[Air-L] AoIR and Digital Methods

[Axel Bruns]

Hi everyone,

as the current President of AoIR, I wanted to follow up on the very active discussion regarding digital methods that we’ve seen on the list over these past few days. It’s great to see the enthusiasm for this within our community, and I’m very happy about the amount of organising that’s already started - many thanks to everyone involved in this.

As always, AoIR crucially depends on its members volunteering to move these efforts forward - that’s been the case with the work on our ethics guidelines almost since the Association started, and I think it’s the same with digital methods (and of course the two are closely interrelated). So as the informal working group that’s now coming together to discuss methods is developing, I do want us to think about how we might give this effort a more formal space within AoIR’s activities over the longer term. I don’t have a ready-made solution for this, but I would encourage those of you who are getting involved in this discussion, here and on Discord, to keep this question in the back of your minds as you go.

We have had general digital methods pre-conference workshops at our annual AoIR conferences for the past five years or so; these have usually been organised by various colleagues at the University of Amsterdam and Queensland University of Technology, and gone through the standard conference submissions process. At times, there have also been further workshops on specific methods, platforms, and questions. I hope that these will continue for as long as people find them useful, and I would encourage anyone with the relevant skills and interests to propose such workshops, as well as papers, panel sessions, roundtables, and fishbowls, for our conferences in this and future years (<hint> submissions for AoIR 2019 close on 1 March </hint>). We will also soon call for expressions of interest to host further AoIR Flashpoint Symposia, and some of these smaller, one-day events could also focus on digital methods questions. But perhaps there is also an opportunity here to make such workshops a more formal, standard part of our conferences and events, in the same way that our Doctoral Colloquium is.

In addition, of course, many of you have already highlighted the summer and winter schools, MOOCs, tools, code repositories, and other sources of information that you’ve found useful in coming to terms with various digital methods, tools, and data sources. If we can find volunteers from the working group that is now forming who are happy to commit some time to curating and maintaining this information, we might make this information available through the AoIR site - and perhaps we could even negotiate discounts for AoIR members with the providers of some of the fee-paying services in that list.

But perhaps those ideas aren’t everything, and there are other ways in which AoIR can support this effort - if you have other ideas, I’d genuinely like to hear them. We may not be able to support everything (and again, we are a volunteer-based organisation, so if you have a great idea please also get involved in making it happen), but as with the efforts of our Ethics Working Group we can at least provide the platform that AoIR has to help make your ideas more visible and connect those of you who can make them fly.

If you have any ideas for what we can do, and are willing to volunteer to make them happen, please feel to follow up here on the list, and/or email me at prez at aoir.org. I’ll also post this message to the Discord forum, and hopefully there will be some discussion there as well.

Thanks again for everyone’s enthusiasm for this topic - this really is AoIR at its best.

Axel Bruns
President, Association of Internet Researchers


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Prof Axel Bruns a.bruns at qut.edu.au - @snurb_dot_info
ARC Future Fellow, 2014-17 http://www.amazon.com/author/axel.bruns/
Professor, Media & Communication http://mappingonlinepublics.net/
QUT Digital Media Research Centre http://qut.edu.au/research/dmrc/
Creative Industries Faculty, Z6-503, KG http://snurb.info/
Queensland University of Technology +61 7 3138 5548
GPO Box 2434, Brisbane, Qld 4001, Australia CRICOS No.: 00213J