NCRM Autumn School 2024 – The Foundations of Digital Research Methods: An Advanced Critical Introduction

Description:

The NCRM Autumn School 2024 is an in-person, intensive training event that will focus on digital research methods. The three-day event will provide attendees with an advanced critical introduction to five foundational aspects of digital research methods by leading experts in the field.

These five aspects are:

1. Code and algorithms as research methods; 

2. Digital datasets, their affordances and limits; 

3. Complexity, collaboration and heuristics for digital research; 

4. Prompting and interaction with AI systems;

5.  Open-source investigations and the critical imagination.   

The event will follow an opening dialogue-based session that will preview and contextualise the sessions to come as well as connect attendees and presenters.

Who the event is suitable for

Combining overviews of the state-of-the-art, worked through examples of significant research and hands-on exercises with different aspects of the digital methods covered that will build progressively over the three days, these sessions will provide a critical grounding in digital research methods for all of those seeking to develop their work as digital researchers and the contributions they can make through it. As such, it will be of particular interest to postgraduate and early-career researchers seeking to enter the digital field but will also be of interest more broadly to all those seeking to understand the potential and the limits of digital methods too.

With presenters drawn from across the social sciences and arts and humanities whose expertise intersects with data science, computational methods, digital archivism and critical investigative approaches to research, the Autumn School foregrounds interdisciplinarity and attendees are welcomed from all disciplines, fields and backgrounds, including those based outside academic institutions. A small number of bursaries will be available to support the unwaged/low waged/unfunded.

Aim of the event

It is a truism that we are all digital researchers now and there can be no question that the digital pervades contemporary research. Indeed, reflecting the extraordinarily rapid processes of ‘creative destruction’ that characterise innovation in the field of digital technology in which new digital services, tools and forms of data rise and fall in the space of a few years, as researchers we are all confronted with a bewildering swarm of new technical possibilities but with few resources at hand that situate these developments and guide us as to how we should take them up if at all.

In a context of this kind, it is very easy to fall back on endless narrowly technical ‘how to’ guides and associated technological fixes without posing critical conceptual and methodological questions as to why we should be pursuing particular avenues of digital inquiry and investigation in the first place.

The broad aim of this Autumn School is to provide researchers with resources that will enable them to step back from the constant disruptions of the digital, ask critical questions about where they want to get and what contributions they want to make through their research and, from there, develop their engagements with the digital.

While the Autumn School will introduce attendees to specific digital methods, tools and resources, that is not its primary focus. Rather, the focus is on helping attendees develop the kind of critical, creative and investigative mindset that will enable them to arrive at assessments of those methods, tools and resources for themselves and the uses to which they might usefully be put in the context of their research.

The complexity of the digital means we are pulled into collaborations with others at all turns through our engagements with it and this Autumn School will provide a means of negotiating the politics and practice of digital research in a clear-sighted, critical and, crucially, equitable way. 

Application process

Attendance to this course will be funded by University of Liverpool and NCRM. Successful candidates will need to secure travel and accommodation at their own expense for the three full days of the course. 

To apply for a place on this Autumn School, please download the application form using the link below and email it to: engage@liverpool.ac.uk

Deadline for the application is Friday, 6 September 2024 at 12:00.

Cost:

This is funded by University of Liverpool with NCRM support. Accommodation and travel will need to be provided by the successful candidates.

Website and registration:

https://www.ncrm.ac.uk/documents/ApplicationForm_AutumnSchool2024_DigitalMethods.docx

Region:

North West

Keywords:

Data Collection, Online Data Collection , Big data, Research Skills, Communication and Dissemination, Research Skills, Communication and Dissemination (other), Digital Humanities, Open-Source Investigation, Coding and algorithms, AI Systems

Related publications and presentations:

Data Collection
Online Data Collection
Big data
Research Skills, Communication and Dissemination
Research Skills, Communication and Dissemination (other)

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