January 2017

Rejoice, it's January, it's 2017!

While January is usually means dark, cold winter nights and the never-ending, ever-threatening exams, we at ETHOS Lab also find reasons to rejoice as a new semester starts, expectations are in the air and new beginnings are forming.

Projects from both Junior researchers and the Datasprint 'Representing Data through History' are continuously being revealed on our website and [drumroll..] ETHOS lab will soon be recruiting junior researchers and therefore we made a Q/A:

What can students use the ETHOS Lab for?

Just to mention a few..... Idea generation from experimental inquiry, research and tinkering with data visualizations and qualitative research tools. Being part of a community with students, alumni and research faculty. Get support and supervision from faculty and assist in generating ideas, projects and problematisations. For example, tie your student research work into existing research topics and projects. Find relevant empirical partners or sites/events for participatory observation and get hands on experience within the setting of collaborative, interdisciplinary experimentation through data sprints. The Lab may not serve everything on a silver platter, as it is very much up to the student to create their own interests and make them grow but we all learn in the collaborative process.
Read more about the mission.

Who is the ETHOS team?

The ETHOS daily team consists of Lab Manager Marie Blønd, Assistant Cæcilie Laursen and also Rasmus Rosendahl in charge of Communication. Behind the scenes, research faculty are managing, collaborating, influencing and supporting the Lab's research, datasprints and experiments. Primarily, what 'makes the lab', are the amazing Junior Researchers and curious, active and engaged community affiliated with the Lab. Many of the ideas for workshops, datasprints and talks are initiated and sometimes performed by these people.
Read about getting involved.

When can I come by?

Our opening hours are from Tuesday - Thursday from 12.30-16:00 and you are also welcome to drop us an email on ethos@itu.dk

What is the kind of data that you scrape and tinker with it?

We tinker will ALL kinds of data - also the participatory ethnographic ones.
On Twitter, we announced the interesting article by the Computer magazine Version 2 on the journey of ETHOS Lab community member Jesper Henrichsen who scraped Denmark's Financial Budget 2017 to make a better visualisation. The scraping was mistaken as a DDoS [hacker] attack by the Danish Agency for Modernisation and his IP-adresses blocked.
This is is a great example of the experimental approach you may take within the lab or how we may use these experiences as ethnographic stories begging relevant questions.

See you at 'What kind of Futures do we want to live in' on Thursday!

Best wishes,

ETHOS Lab

Teaching: Reflections on the "Mining with Hyphe" Workshop

In the final publicETHOS of 2016 we were honoured to have Mathieu Jacomy run a workshop on the web-scraping tool Hyphe. Mace Ojala, former research assistant of ETHOS head-of-lab Marisa Cohn, joined the workshop, and has lived to tell the tale. Read on about his reflections on the workshop, about the tool, and the importance of matching your tools to your research. You can also read more about Hyphe here, and watch the instructional video made by former lab manager, Michael Hockenhull.

Research: Junior Researcher Projects popping up on Website

As part of their work in the lab during the fall semester of 2016, our junior researchers are putting together an online report on their work. The outcome of each project are diverse, varying from network visualisations to ethnographic research reflections on entering innovative development projects. Some projects are already uploaded to our website and others will follow. Check out projects by Adam Pantkowski and Minna Jensen’s respective Electricity Map projects and Viktor Hargitai’s LoL-app project here.

Services: "Representing History through Data" - A Datasprint Series

Our series of data sprints in collaboration with HUMLab and The Royal Danish Library was concluded on December 10th 2016. Joining the workshop from Germany was doctoral candidate of Technische Universität Braunschweig, who has been visiting ITU during the fall.

Being new to data sprints, Göde has written a piece on reflective participation in his first meeting with this form of work method and knowledge production. Give it a read if you are curious about data sprints, and what happened behind the opaque glass facade of The Black Diamond in Copenhagen during last semester. Here, we also link up to some of the final projects varying from a musical piece to Tableau dashboard to the winning story-telling project on 'A Sweet Deal'.

Explore a Tableau dashboard of a project that visualised the St Croix census of 1841.

We will be recruiting Junior Researchers soon – stay tuned

Are you interested in becoming part of ETHOS Lab?

As part of the start up of the first semester of 2017, ETHOS Lab will once again be recruiting new Junior Researchers to our team. Stay tuned on our Facebook or readit for more info soon. If in doubt - please just contact us directly.

In Other News

• We are now open every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 12.30-16:00

• Bubble Studies @ Center for Information and Bubble Studies Copenhagen University are looking for 3 people who knows about developing computer interface tools and running and analyzing experiments.Contact: henrik@placeofideas.dk / 42453008

• From January the research project Data as Relations is launching.

• Research project VIRT-EU is launching their first public talk on Thursday the 12th from 13.30-15.30 on The ethics of Internet of Things – what kind of future do we want to live in?