Session 1 – Google Domination
René König is a sociologist researching at Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Together with Michael Nentwich he recently published the book ‘Cyberscience 2.0: Research in the Age of Digital Social Networks’ at Campus (Frankfurt a.M./New York) which analyzes transformation processes in academia triggered by Web 2.0. Currently, König works on his PhD thesis, focusing on online search behavior in the context of scientific controversies. He is a co-organizer of the Society of the Query conference and he is editing the upcoming related reader with Miriam Rasch.
Siva Vaidhyanathan is a cultural historian and media scholar, and is currently the Robertson Professor in Media Studies at the University of Virginia. From 1999 through the summer of 2007 he worked in the Department of Culture and Communication at New York University. Vaidhyanathan is a frequent contributor on media and cultural issues in various periodicals including the Chronicle of Higher Education, New York Times Magazine, The Nation, and Salon.com, and he maintains a blog, www.googlizationofeverything.com. He is a frequentcontributortoNationalPublicRadio and to MSNBC.COM and has appeared in a segment of ‘The Daily Show’ with Jon Stewart. Vaidhyanathan is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Institute for the Future of the Book. In 2011 he was appointed chair of UVA’s Department of Media Studies.
Astrid Mager is a scholar in Science and Technology Studies with a particular interest in Internet technologies and socio-political developments. From 2004-2009 Astrid Mager worked as a research collaborator at the Department of Social Studies of Science, mainly on the project ‘Virtually Informed. The Internet in the medical field’ (FWF). She was also a lecturer at the Department of Social Studies of Science and Nursing Sciences from 2005 to 2010. From 2010 to 2012 she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the HUMlab, Umeå University, in Sweden and investigated search engines and algorithmic ideologies. Since 2012 she has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the ITA, leading the project on ‘Glocal Search. Search technology at the intersection of global capitalism and local socio-political cultures’ (OeNB). She occasionally teaches at the Department of Social Studies of Science as an external lecturer. Her research is concerned with the Internet and society, search engine policies, algorithms and aspects of privacy, critical theory, as well as digital methods against the background of science and technology studies and technology assessment.
Dr. Dirk Lewandowski is a professor of information research and information retrieval at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. Prior to that, he worked as an independent consultant and as a part-time lecturer at the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf. His research interests are Web Information Retrieval and users’ interaction with Web search engines.
Session 2 – Search Across the Border
Steven Pemberton is a researcher at The Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI) in Amsterdam. The focus of his research is on interaction and how the underlying software architecture can support users. Involved with the Web since the beginning, he organized two workshops at the first Web Conference in 1994, and chaired the first W3C Style Sheets and Internationalization workshops. He now chairs XHTML2 and leads the W3C Forms Activities. He is co-author of many current web technologies, including HTML4, CSS, XHTML, XForms and RDFa. He speaks and writes regularly on the effects of technology design, and for a while had a regular column on Teleac’s science radio program Teleskoop.
Thomas Petzold, Ph.D., is a professor of media management at HMKW – University of Applied Sciences for Media, Communication and Economics, Berlin, Germany. He worked previously as a research fellow with the Social Science Research Center Berlin, Germany, and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, Brisbane, Australia. His work is concerned with innovation capacities of media and communication caused by technological and social change. In particular, he looks at how computational innovation together with social innovation affect people’s lives.
Dr. Min Jiang is Assistant Professor of Communication at UNC Charlotte and an affiliate researcher at the Center for Global Communication Studies, University of Pennsylvania. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the areas of mass communication, new media technology, global media and research methods. A recipient of several research grants, she was the first Research Fellow at UNC Charlotte’s Center for Humanities, Technology, and Science, a faculty member of the 2009 Annenberg-Oxford Summer Institute and a finalist in 2009 Knight News Challenge. Jiang received her Ph.D. in Communication from Purdue University in 2007. Her dissertation focuses on Chinese government networks, authoritarian deliberation, and civic/political participation on Chinese Internet. Prior to pursuing her doctor’s degree in the U.S., Jiang worked as an international news journalist/editor for BTV and CCTV as well as assistant to director for Kill Bill I in her native country China.
