We are delighted to announce that Richard Rogers (University of Amsterdam) will be joining us as a Visiting Professor at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. In the post below he discusses his plans.
I’m very pleased to be able to join the Department of Digital Humanities over the coming period. I’ve worked closely with colleagues at King’s College London for years and look forward to further collaborations.
My main project for the visiting stint is entitled, Chatbots for internet research: a critical reflection, which is shaping up into a book. It came into being initially as tests or experiments with chatbots and ultimately have become approaches to research that supplement and extend the digital methods I’ve been working on.
Chatbots for internet research has three lines of enquiry. One is how to use chatbots for social media, search engine and other online analysis (‘internet research’) but also how to study them as media, as both a vector space medium as well as a platform. Thirdly, I’m particularly interested in those occasions when researcher and machine findings misalign and how to characterise them. Certain of these moments have to do with platform effects such as user pleasing and value alignment that produce ‘overagreement’ and a ‘bias towards neutrality’, respectively. They may have to do with limited scraping, where model responses exhibit ‘technical shallowness’. But they also arise when chatbots are asked to prove themselves and then subsequently provide bogus sources, despite the fact that they appear to produce good (synthetic) data. I characterise this occasion as ‘ungrounded performance’.
During the visiting period, I’m looking for opportunities to conduct workshops and undertake such experiments as well as other methods work.
Richard Rogers is Professor of New Media & Digital Culture, Media Studies, and Director of the Digital Methods Initiative, Humanities Labs, University of Amsterdam. His is author or co-author of Information Politics on the Web, Digital Methods (both MIT Press) as well as Doing Digital Methods (Sage) and Digital Methods: A Short Introduction (Polity). He is editor or co-editor of The Politics of Social Media Manipulation, The Propagation of Misinformation in Social Media (both Amsterdam University Press) and Content Moderation across Social Media Platforms (Routledge). Apart from his project on chatbots for internet research, he is currently working on auditing content moderation on social media platforms, FIMI and the politics of methods as well as Wikipedia as media archaeological instrument.