[Air-L] Digital Methods Summer School '23 - Univ. Amsterdam

[rogers at govcom.org]

Digital Methods Summer School 2023

’Prompting and other algorithmic curiosities’

3-14 July 2023

New Media & Digital Culture
Media Studies
University of Amsterdam
Turfdraagsterpad 9
1012 XT Amsterdam
the Netherlands

Call for participation 

The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), Amsterdam, is holding its annual Summer School on ’Prompting and other algorithmic curiosities for knowing AI’. The format is that of a (social media and web) data sprint, with tutorials as well as hands-on work for telling stories with data. There is also a programme of keynote speakers including visual media scholar, Sabine Niederer, speaking on ‘prompt design'. The Summer School is intended for advanced Master's students, PhD candidates and motivated scholars who would like to work on (and complete) a digital methods project in an intensive workshop setting.

'Prompting and other algorithmic curiosities for knowing AI'

Algorithmic auditing and probing are methodologies to tease out discriminatory, offensive and other undesirable outputs of AI-driven systems and may lead at once to critiques of reinforcement and reification as well as to subsequent efforts at debiasing, retraining, patching, editing and other means to moderate the content. One aspect of the auditing that is less well understood is how best to trigger the systems to show how well thought through the safeguards are. Journalistic and scholarly work on probing Google’s autocompletion has been undertaken for years, yet more attention is paid to the sometimes shocking outputs than how to elicit them. ‘Prompting’ strategy (and ‘prompt design’) may be considered elicitation methods for learning the machine’s capacity for offence and other auditing interests. Or more dramatically perhaps, how to learn what lurks within the machine? The Digital Methods Summer School is dedicated to machine curiosity and its methods to make AI knowable.

At the Summer School there are the usual social media tool training tutorials for working on single and cross-platform analysis, but also continued attention to thinking through and proposing how to work critically with social media data, both from mainstream social media platforms as well as so-called alt tech.

Apart from the keynotes and the training tutorials, there are also empirical and conceptual projects that participants work on. Projects from the past Summer and Winter Schools include: Detecting Conspiratorial Hermeneutics via Words & Images, Mapping the Fringe on Telegram; Greenwashing, in_authenticity & protest; Searching constructive/authentic posts in media comment sections, Mapping deepfakes with digital methods and visual analytics, “Go back to plebbit”: Mapping the platform antagonism between 4chan and Reddit, Profiling Bolsobots Networks, Infodemic cross-platform analysis, Post-Trump Information Ecology, Streams of Conspirational Folklore, and FilterTube: Investigating echo chambers, filter bubbles and polarization on YouTube. The most recent school had some of the following projects: Climate imaginaries; Repurposing Google Ads; What is a meme, technically speaking?; Tracing the genealogy and change of TikTok audio memes; Google Autocomplete: Racist results still?; and OK Boomer on Twitter.

Summer School ’23 organisers: Richard Rogers, Kamila Koronska and Guillen Torres, Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. Application information at https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/bin/edit/Dmi/SummerSchool2023. 

Best regards
Richard Rogers
Media Studies
University of Amsterdam