Current and past working groups
Current working groups
How do we ensure that the use of AI for Holocaust memory and education is critically informed? How can AI models be used to enhance the memorialisation and pedagogical aims of the Holocaust memory and heritage sector? Whilst there is an emerging body of theoretical literature on this topic, there still remains a dearth of empirical answers. Our working group brings together an interdisciplinary group of academics, from the cognitive and communication sciences, and humanities, and memory practitioners to explore these urgent questions. We will use a design-led research methodology and be influenced by the development of working papers to adopt a mixed-method approach combining arts and science methodologies.
This project addresses the transformations reshaping academic publishing in the digital age. Driven by technological advancements, particularly digitalisation, datafication and artificial intelligence (AI), the scholarly literature is evolving from a […]
This century has been the deadliest for journalists while the working environment of conflict reporting has expanded to include civil protests, environmental crisis aftermaths, online harassment, and state surveillance, among other arenas. Rapidly-evolving sociopolitical and technological elements further exacerbate journalists’ increased vulnerability. Our study seeks to understand the evolving nature of conflict reporting through the lenses of technological transformation and expanding conflict environments.
PolarNar will explore the power of polarizing visual narratives. In our highly visual society polarization is often developed by and through images. Images that support and propagate specific narratives about politics, identity or climate. Building on an extensive dataset of European social media visual content, PolarNar will investigate how activists and political actors visually represent issues connected with the climate debate and what role these visual narratives play in the existing polarization around the topic.
In 2022, the European Union (EU) underscored the need to build synergies between digital and green transitions – two paradigmatic shifts proposed lately in response to global economic and environmental challenges (Joint Research Centre, 2022). The working group aims to address the conceptual groundwork required for critically interfacing the two transitions. The key goal of the working group is to build a shared conceptual vocabulary from an anthropological perspective, while borrowing from other allied disciplines, to address the challenges and possibilities of thinking these processes together.
As generative AI transforms how news is produced and consumed, traditional skills – like evaluating sources and detecting bias – must evolve. This project investigates how generative AI is reshaping critical thinking, particularly in journalism, media studies, and education.
In 2024, the EU adopted the AI Act, a new set of rules for trustworthy artificial intelligence. The AI Act relies on standardisation, a regulatory technique that consists in crafting so-called harmonised technical standards, to facilitate legal compliance by the AI industry. While technical standards have been used in the past for ensuring product safety, for the first time standardisation aims to foster “human-centred” AI in compliance with fundamental rights. Our working group explores how standardisation processes shape and stabilise notions of justice in the algorithmic society.
To answer this, we bring together scholars from law, philosophy, STS, critical algorithm studies and computer science. We study the work of EU standardisation bodies, examining how technical experts translate complex issues like bias, fairness, and fundamental rights into measurable norms and procedures.
Past working groups
“A Day in the Life of Metadata” is a multi-disciplinary collaboration between a social scientist at the Surveillance Studies Centre and computer engineers at the Centre for Advanced Computing.
This research group studies the phenomenon of automated engagement on Instagram and Tumblr as an ensemble of software affordances, human interests and techniques of mediation.
Digitisation in a cultural, social and techno-philosophical perspective is first and foremost thematised as a plethora of cultural processes, in order to avoid technocentric narrow views from the outset.
In order to understand digitisation, it must be thought about and researched in a transdisciplinary way. How? The majority of the members of the working group consider it comparatively promising […]
The spread of the World Wide Web and the emergence of easy-to-use social web applications combine opportunities and risks.
Digital technologies are the outcomes of social processes and in turn they continuously transform our societies in fundamental ways.
Instead of Google gathering data on users, „1n(tr0)verted Data: Ecologies and Economies of Google Search“ will ‚invert‘ search technologies by collecting data on Google Search.
In this working group we focus on Facebook’s data sharing practices as enabled by APIs to trace the platform’s responsiveness in relation to data and privacy controversies.