Digital Methods Winter School 2013 and Mini-Conference

The 2013 Digital Methods Winter School is devoted to emerging alternatives to big data. The Barcamp, Hackathon, Hack Day, Edit-a-thon, Data Sprint, Code Fest, Open Data Day, Hack the Government, and other workshop formats are sometimes thought of as "quick and dirty." The work is exploratory, only the first step, outputting indicators at most, before the serious research begins. However, these new formats also may be viewed as alternative infrastructures as well as approaches to big data in the sense of not only the equipment and logistics involved (hit and run) but also the research set-up and protocols, which may be referred to as "short-form method." The 2013 Digital Methods Winter School is dedicated to the outcomes and critiques of short-form method, and is also reflexive in that it includes a data sprint, where we focus on one aspect of the debate about short- vs. long-form method: data capture. To begin, at the Winter School the results of a data sprint from a week earlier (on counter-Jihadists) will be presented, including a specific short-form method for issue mapping. One outcome of the Winter School would be a comparison of short-from methods for their capacity to fit the various workshop formats (barcamp, sprint, etc.), with the question of what may be achieved in shorter (and shorter) time frames. We also will explore a variety of objects of study for sprints, including data donations, where one offers particular data sets for abbreviated analysis.

(Source: Digital Methods event site)