Payal Arora is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communication. Her expertise lies in social informatics, digital leisure, new media spaces/cultures, edutainment and IT for international development. She has research experience in both the private and public sector on award-winning and grant-funded projects including the Kellogg sponsored speech-recognition literacy software for Hispanic immigrant youth in New York, the World Bank Development MarketPlace and HP funded project on karaoke edutainment television content in rural India and the National Health Foundation grant on the impact of technologically-mediated arts experiences on mental health post 9/11. She earned her doctorate in Language, Literacy and Technology from Columbia University, Teachers College in New York, a Master’s degree in International Policy from Harvard University, and a Teaching Certificate from the University of Cambridge.
Session 3 – The Art of Search
Renée Ridgway is an artist, free-lance curator, writer and educator based in Amsterdam. Her current research merges artistic and curatorial practice with digital economies in regard to online remuneration along with investigating the conceptual as well as technological implications of ‘search’. She is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA) and Piet Zwart Institute(MA) and has exhibited widely in the Netherlands and internationally. (http://reneeridgway.net) Ridgway is co-initiator and contributor to n.e.w.s. (http://northeastwestsouth.net), a collective online platform for the analysis and development of art-related activities. Presently she curates and facilitates ‘Welcome to Econotopia – commons of the contemporary’, masters curriculum that addresses spaces of transgression, ranging from institutions of culture to contemporary hubs of spectacle to the internet. (http://dutchartinstitute.eu)
Rebecca Lieberman is a interdisciplinary artist and designer based in Brooklyn, New York. She works across a range of disciplines and materials including sculptures, videos, performances, social experiments, and more recently, websites and other net-based art. Rebecca earned her B.A. from the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She has shown her work at Anthony Greaney Gallery in Boston, the Harvard Museum of Natural History, The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, and Galerie der HfK in Bremen. She was recently named a 2013-2014 Public Access Design Fellow at the Center for Urban Pedagogy in New York City.
Anja Groten is an independent designer and researcher based in Amsterdam. She graduated from the Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam in 2011. Ever since she investigated the possibilities of an agonistic design practice (‘An Agreement to Disagreement – Why Designers need to Design Conflict’, June 2011). Anja has been involved in projects including ‘De Punt’, ‘Our Autonomous Life?’, the ‘SwapUpShop’, ‘The Invisible Operators’, ‘Breit – Kollektives Ausbreiten’ and ‘Barmbek.tv’. Exploring collective modes of production she designs printed matter such as books and posters as well as visual identities, film titles and websites.
Rosa Menkman – Every technology possesses its own inherent accidents. Rosa Menkman is a Dutch artist/theorist who focuses on visual artifacts created by accidents in both analogue and digital media. The visuals she makes are the result of glitches, compressions, feedback and other forms of noise. Although many people perceive these accidents as negative experiences, Menkman emphasizes their positive consequences. By combining both her practical as well as her academic background, Menkman merges her abstract pieces within a grand theory artifacts. Besides the creation of a formal “Vernacular of File Formats”, within her static work, she also created work in her Acousmatic Videoscapes. In these Videoscapes she strives to connect both sound and video artifacts conceptually, technically and sometimes narratively. In 2011 Rosa wrote the Glitch Moment/um, a book on the exploitation and popularization of glitch artifacts (published by the Institute of Network Cultures), organized the GLI.TC/H festivals in both Chicago and Amsterdam and co-curated the Aesthetics symposium of Transmediale 2012. Besides this, Rosa Menkman is pursuing a PhD at Goldsmiths, London under the supervision of Matthew Fuller and Geert Lovink.
Isabelle Massu – ‘Sometimes ideas, like men, jump up and say ‘hello’. They introduce themselves, these ideas, with words. Are they words? These ideas speak so strangely.’
Session 4 – Reflections on Search
Geert Lovink, founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, is a Dutch-Australian media theorist and critic. He holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne and in 2003 was at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland. In 2004 Lovink was appointed as Research Professor at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and Associate Professor at University of Amsterdam. He is the founder of Internet projects such as nettime and fibreculture. In 2005-06 he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin Institute for Advanced Study where he finished his third volume on critical Internet culture, Zero Comments (2007). Since then he published the book Networks Without a Cause (2012), which has been translated into German and Italian. Other books titles by Geert Lovink are The Art of Free Cooperation (2007), The Principle of Notworking (2005), and My First Recession (2003).
