Knowledge Theory and Method

Panel Abstract: Digital Experiments in the Making

Digital Experiments in the Making: Methods, Tools, and Platforms in the Infrastructuring of STS Digital infrastructures are ubiquitous in the technosciences and in everyday life, and have become crucial objects of analysis for diverse STS researchers and their arrays of approaches. Digital...Read more

Doing Data Together: Intervening In Urban Planning With Digital Methods

One year ago researchers from TANTLab and employees from GEHL architects decided on pursuing an experiment together. Driven by a shared interest in bringing social issues into the technical paradigm of ‘the smart city’ we set ourselves the task of making the diversity of Copenhagen’s social...Read more

The Privatization Of Health-Related Online Data And Its Methodological And Ethical Implications

Whereas the availability and relative ease with which health-related online information can be provided, collected, and re-used have led to important debates regarding the meaning of informed consent in scientific research, less attention has been paid thus far to platform owners’ claims to...Read more

Knowing Infrastructure: Critically Engaging The Wayback Machine As Source For STS Research

From documenting human rights abuses to studying online advertising, web archives are increasingly positioned as critical resources for a broad range of scholarly Internet research agendas. And yet, web archives as research infrastructures remain relatively understudied. In this paper we reflect...Read more

Locating And Timing Matters Of Attention Through Wikipedia: Technical, Epistemological And Political Considerations

Wikipedia has become a ubiquitous digital knowledge infrastructure and thereby a locus for politics by other means. As the primary online reference, it is central in our everyday life digital information ecosystem. Because of its uniqueness, it constitutes not only an essential object of study,...Read more

Inhabiting The Algorithm. The Making Of A Smartphone App To Explore How People Became Habituated To Algorithmic Profiling And Recommendation Systems

This paper presents some findings of the interdisciplinary project ‘Algorithmic Identities.’ This project was devised to study how people feel, react and thematise the extraction of digital data and algorithmic inferences about their personhoods. Considering the proprietary, opaque and...Read more

Ethical Challenges When Doing Ethnographic Research With Hard-To-Reach Online Communities

With the emergence of cryptomarkets less than a decade ago, the darknet – a subset of the internet which requires anonymizing software to get access to its hidden services – has created unprecedented opportunities for conducting research on hard-to-reach communities often infringing criminal law...Read more

Transforming Code Into Voice: Toward A Material Semiotic Critical Code Studies Of Weizenbaum’s ELIZA Program

This paper takes up an exploration of the use of critical code studies in STS. I argue that STS methods call for a different use of critical code studies from the ways in which it has been primarily used in the digital humanities and literary code studies (Marino, 2014). Instead, I propose...Read more

Platforms For Experimental Collaborative Ethnography And STS

This presentation will share the history, purpose and projects of the Platform for Experimental, Collaborative Ethnography (PECE, pronounced “peace”), open source software designed with STS perspective. While originally designed to provide digital workspace for the Asthma Files (a cluster of...Read more

Reflexive Digital Methods In The Social Sciences And Humanities - Beyond ‘Blind’ Users And ‘Blind’ Critics

At present we can observe that on the one hand 'blind' users of digital methods are trained at universities and on the other hand 'blind' critics of these methods, mostly with a humanities or social science background. However, for innovations in the field of method development, an...Read more

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