Last-minute logistical changes due to renovations in the original location notwithstanding, the April 2010 workshop of the Maastricht Virtual Knowledge Studio didn't leave a single seat unoccupied. 22 people with various disciplinary and institutional backgrounds gathered to discuss a variety of issues related to digitization and its impacts on the sciences and the arts.

The first session was primarily dedicated to the influence of digitization on scientific practice. Matthijs Kouw of the Maastricht Virtual Knowledge Studio talked about epistemic shifts in modeling practice conducted in the field of hydrology, and outlined the impact of contemporary digital means for producing knowledge about hydrological phenomena. Sarah de Rijcke of the Virtual Knowledge Studio's HQ in Amsterdam talked about digital visualizations of the human brain. Drawing on her recently defended PhD dissertation, Sarah presented not only a constructivist account of cerebral imaging, but also discussed the ways in which such practices are shaped and co-constructed by digital technologies. The final presentation of the first session was given by Peter Peters (Maastricht University, Hogeschool Zuyd) and Ruth Benschop (Hogeschool Zuyd), who presented their work on artistic research by talking about some of the academic and intellectual motivations for setting up this type of research, but also addressed organizational dimensions of such research.

During the second session, more attention was devoted to the perspective of two designers of the Jan van Eyck Academy. Stijn Verhoeff presented his work on digitization, which taps into the aesthetic potential of error induced by the process of visualization. Stijn's presentation thus became a powerful and layered reading of the emptiness and absence thematized in his work based on books about arctic exploration. Kim de Groot presented her work on the networked image, and presented various configurations and reconfigurations of 'the image' as facilitated and enabled by digital technologies. Klaas Kuitenbrouwer (Virtueel Platform) focused on the need for critical interpretations of artistic and theoretical appropriations of new technologies, and provided a more normative extension of the two previous presentations.

The final session featured Angelo Vermeulen, who presented his work as an artist that also expressed his background in ecological and biological research. Angelo's work involves artistic expressions complemented by scientific knowledge and techniques, which provides a platform for addressing a variety of topics in an inspiring and empowering manner. Caroline Nevejan of the Technical University of Delft subsequently talked about virtual platforms for collaborations between artists and scientists, but also provided a more realistic picture of such platforms by devoting attention to the various things that may go wrong or proceed unexpectedly in such contexts.

All in all, the workshop was an event during which a productive chemistry between participants and speakers created an atmosphere of exchange and inspiration. The workshop concluded on a high note after a crescendo that resulted in further lively discussions over drinks, and leaves much to be said for organizing a future event along similar lines.

Links:

Virtual Knowledge Studio

Maastricht Virtual Knowledge Studio

Hogeschool Zuyd

Jan van Eyck Academy

Virtueel Platform

Angelo Vermeulen

Being-here.net

 

What are the artistic dimensions of scientific practice? What are the scientific dimensions of art? And how do digital technologies affect interactions between science and art?

On April 14th 2010, the Virtual Knowledge Studio in Maastricht will organize a workshop on the role of digital technologies in interactions between science and art: "The Digital Making of Art and Science".

The workshop will focus on the myriad of relationships between science, art, and digitization. Rather than rigidly differentiating or demarcating fields, disciplines and traditions, the workshop takes as its starting point the passages between science, art, and digitization to study how they are produced in concert with each other.

Of key importance is the role of digitization and digital technologies in fostering the intertwining of science and art. Through this workshop, the Maastricht Virtual Knowledge Studio aims to enhance the understanding of the evocative power of digital technologies. The latter cannot simply be celebrated as emancipatory digital devices, but rather should be understood against the backdrop of technological, institutional, political, economic, and cultural strata that are responsible for the investments that flow through these technologies.