Kylie Jarrett is a lecturer in Multimedia at the Centre for Media Studies at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, responsible for teaching modules on digital media. Her research interest is critical analysis of commercial digital media, in particular those emerging forms referred to as Web 2.0. Her current research is focussed on applying feminist labour theories in understanding consumer labour in digital media contexts. She has recently published with colleagues a study of Google and the culture of search, and she has also published on YouTube and eBay. Her doctoral study investigated the discourse of consumer empowerment in the field of e-commerce, using semiotics and sociolinguistics to explore this representation.
Antoinette Rouvroy, Doctor of Laws of the European University Institute (Florence), is research associate at the Belgian FRS – FNRS (National Fund for Scientific Research) and lecturer and senior researcher at the Information Technology and Law Research Centre (CRID) of the University of Namur, Belgium. She is particularly interested in the mechanisms of mutual production between sciences and technologies and cultural, political, economic and legal frameworks. Her doctoral research at the European University Institute of Florence (Human Genes and Neoliberal Governance: A Foucauldian Critique. Abingdon and New York, Routledge-Cavendish, 2008, looked at the knowledge-power relations in the post-genomic era. Her current interdisciplinary research interests revolve around the ethical, legal and political challenges raised by the new information, communication and surveillance technologies (biometrics, RFIDs, ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence, persuasive technologies, …) and their convergence.
Anton Tantner is lecturer at the Department of History at Universität Wien. His research interests include the history of intelligence/registry offices in Europe, house numbering, and new media in historical sciences. In 2004 he defended a dissertation about the history of the census and house numbering in the Habsburg monarchy that was published in 2007 as Ordnung der Häuser, Beschreibung der Seelen. Hausnummerierung und Seelenkonskription in der Habsburger-monarchie (=Wiener Schriften zur Geschichte der Neuzeit; 4). Innsbruck/Wien/Bozen: Studienverlag, 2007.
Interview Maarten Sprenger (NL)
Maarten Sprenger is art educator and also focused on reliable and readable (Dutch) information for children. Since 2002 he has worked in primary education, as a teacher and as an entrepreneur. Formerly he has been a professor at the Rietveld Academy and he organized art projects (television and new media). Maarten Sprenger is the author of a recently published book for children and adults about searching for valuable information online (Slim zoeken op internet). He has extended experience in teaching about online search and also maintains a search engine especially for children: 8-12.info. He will be talking about his recent projects with Geert Lovink.
Book Launch Ippolita / Karlessi (IT)
Ippolita is an international collective for convivial research and writings. Investigations and workshop topics include: (reality) hacking, free software and philosophy and anthropology of technologies. As a heteronomous identity, Ippolita published ‘Open Is Not Free’ (2005, it); ‘The Dark Side of Google’ (2007; it-fr-es-en); ‘In the Facebook Aquarium: The Resistible Rise of Anarcho-Capitalism (2012; it-es-fr). Ippolita’s independent server provides their copyleft works, exploring the cutting edge ‘technologies of domination’ with their social effects. Forthcoming project: Rites and Beliefs in Tech Everyday Practices. www.ippolita.net & info@ippolita.net
Session 5 – Search in Context
Jelte Timmer is a Junior Researcher and focuses on the subjects of captology in online services and e-government security. Jelte started his studies at Utrecht University doing Social Psychology, from there he went on to study Arts policy and management and finally New Media and Digital Culture. He has worked with Mediamatic in Amsterdam and was one of the founding members of the Utrecht medialab called SETUP. He combines the insights derived from psychology and cultural practices to reflect on societal-technological developments.
