Projects

Centered around a series of three workshops, the project entails to conceptualize a Nordic approach to critical algorithm studies. The project is a collaboration between Tampere University, Helsinki University, Stockholm University, and ITU, working towards contributing to the conversations on automation, categorization, and other key features of human-machine collaborations through a unique understanding from Nordic settings. Participants bring in a broad range of scholarly backgrounds, and further include actors from outside academia. An additional objective is the establishment of a network on the topic with a strong focus on supporting junior scholars. ETHOS contributes to foster an explorative, creative, dialogue across the disciplines and hosts the workshops in Copenhagen.

Beginning in 2018, this project has engaged the new General Data Protection Regulation through the form of erasure poetry. Through events in Denmark and internationally, we have convened academics and publics to create erasure poems from the text of the GDPR. Selections have been published in two erasure poetry collections. The collections are available through the Lab, and have been used in training workshops around the world! For an account of the process, see here.

Making sense of medicinal cannabis debates is a 3-year research project about discourses surrounding the current Danish pilot programme for medicinal cannabis. The very introduction of medicinal cannabis is often assumed to be intrinsically linked to the digitalized media landscapes where the “public” voice has a new power to mobilize and build political pressure, which is investigated and questioned by mapping the evolution of the online debate about medicinal cannabis in Denmark. The project combines digital “issue mapping” approaches with qualitative methods and explores how critical inquiry into digital methods can qualify their use.

Research projects often end up with data and empirical material left unexamined. Often, we hold onto these materials with the anxiety and hope that they will become useful someday. Or perhaps we do not know how best to dispose of them. In this project we have stored a black box of empirical data gathered over multiple lab events and workshops without opening it. Through this experiment we live with the ambivalences of unexamined data and consider both institutional GDPR requirements as well as the collective responsibility for its liminal status as material that requires care until its eventual use or disposal.

During the spring semester of 2021, lecturers suddenly discovered that a new risk algorithm predicting student drop-out was activated in ITU’s online learning platform; LearnIT operating through Moodle software. While the algorithm got deactivated, a student project in collaboration with ETHOS lab started, investigating the naturalisation of surveillance in learning platforms and their connection to how universities get funded.

‘Monster Writing’ approaches writing as a vulnerable practice marked by an unstable boundary between bodies: bodies of text and bodies of the writer. Drawing on feminist theory on vulnerability, embodiment and the monstrous as well as scholarship on creative writing/experimental methods, we develop and organize writing workshops that engage with these instabilities as well as address experiences of difficulties, anxieties, and uncertainty in relation with the text and writing process. We also publish on these subjects, arguing that this potentially more troubled relationship between writer and text should be explored further in scholarship on writing.

This project considers the ways in which silences and absences are central parts of research relying on automated data collection from social media or the internet. As these research methods have gained popularity within social science and humanities, it becomes ever more pertinent to consider how we engage with digital data, and how both engagement and data are situated, messy and contingent. Based on experiences with ‘missing’ data, the project mobilizes the framework of hauntology to make sense of the relationships we may build with missing data, and how silences haunt research practices. We reimagine absent data not as a limitation, but rather an invitation to reflect on and establish new methods for working with automated data collections.

This project critically analyses the sustainability efforts of large Danish companies in the face of multiple climate crises. Such organizations are required by law to detail their efforts to combat climate change in their annual reports, and this research project seeks to use this open data to 1) create a research infrastructure with easy access to the data for others to use and 2) analyze what kind of sustainability efforts companies engage in, and what kind of expertise and knowledge they are based on. The project leverages overlapping traditions such as infrastructure studies, digital methods and the emerging field of digital sustainability, exploring how sustainability is being reported and providing a better overview for further research into this topic.

Offering the lab as a site for supervision and consulting in Digital Methods can be complicated in the messiness of reality, where we periodically receive requests to harvest and provide data from social media. We occasionally feel a sense of ambivalence, uneasiness and even resistance towards handing over datasets and leaving them in the hands of others. The project ”ETHOS as a Data Provider” attends to what kind of data ethics we find ourselves involved in by incorporating two entangled tracks. The first track concerns reflecting on and qualifying our internal process of handling these requests, and the other is to participate in the academic conversations of data ethics in practice and contribute to the field.

The Moving Data Moving People project is a 5 year ethnographic study of the emergent Social Credit System in China. ETHOS colleagues have been involved in early online ethnography, the establishment of infrastructure for Weibo data collection and analysis, and RAs from the project have been based in the Lab. The MDMP project will be exploring experimental methods 2021-2025.

Since we returned to our offices in Summer 2021, there has been a buzzing in the corners of the Lab. Conversations on how corona and the political handling of it has affected our work life has spread, and an insistence to fundamentally (re)think working conditions for knowledge producers given the prevailing neoliberal influence has grown. We consider this to be a reoccurring theme within the Lab community, and a project which is slowly figuring and finding its form. The process is highly valuable and perhaps this is the very project.