The workshop aims to address the following questions:
- What differences are introduced by digital technologies in art and science?
- What are the political dimensions of digitization?
- To what extent and how do digital technologies straddle discovery and manipulation?
- What interfaces between art and science can be distinguished?
- How are these interfaces affected by digitization?
- Why is it important to think through and establish such interfaces, given the influence of digitization?

Confirmed speakers are Matthijs Kouw (Maastricht University, Virtual Knowledge Studio), Sarah de Rijcke (Virtual Knowledge Studio), Peter Peters (Maastricht University, Hogeschool Zuyd), Angelo Vermeulen, Stijn Verhoeff (Jan van Eyck Academy), Kim de Groot (Jan van Eyck Academy), Caroline Nevejan, and Klaas Kuitenbrouwer (Virtueel Platform).

The workshop will take place on the Grote Gracht 80-82 in Maastricht, the Netherlands. The first presentations will start at 11:00 am and the final discussion will end around 5 pm.

If you would like to participate, please send an e-mail to José Cornips (j.cornips@maastrichtuniversity.nl) before March 26th 2010. Space is limited.

Further information on the workshop can be downloaded here.

Sally Wyatt will give a lecture on October 12th at 5:30pm at the Glaspaleis in Heerlen entitled "Colonialism in the New Knowledge Economy". The lecture is part of a series of three lectures on the Internet, and will feature additional lectures by prof. dr. Peter Sloep and drs. Isolde Sprenkels.

More information can be found on the following URL:
http://www.sgparkstad.nl/

Virtual Knowledge Studio, 3-month Postdoctoral Fellowship, KNAW

Applications are invited for three-month fellowships within the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences (VKS) for Spring 2010. The fellowship is designed for junior scholars who have recently received their PhDs in order to provide the following: experience of working within an interdisciplinary research group, an opportunity to prepare material for publication and to develop new research ideas. Deadline for applications is 15 November 2009.

Please find more information on the VKS website:

http://www.virtualknowledgestudio.nl/opportunities.php

The weblog of the 'Urban Laboratories: towards an STS of the Built Environment' workshop to take place on 5 and 6 November at Maastricht University is now online. Please see: http://urbanlaboratories.wordpress.com.

International workshop; October 6- 9, 2009 in Amsterdam at the KNAW, Trippenhuis

Organized by the Science System Assessment group at the Rathenau Institute of the KNAW in collaboration with the Virtual Knowledge Studio (KNAW) and The Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center (Indiana University).

Deadlines: Submission of an abstract (max. 500 words) for presentation or poster by June 30, 2009.

Notification of acceptance by August 31, 2009.
Please register before September 15, 2009.

For more information, please click here.

Thursday 5 and Friday 6 November 2009
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, NL

Financial support by the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) and the Netherlands Graduate Research School of Science, Technology and Modern Culture (WTMC)

Theme and Focus

It is crucial to analyse cities holistically as ensembles of technologies, infrastructures, buildings, institutions and the actors who design, manage and inhabit them as no single discipline can effectively tackle the enormous challenges cities currently face. The emerging field of socio-technical studies of architecture and urbanism is well equipped for such a task. However, as Moore and Karvonen observe, "there has been little emphasis in STS scholarship to date on the design of the built environment" (2008, 29). This workshop provides much-needed coordination between scholars in this field and an opportunity to develop an active research strategy that avoids redundancies and identifies potentials for synergies and future collaborations.

Conceptually and theoretically, the workshop follows a recent argument by Collier, Lakoff and Rabinow (2006) in highlighting the relevance of the laboratory concept for the human sciences and proposes to analyse the urban built environment as an assemblage of local knowledge claims, collaborations and emergent interactions. This has little to do with the self-representation of many laboratories as being involved in rigorous experimentation through the employment of controllable observation techniques, but instead highlights - following a veritable tradition in STS - the contingent cultural and institutional dimensions of knowledge production. Such a shift allows for a more ethnographic investigation of laboratory dynamics and
creates awareness of the heterogeneity of urban laboratories: besides academic research institutions, it might also be productive to investigate policy think tanks, planning departments, economic development agencies, architectural firms and creative clusters as urban laboratories. In taking the well-established trope of the laboratory as starting-point and in applying it to cities - in a world characterized by increasing urbanization - the workshop results will offer inspiration to the STS community at large. Also, by actively engaging with research developments in the fields of urban studies, architectural sociology and design theory, the workshop will generate a process of mutual learning that is to be of lasting value for all disciplines involved.

