Call for Presentations 

In this intimate workshop, Olga Goriunova, Tony Sampson, and Nate Tkacz, will present their recent work. Through notions of 'conceptual personae' (Sampson), 'model characters' (Goriunova) and 'primal users' (Tkacz), each will present a different way to think about digital subjectivity. The workshop is open, but places are limited.

Register here: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/cdi/news-events/registration_digital_subjectivity

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Join us for a discussion about Tony Sampson's new work of dystopian media theory. Here's a description of the book:

Positing online users as 'sleepwalkers', Tony Sampson offers an original and compelling approach for understanding how social media platforms produce subjectivities.

Drawing on a wide range of theorists, including A.N. Whitehead and Gabriel Tarde, he provides tools to track his sleepwalker through the 'dark refrain of social media': a refrain that spreads through viral platform architectures with a staccato-like repetition of shock events, rumours, conspiracy, misinformation, big lies, search engine weaponization, data voids, populist strongmen, immune system failures, and far-right hate speech. Sampson's sleepwalker is not a pre-programmed smartphone junkie, but a conceptual personae intended to dodge capture by data doubles and lookalikes. Sleepwalkers are neither asleep nor wide awake; they are a liminal experimentation in collective mimicry and self-other relationality. Their purpose is to stir up a new kind of community that emerges from the potentialities of revolutionary contagion.

At a time in which social media is influencing more people than ever, A Sleepwalker's Guide to Social Media is an important reference for students and scholars of media theory, digital media and social media.

Details:

November 17th, 4:00-5:30 pm

Online and in person

Register: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/cdi/news-events/sampson_registrationLink opens in a new window

How can you collect and examine social media data? In this workshop, we will use the R statistical programming language to download and begin to examine social media data from Twitter and Reddit. We look closely at the data and then zoom out to consider overall trends. The aim of this workshop is to introduce the collection and analysis of social media data. The materials for this workshop are available on GitHub here.

The workshop is available for Warwick staff and students, who can sign up here. If you have any queries then please contact james.tripp@warwick.ac.uk

Our public discourse is often mediated by social media. Both the personalities and the structure of the platforms shape our debates, to construct meaning and foster our shared selves. Finding means to collect, collate, and form narratives around these platforms is useful for scholars in the Arts and humanities.

In this workshop, we (a) look at tools for interacting with APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to collect data, (b) explore some basic analysis and (c) consider critically what our tool and methods allow us to learn about these platforms and the debates within.