On October 10, CSISP hosted the launch of Noortje Marres’ new book Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics at the Centre for Creative Collaboration in London. The launch took the form of a discussion with Javier Lezaun (Oxford), Celia Lury (Warwick), Alex Wilkie (Goldsmiths) and was moderated by Monika Krause (Goldsmiths).
On October 26 and 27 CSISP hosted a second event on Tactics of Issue Mapping, which David Moats discusses in his workshop report below. The first day featured a series of presentations on the role of creative practice in connecting research and intervention in issue mapping, and audio recordings of these talks can be downloaded here: Part 1 and Part 2. The second day was dedicated to groupwork on a selected tactic of issue mapping, namely bias detection, about which you can read more here.
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“Issue Mapping combines social theory, computing, design and advocacy. If one of those elements isn’t there it doesn’t work” – Noortje Marres, workshop co-organiser… Continue reading
Science and Technology Studies has long concerned itself with a proliferation of “hybrids” (messy mixings of science and politics, nature and culture) but it seems that we now face a proliferation of methods and devices for studying them. Under various banners, from The Social Lives of Issues to Mapping Controversies, teams of social scientists, programmers and designers have developed a staggering array of technical tools for analysing, profiling, locating and visualising these issues, controversies and matters of concern. Many of the people who developed these tools were present at an exploratory workshop at Goldsmiths last week, the first of two planned for this year.… Continue reading
We are pleased to put online the next in our ‘The New in Social Research’ series, a recording of Evelyn Ruppert’s lecture titled ‘Doing the Transparent State: Methods and their Subjectifying Effects/Affects’ (Feb 28th).
Building on themes explored in the previous talk by Fuller and Harwood, Ruppert looked at the effects (and affects) of the UK government’s data ‘Transparency Agenda’, insisting on the generative capacities of this device. This includes the release of detailed data, via publically accessible, comparatively easy-to-use online platforms (e.g. government produced data apps), ranging from details of MPs expenses to itemised lists of departmental spending. This data, in turn, can be – and increasingly is – downloaded, manipulated and mediated by organisations and institutions, whether by journalists looking to produce eye catching visualisations , or companies hoping to unearth market value hidden in the relations between and amongst different data sets.… Continue reading