriptions using the tool scrintal. The series is a research diary that accompanies the process of writing his master thesis, containing rants, tools, experiences and more.
The reading group Activism X Research coordinated by Lab Assistant and Extinction Rebellion activist Luuk Blum is meeting up on the 20th November for a session - are you interested? Please contact Luuk on lubl@itu.dk The reading group takes a Stangerian stance approaching research as a constructive enterprise, a diverse, interdependent, and highly contingent system that does not simply discover pre-existing truths but, through specific practices and processes, helps shape them. To inform this process in a way that questions the dominance of academic expert knowledge the goal is to have about half of the participants active within activism, whereas the other half comes from within ITU.
What was going to be a September SURPRISE has been postponed. The book launch on a second volume of the GDPR Deletion Poetry Chapbook!!! The event will most likely be small and held at the volunteer-run bookstore Ark in Copenhagen where it will also be available for purchase.
Interact with us and keep you and us posted on social media [twitter, facebook Instagram] or see you in the next newsletter.
All the best,
ETHOS Lab
ethos.itu.dk
Co-heads of Lab: Marisa Cohn & Rachel Douglas-Jones
Post doc: Katrine Meldgaard Kjær
Lab Manager: Marie Blønd
