Innovative Methods Seminar Series
Published: 7 December 2023
During our virtual 50-minute workshops, our speakers share their digital methodology/methods and the project in which the methodology was applied or developed, with a particular focus on the innovative aspects of that methodology, including benefits, challenges, ethical dimensions, challenges, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7ByO2Ev5FY
SEMINAR: Data-driven Investigations – The Algorithmic Audit
3 November, 2023
How do we systematically investigate technology, and where do we even start? Leon Yin, data journalist at Bloomberg, will share how to approach data-driven investigations by walking through several case studies along with the tools and decisions that his team made to hold technology and its creators accountable.
About our speaker:
Leon Yin is an award-winning data journalist at Bloomberg. He builds datasets and develops methods to investigate the social impacts of technology. He writes Inspect Element: a practitioner's guide to auditing algorithms and hypothesis-driven investigations. His work has been cited by legislators, the academy, and popular media. In 2022, he received a Gerald Loeb Award for the series "Amazon's Advantage". Leon got his start in news at The Markup, and his start in research writing Fortran scripts at NASA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1ZdvP2EJ4Y
SEMINAR: Participatory Investigations - Workers as Futurist
1 December, 2023
The Worker as Futurist project supports rank-and-file Amazon workers to write and publish short, specualtive fiction stories about “the world after Amazon.” That corporation not only dominates online retail and web services, it actively seeks to “disrupt” sectors from health care to groceries, from film and television to logistics and robotics, animated by its executives' science fiction-fuelled dreams. But workers pay the price, and have no say in the future they are made to build, which for most will be a dystopia. Around the world, workers are rising up against Amazon and similar corporations, but what kind of future do workers want?
About our speaker:
Max Haiven is a writer and teacher and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination. His most recent books are Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022), Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020) and Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018). Haiven is editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press. He teaches at Lakehead University, where he directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfyjBt0gK_c
SEMINAR: Using Games as/for Research
23 February, 2024
We all play games, whether consciously for entertainment and education, or in interacting with digital systems that increasingly ‘gamify’ modern society, hinting towards an unseen future ‘metaverse’. However, how may we further use video games and simulations as research tools? UofGGamesLab runs or hosts different cross-college projects promoting research into games themselves, but also into finding new ways of translating research and data into game form, or using games as innovative research tools. Whether modelling space missions or gaming the effects of generative AI, what are some possibilities and challenges posed by games? Equally, how may our uses of ‘history’ in such games critically change our ways of approaching future simulations?
About our speaker:
Dr Timothy Noël Peacock is a Lecturer in History and War Studies and Co-Director/founder of the University of Glasgow Games and Gaming Lab (UofGGamesLab). He leads up to 35 researchers, interns and programmers as Principal Investigator for funded research and educational cross-disciplinary innovation projects. His research ranges across nuclear history, space history/security, games and wargaming, to AI and politics, including the socio-political and military impacts of new technologies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVNWireBXzg
SEMINAR: Using Games as/for Research
15 March, 2024
Relief Maps are a methodological model for studying social inequalities from an intersectionality perspective, in three dimensions: the social dimension (positions and identities of gender, social class, ethnicity, age, etc.), geography (places in daily life) and psychology (effects on emotions). Within the framework of INTERMAPS project, a new digital open-access and free tool has been developed: https://reliefmaps.upf.edu/. It includes a visual way of collecting data on intersectional positions, based on the apple metaphor, and a new interactive model for the Relief Maps. Moreover, it offers a GIS tool designed to combine textual narratives, points and areas with geographic coordinates and places with unknown or more vague locations to capture the complex qualities of place and scale in relation to the lived experience of intersectional inequalities.
About our speaker
Maria Rodó-Zárate is professor at the Political and Social Sciences Department. She is graduated in Political Sciences (UAB), Master in Women, Gender and Citizenship Studies (UB) and PhD in Geography (UAB). Her research focuses on the study of social inequalities from an intersectional, spatial and emotional perspective applied to issues such as the right to the city, gender-based violence or LGBTI-phobia. She is interested in the spatial articulations among social categories such as gender, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age or (dis)ability, and their effects on lived experience. She is currently leading the project INTERMAPS on social inequalities in everyday life and coordinates the research on the effects of anti-gender discourses within the RESIST project. She is the coordinator of the Research Group on Gender and Inequalities (GRETA) at the Political and Social Sciences Department at UPF.
First published: 7 December 2023