Despite increasing references to the notion of laboratory in specific urban development and policy projects, sustained research on the role of these and other laboratories: in shaping and transforming our cities is almost absent. This seems to reflect a broader trend in STS: after foundational work in the 1970s and 1980s that investigated the socio-cultural and technical context of knowledge production, this once active field of laboratory studies is now rather neglected (Kohler 2008) and Karin Knorr Cetina's hope in a 1995 review essay that laboratory studies could be further extended by investigating "processes of laboratorization" (163) in a variety of settings has hardly been realized. This workshop aims to contribute to this extension by revisiting the theoretical notion of laboratory and by investigating the ways in which this notion can be productively put to work in our analysis of the urban built environment. Three dimensions seem central in this regard and in need of further research.

Dimension 1: laboratory studies has promoted a thoroughgoing contextualization of science by
emphasizing the interests, techniques, materials and discourses involved in the stabilization of supposedly neutral scientific facts. What are, in Ian Hacking's (1992) terminology, the relevant ideas, things and marks shaping contemporary urban laboratories? This is largely a descriptive interest, but - despite many years of research on urban governance from a number of
disciplinary perspectives - we still know very little of the actual dynamics involved in the emergence and reproduction of urban laboratories. Research, however, needs to avoid the internalist bias of early laboratory studies and should pay explicit attention to communication between urban laboratories and the rise of regional and transnational networks of expertise (Dierig, Lachmund and Mendelsohn 2003). How do facts emerge and circulate in and through these networks of expertise?

Dimension 2: historians of laboratories have increasingly paid attention to the heterogeneity of
laboratories: whereas the twentieth-century modern laboratory was seen as 'set apart' from the surrounding natural and social world (an idealistic representation effectively deconstructed by laboratory studies), earlier and other laboratories often operated with less rigid distinctions and, for example, effectively meshed scientific research with artisanal and commercial work (Klein 2008). A similar sensitivity to the variety of laboratories in contemporary urban environments is still lacking. What are the similarities and differences, for example, between the many policy think tanks, creative incubators or planning agencies currently active? Can one understand all these laboratories as 'centres of calculation', as Latour (1987) would have it, or should one instead understand these institutions as tools of reconfiguration that 'upgrade' the natural and social order (Knorr Cetina 1992)? This second dimension is related to the first, but zooms in on questions of method i.e. the ways in which features of urban life become objects of laboratory research and manipulation. In the case of research on and in the city in particular, there seems to be a constitutive tension between laboratory and fieldwork science that needs to be addressed (Gieryn 2006). Through the use of which methods and in what ways do the various urban laboratories construct and manipulate local objects of research?

Dimension 3: also countering the internalist bias of early laboratory studies, there is a need to investigate the complex and shifting relations between laboratories and their environments. Laboratories interact with other laboratories, but they also engage with a world directly outside the laboratory. On the one hand, this refers to the obvious but often ignored fact that the laboratory is always also a social institution: its logics and dynamics will, to some extent, reflect
broader societal processes (Kohler 2008). On the other hand, and perhaps more interesting, this third dimension refers to the fact that laboratories actively shape the urban environment in which they are embedded. In reconfiguring the natural and social order in the laboratory, these laboratories can potentially also change the world outside of the laboratory through a variety of translations (Knorr Cetina 1995). Collier et al. (2006, 8) also see an advantage in the adjacency of laboratories to the object of investigation in that this allows for possible transformation of the object. This in turn raises important questions concerning the role of local collaboration in urban change. How and to what extent do processes of laboratorization transform the built environment in which laboratories are simultaneously embedded?

