Liliana Bounegru: Recent Episodes
None
I have just completed a one-month fellowship in environmental humanities at the University of Potsdam. Together with two other fellows, Jonathan Gray and Simone Fehlinger, we participated in a three-day hackathon on Environmental Data, Media, and the Humanities, organised by the Potsdam Network for Digital Humanities and the Weather Reports research project. I co-facilitated a project on repurposing forest media, which explored what arts-based media repurposing techniques can bring to engaged research on ecological politics.
Below is more about the hackathon from the event page.
What can the Humanities learn from environmental data? This hackathon brings together researchers across disciplines to explore the unrealised potential of weather and climate data for the Digital Humanities, contributing to the emerging field of Environmental Digital Humanities.
Making sense of meteorological and climatological data is a pressing issue for the Humanities in the face of climate change. As global warming makes weather increasingly unpredictable and chaotic on a spatial and temporal scale that exceeds immediate comprehension, data provides one point of access to this new reality. At present, however, the digital tools which make climate change legible, for instance through visualisation, are only readily accessible to a group of scientific experts. Conversely, meteorologists and climatologists might themselves benefit from the Humanities in making sense of the increasingly large amounts of data and their consequences for humanity. Turning to the past, for instance, a Digital Humanities engagement with historical sources–combining environmental and data-driven approaches–might prove particularly fruitful.
Over 3 days, this hackathon then aims to open up meteorological and climatological data as well as other types of environmental data to a wider audience, to new readings and novel applications. Bringing together scholars, artists, coders, data managers, librarians, archivists, activists and designers, we will draw from established Digital Humanities methods and develop novel ones to face a number of challenges in smaller groups. Participants apply such methods as exploratory data analysis, mapping & GIS, text mining, topic modelling, sentiment analysis, network analysis, language modelling, data visualisation and so on. Possible challenges include the development of software prototypes, the conducting of digital analyses, the processing (cleaning, enrichment, etc.) of a data set, the design of a data model, the discussion of standards or ontologies or the testing of new workflows.
More can be found on the event page.
I’ll be part of a new 20 million Euro research project on forest restoration and adaptation, led by the European Forest Institute and funded under the European Union’s H2020 programme. Together with Jonathan Gray, I’ll co-lead a team at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London exploring how humanities-based digital methods can be used […]
Today The Data Journalism Handbook: Towards a Critical Data Practice (which I co-edited with Jonathan Gray) is published on Amsterdam University Press. It is published as part of a new book series on Digital Studies which is also being launched today. You can find the book here, including an open access version: http://bit.ly/data-journalism-handbook-2 The book […]
I’ve just published a new article titled “’We only have 12 years: YouTube and the IPCC report on global warming of 1.5ºC” in First Monday with Kari De Pryck (University of Geneva / University of Cambridge), Tommaso Venturini (CNRS) and Michele Mauri (DensityDesign Lab, Politecnico di Milano). The article is open access and available here. […]
I’ve recently been appointed to a new role as Lecturer in Digital Methods at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. The department is a world-leading centre for “critical inquiry with and about the digital”, with staff research interests in science and technology studies, internet studies, the politics of platforms and AI, global digital […]
I’ve recently started a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Oxford, where I’ll be affiliated with the Oxford Internet Institute and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. I’m joining a research team on the Misinformation, Science and Media project which is led by Philip Howard and Rasmus Nielsen. The project investigates the implications of misinformation campaigns online on the […]
Today sees the launch of A Field Guide to “Fake News and Other Information Disorders, a new free and open access resource to help students, journalists and researchers investigate misleading content, memes, trolling and other phenomena associated with recent debates around “fake news”. The field guide responds to an increasing demand for understanding the interplay […]
The first edition of The Data Journalism Handbook has been widely used and widely cited by students, practitioners and researchers alike, serving as both textbook and sourcebook for an emerging field. It has been translated into over 12 languages – including Arabic, Chinese, Czech, French, Georgian, Greek, Italian, Macedonian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian – […]
Last week I gave a talk at the ‘Politics, Fake News and the Post-Truth Era’ symposium organised by the Institute for Policy Research at the University of Bath. I presented some of the work that myself and several other colleagues from the Public Data Lab, a network of researchers working to facilitate research, engagement and public debate […]
Today saw the launch of A Field Guide to Fake News, a set of methodological recipes to explore the production, circulation and reception of fake news online. The field guide is the first project of the Public Data Lab, a new network of researchers working to facilitate research, engagement and public debate around the future of […]
Nieman Lab published today an article that Jonathan Gray, Tommaso Venturini and I wrote about fake news in the digital age. In this article we argue that fake news encapsulates key aspects of our digital environments and cultures and hence that it can be taken as an opportunity to learn not just about misinformation but, […]