Simon Knight‘s research focuses on student’s epistemic practices in information seeking. Following teaching high school philosophy and psychology, he completed his MA in philosophy of education exploring the implications of the ‘extended mind’ thesis for our understanding of knowledge and its assessment. That work particularly focussed on the Danish use of internet in examinations, asking the question ‘Is Wikipedia a part of my extended mind?’ He then completed an MPhil in Educational research, focussing on the epistemic dialogue children used in collaborative information seeking tasks. His PhD work at the UK’s Open University continues this line of research, applying learning analytic techniques to the exploration of epistemic dialogue and commitments in collaborative information seeking. He tweets @sjgknight and blogs.
Martin Feuz is a PhD researcher at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London. His research focuses on exploratory search interactions and how such interactions can be meaningfully supported.
Dr. Sanne Koevoets was a Marie Curie research fellow at the Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis in Ljubljana (Slovenia), defended her PhD thesis at Utrecht University in 2013, and currently teaches philosophy and new media studies at Leiden University College in The Hague. In her research she focuses on the gendered dynamics of the library in the network society, with which she has engaged through the figure of the female librarian and the trope of the labyrinth.
Session 6 – The Filter Bubble Show
Miriam Rasch started working as a publication manager at the Institute of Network Cultures in June 2012. She holds a masters degree in Literary Studies (2002) and Philosophy (2005). Since graduating she worked as a (web) editor and from 2008 on as a programmer for the public lectures department at Utrecht University, Studium Generale, organizing events and taking care of digital broadcasts and online representation. Next to that she worked as a lecturer for Liberal Arts and Sciences, and is teaching philosophy and media theory at the Media, Information and Communication department. She writes book reviews and guest posts for different websites and magazines; her personal blog can be found on miriamrasch.nl.
Erik Borra is PhD candidate and lecturer at the University of Amsterdam’s M.A. program in New Media. Erik is also the lead programmer for the Digital Methods Initiative and is currently involved in the European research project ‘Electronic Maps to Assist Public Science’ (EMAPS). Erik’s employment as a programmer is the continuation of his work for Govcom.org, a foundation dedicated to creating and hosting political Web tools. This work consists of mapping issue networks on the Web by using the Issue Crawler software, as well as devising new tools such as the Issue Feed (beta), Issue Scraper – which makes comparative analyses of webspheres (e.g. news spheres and blogospheres), a surfer pathway browser, and tag ecology visualizers. Together with artists and designers Erik worked on projects such as the WEX machine – a physical website recursively connecting the on- and the offline, iTea – an interactive RFID installation designed as a coffee table, tapemixer.com – a playlist recommendation mash-up between YouTube and Last.fm, and the IP-browser – an alternative browsing experience that foregrounds the Web’s machine habitat and returns the user back to the basics of orderly Web browsing. Erik earned his BSc and MSc in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Amsterdam.
Noortje Marres joined the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths in March 2011. Before that she was a Research Fellow in Science & Technology Studies at the University of Oxford, and a Marie Curie Fellow in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths. She studied sociology and philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, and did her doctoral research at that same university and at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation, École des Mines, Paris. Noortje was part of the team that built the Issuecrawler, an online platform for the location and analysis of issue-networks, and is currently developing Issue Mapping Online. She convenes the MA/MSc Digital Sociology and is Director of the interdisciplinary research centre CSISP(Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process).
Pascal Jürgens is a doctoral candidate at the Institute for Communication at University of Mainz, Germany. Prior to obtaining an MA in the classic social scientific field of mass communication, he worked as a radio journalist. His research interests include political communication online, models of opinion dynamics, network analysis of social behavior, computational methods for content analysis and time series analysis in networked communication. Previous research involved (among other subjects) the German electronic petition system, models of opinion dynamics with back-channels, the use of twitter during the German general election, event mapping through linguistic time series analyses and topic cycles in social media.
Engin Bozdag is a PhD candidate in the Values and Technology Department (Section of Philosophy) at the Delft University of Technology. He is the winner of NWO’s Mozaiek 2010 grant with his research proposal ‘Lifting the fog from the cloud, a value-sensitive design for Cloud Computing’. His research will focus on ethical implications of personalization in cloud services. Engin completed both his MSc and BSc degrees in Computer Science, specializing in web based applications (Delft, 2008). Before joining TU Delft as a PhD student, he was working as a search quality associate in Google.