Organization

The workshop will take place in Maastricht, but will be co-hosted by The Manchester Architecture Research Centre (MARC) - part of the School of Environment and Development and the Manchester School of Architecture at the University of Manchester - and the Maastricht Virtual Knowledge Studio (VKS) - a joint-venture between the STS department of Maastricht University and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In drawing on the acknowledged expertise of both institutes in the various disciplines related to the workshop theme, the organizers ensure a truly transdisciplinary orientation. The Maastricht workshop is also explicitly linked to the CityLabs event in Manchester (18-19 June) and the Urban Laboratories sessions within the Lieu de Passages conference in Maastricht
(14-15 May), which are more policy-oriented.

Call for Papers

Please submit a 500 word abstract by 1 July 2009 to the organizers Bas van Heur (b.vanheur@vks.unimaas.nl) and Ralf Brand (Ralf.Brand@manchester.ac.uk). We will send out notices of acceptance mid-July.

The goal of this workshop is to publish an edited volume on Urban Laboratories. For this and to facilitate discussion during the workshop, we ask all participants to prepare a full paper and to submit this to the organizers before 1 October. We will then send the papers to all participants.

Limited funding for travel expenses and accommodation will be available. If you have any questions on this call for papers or on the workshop in general, please contact the organizers.

Please note that the workshop is full. Please get in touch with José Cornips (details on contact page) if you would like to see whether there is room for additional participants.

Background information

In this half-day workshop we want to examine the intersection of two processes central to contemporary society: the emergence of the reflexive self and the digitisation of everyday life. Both of these are not only important features of late modernity but are also crucial for how we study it. Giddens (1991) and others have argued that in modern societies people need to work, constantly and reflexively, on their biographies in order to create coherence and meaning in a rapidly changing globalised world. An important source of change is the development, use and diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICTs). At a global level, ICTs are understood as determining post-industrial development whilst, at the same time, governments and organisations argue that the push to use ICTs in the production of goods and services is simply a rational response to the coming of the 'information society'.

The 'biographical turn' in the social sciences and humanities, visible since the 1980s, can be understood as a shift concomitant to the emergence of the reflexive self. The 'biographical turn' can also be understood as a reaction against traditional forms of research, which tend to marginalise the perspectives of individuals/social actors/subjects or to reduce them to overly abstract or overly determined demographic and social processes. The 'biographical turn' is motivated by an explicit intent to bring the lived multiplicity of identity into view, and to understand it in relation to transformations in late- or post-modern societies, without reducing them to such transformations.

The digitisation of the life world is in itself an important object of research but digitisation also has the potential for changing the methods by which knowledge is produced. Thus, a parallel between changes in lived experience and changes in research methods can again be observed. Digital technologies are increasingly being taken up in the production of the self as new applications such as blogs, social networking, video- and photo-sharing sites offer people opportunities to document and share the meaningful and mundane moments of their ordinary lives. These applications offer new challenges and opportunities to researchers.

The biographical turn is not confined to understanding how individuals make sense of the world in which they live. The notion of 'biography' has been taken up in other fields to capture the ways in which organisations, places, art works, facts and things develop an identity and/or travel through time and space. Processes of digitisation, including the development of digital archives as well as 'web 2.0' applications also affect research processes, not least in the ways in which researchers and others all have the possibility to contribute material.

What does the digitisation of information, whether company archives, personal holiday photos or documentation associated with buildings or artworks, mean for the ways in which biographies of people, places, facts and things are constructed, written and presented? The questions raised by the digitisation of knowledge production are central to the work of the Virtual Knowledge Studio. This workshop will enable all those associated with the VKS or interested in its activities to explore these ideas.

