Unheard City

A experimental project by Iain Emsley that explores the Internet of Things through sonification.

Investigating urban digital infrastructures, the project captures Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) signals to reveal the hidden networks of connected devices. Using a custom-built Android app, participants engage in data walks, mapping and sensing nearby BLE-enabled technology. These walks function as a form of data ethnography, transforming invisible infrastructures into sound and visualizations.

By interpreting Bluetooth signals, Unheard City invites reflection on the often-unseen socio-technical landscapes of connectivity and the digital literacies required to navigate them.

StreamArtNetwork (SAN)

Our livestreaming initiative CDI-TV is a co-founder of SAN - a network of interdisciplinary streamers that emerged from UKRAiNATV’s live webcasts in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, uniting media artists, activists and technologists in solidarity. Expanding through pop-up studios and global collaborations, SAN has grown into a decentralized streaming collective with founding members in Krakow, Amsterdam, Kyiv, Budapest, Vilnius and Warwick.

Join the network, press <on>, connect, share your inputs. Demystify and reclaim the video tech for a more participatory, free and open future!

Curating Data Cultures

A project that invited researchers at the University of Warwick to collaborate on developing data curation practices that support open interpretative research. While open data initiatives often prioritize quantitative methods, Curating Data Cultures examined how openness can benefit qualitative inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. Through a case-based approach, researchers contributed datasets to explore strategies for data stewardship, fostering infrastructures and cultures that enable open, interpretative inquiry.

Mastodon: Research Symposium and Tool Exploration Workshop

Funded by University of Warwick's Research Development Fund and the Sustainable Cities GRPA, this CDI project organised by Nathaniel Tkacz, Carlos Cámara-Menoyo and Fangzhou Zhang captured the pulse of critical and interdisciplinary Mastodon research through a symposium and hands-on workshop. Held as a hybrid event at the University of Warwick on June 22–23, 2023, the program included research presentations and a plenary address by alternative social media researcher Robert Gehl. The tool exploration workshop focused on the RToot package and other research tools.

Dante’s Transnational Female Public in the Long Nineteenth Century

A CDI-funded digital humanities project created by Frederica Coluzzi and Senior Research Software Engineer James Tripp.

The Dante’s Female Public uses the Omeka S platform to present information about female authors who have written about Dante, the libraries where their works can be found and associated information. The website includes a map of showing the location of libraries and the number of works these contain. A map of library locations in Italy was also created and released on the CDI Github (source codeLink opens in a new window, map websiteLink opens in a new window).

A prototype and mini-project created by Justin Tackett and James Tripp.

Intertitles

A prototype website was created to present title cards from silent films. We used the Tropy desktop application to annotate a set of title cards and then upload these to Omeka S, which offered excellent support for sector wide metadata standards and allows the researcher to create an online exhibit.

The "Speaker"

This word evolution project examined words referring to the "speaker" in a textual corpus. Research software engineers helped identify and analyse historic texts containing "speaker"-related terms using the Gale Scholar Lab. Further analysis using the prosodic library written in Python to better understand these texts by inferring the meter of prose. The work demonstrated the impact of large corpus analysis tools such as Gale Scholar Lab.

Findings from the project were presented in the 'Digital Analysis of Poetics' seminar organized by Centre for Digital Inquiry at University of Warwick, 9th June 2022.

Digital Love in the Time of COVID

Digital Love in the Time of COVID is a study on the digital culture of love during coronavirus restrictions. The project deployed a qualitative research framework including focus groups and interviews to explore the affective investment that dating app attract and the symbolic practices they produce, in a context when meeting another person is perceived as difficult and risky, when not altogether forbidden. The project’s findings suggest that the pandemic has accelerated two interconnected processes: the emergence of dating as a dimension deprived of sensual and romantic connotations, and the experience of digital media as erotic objects in themselves.

A series of livestreams from the project are available from the CDI-TV YouTube channel.

Found Sound

COVID-19 App Store and Data Flow Ecologies

Drawing from an interdisciplinary set of ‘multi-situated’ app methods at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, this ESRC-funded project investigated coronavirus apps as media ecological artefacts. In doing so, we mapped the capacities of apps by cycling them through different socio-technical settings to address specific questions developed in dialogue with recent work on the platform economy, software infrastructure and data critique.

An article of findings from the project published with Internet Policy Review is available here.

A CDI contribution to the App Studies Initiative.