What follows is not a list of 'required' reading, but rather a very partial list. Auto/biography has exploded as a genre in recent years. Not only do celebrities (ghost)write their biographies at an alarmingly young age, but 'biography' is being used to describe accounts of cities and rivers (London & Thames, both by Peter Ackroyd), fish (cod by Mark Kurlansky), ideas (zero by Charles Seife). One question to consider is why 'biography' has come to be so popular, what does it offer over other ways of conceptualizing how people, places and things change over time, such as career, life course, trajectory? Another small genre is the ways in which the lives of people and things are intertwined, such as in Sherry Turkle's recent collection, The Inner History of Devices, or the volume Sally Wyatt contributed to a number of years ago called Cyborg Lives? Women's Technobiographies (edited by Flis Henwood et al). Such volumes are clearly informed by anthropological work, particularly the much-cited collection edited by Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things, and the chapter therein by Igor Kopytoff, 'The cultural biography of things'. The digitization of everyday life is picked up in some of these, but not all. There are different ways that it could be - for example, the affective relationships many people have with digital technologies (this appears in both the Henwood et al and Turkle collections). As well as that, it is important to consider the ways in which digitalization affects how biographical or narrative research can be conducted - is new material made available, what kinds of ethical considerations arise by making things public or by collecting digitally-produced data about people's lives? In Modernity & Self-Identity Giddens reflects on the difficulties of maintaining a coherent identity in late modernity. Has it suddenly become much easier as the possibilities for documenting one's life have become so diffused, or does the task of constant re-interpretation of one's life actually become more difficult if there are so many more digital traces of it?

The purpose of the day is to explore these and other themes, to learn more about what one another is doing, to develop ideas for future research individually or together and to think about other activities such as a larger conference or publication.

Homework for all participants

Ernest Hemingway once wrote a short story of only six words: 'For sale: Baby shoes, never used.' He claimed it was his best work.

All participants (and not just the speakers) are invited to think of a six word biography, of a person, object, place or idea of their choice.

Programme

12:00-12.30    Arrival and lunch

12.30-12.45    Welcome & introduction by Sally Wyatt

12.45-13:00    Jan Kok  Digital Collective Biographies: Gains and Losses

13:00-13.15    Maaike Meyer  Lost and Found and Lost Again: The Digital Labyrinth

13.15-13.30    Vivian van Saaze  Conservation of Contemporary Art and the Concept
                     of Biography

13.30-13.45    Pieter Caljé  The Cultural Biography of Maastricht: Theoretical Use and
                     Practical Implementation of a Concept

13.45-14:00    Bas van Heur  From Digital to Analogue: Institutional Dynamics of Heritage
                     Innovation

14:00-14.15    Stefan Dormans  Studying Sideways on the Sidewalk

14.15-14.30    General discussion

14.30-15:00    Tea

15:00-15.15    Charles van den Heuvel  Digitizing Experience in Web Archives and Digital
                     Repositories for Reminiscence and Remembrance

15.15-15.30    Jan Bierhoff  The Newspaper of the Future

15.30-15.45    Sara Kjellberg Being a Blogging Researcher

15.45-16:00    Ike Kamphof  Webcams to Save Nature. Technospace as Affective and Ethical
                     Space

16:00-16.15    Niels van Doorn  Gendered Networks: Performative Subjectivity in Digital  
                     Culture

16.15-16.30    Jason Pridmore  Branding Consumers: Consumer Surveillance and the
                     'Informatization' of Everyday Life

16.30-16.45    Irma van der Ploeg  Ubiquitous Identification: Concepts of Identity in a Digital
                     Culture

16.45-17:00    General discussion

17:00-17.30    Overall discussion

17.30-18:00    Next steps and close - and reception

One-day course for PhD students, post-doctoral and other researchers, organized by the Virtual Knowledge Studio in collaboration with the KNAW.

Date and location: Monday 15 June 2009, at the KNAW, Trippenhuis, Amsterdam.

In this one-day event, participants will have the opportunity to examine their own research practices from an ethical perspective and to learn about current approaches to research ethics.

The workshop will enable researchers to identify and analyze ethical issues that arise in the course of their own research, whether relating to empirical material and sources, to analysis or to publication and dissemination. They will also become familiar with a range of mechanisms that support ethical research practices (codes of conduct, consent forms, ethical audits, etc.). The workshop will contribute to the development of skills to deal with ethical dilemmas and increase researchers' confidence in undertaking research in novel settings or using new tools.

Such a workshop is especially timely because the ethical dimensions of research are receiving more attention from national and transnational funding agencies and professional associations for a number of reasons, including:

* Greater accountability of researchers receiving public money

* Pressure from funders to increase scale and disciplinary breadth of research teams

* 'Ethical' turn in social science and humanities, following the linguistic and cultural turns

* Rise of ethical approval committees, moving beyond the medical sciences into other disciplines

* Increased presence of new media in research and communication

* Increased availability of data arising from mundane social practices

* Creation of new research infrastructures and tools

New technologies not only raise new ethical questions; they also bring into relief some very old ones regarding, for example, respect for the confidentiality of research participants. Similarly, greater internationalisation and interdisciplinarity also raise both new and old issues, as different national and disciplinary cultures have different traditions of both defining and dealing with research ethics. For example, universities in the US and Canada have a strong tradition of ethical review, with all research projects involving human subjects - regardless of discipline - being required to obtain institutional approval prior to research commencing. In European countries, such procedures often only apply to medical and psychological research. The standards of medical research, about informed consent and doing no harm, are not always relevant in social sciences and humanities. Humanities and social sciences differ in their view of people not only from medical sciences but also from each other. For example, for humanities scholars, people producing (online) texts should best be regarded as authors, with the result that they should simply be cited as any other author. For a social scientist, the very same people may be regarded as 'respondents' and then issues of consent and confidentiality become more salient. In the UK, recipients of research council funding are normally expected to deposit all data in a public archive; in the US and Canada, similar data would have to be destroyed after five years. The imposition of ethical review procedures may also have implications for what styles of research are favoured. Most formal review procedures require the production of research instruments as part of the process, instruments which may then need further approval if they are changed. This may work for research using positivistic research designs, but would be very cumbersome for more interpretative research designs which rely on the identification and pursuit of emergent phenomena. Clearly, as research becomes ever more international and interdisciplinary, all of these issues will become urgent. This one-day workshop will orient researchers to these discussions as well as develop their ability to deal with dilemmas faced in research.

Provisional timetable

10-10.30
 Arrival & coffee
 
10.30-11.30
 Introductions & ethics quiz
 
11.40-12.30
 Brief lecture outlining history & practice of research ethics in the Netherlands
 
12.30-13.30
 Lunch
 
13.30-15.00
 Discussion of research dilemmas
 
15-15.30
 Tea
 
15.30-17
 Discussion of sample US/Canadian-style ethical clearance form
 
17-17.30
 Concluding remarks
 
17.30-18.30
 Borrel followed by dinner


Work to be done in advance by participants:

Complete ethical clearance form and write one page about past or current dilemma.

Time and location: 10-18.30 (followed by dinner), Monday 15 June 2009, at the Trippenhuis, Kloveniersburgwal 29, Amsterdam. More travel information at http://www.knaw.nl/contact/contact_eng.html

Registration: Please contact Anja de Haas (anja.dehaas@vks.knaw.nl) to register. Deadline for registration is 8 May 2009.

Cost:  €50, includes participation, course materials, lunch and breaks; or €75, also including dinner

Number of participants: maximum 16, to ensure a discussion-oriented format

Contact : Prof.  S. Wyatt (sally.wyatt@vks.knaw.nl) or Dr. A. Beaulieu (anne.beaulieu@vks.knaw.nl)