Seventh DIGITALIZED! Masterclass for PhD students

The seventh Una Masterclass workshop will be held by Prof. Matti Pohjonen who currently works as a University Researcher at the Helsinki Institute of Social Sciences (HSSH), University of Helsinki, where he specializes in developing new digital methods using open social media/internet data for social sciences and humanities research. He also currently leads the global and comparative work package for the Finnish Academy funded Media platforms and Social Accountability project: Dynamics, Practices and Discourses (MAPS), which explores questions related to digital platform accountability and datafication.

Pohjonen has previously worked as a Lecturer in Global Digital Media at SOAS, University of London (2018-2020), Research Fellow for the Vox-Pol Network of Excellence (2015-2017) and a Researcher for Programme for Comparative Media Law and Policy (PCMLP), University of Oxford (2014-2016).

The growing digitalization of human lives – and the exponential growth of the volume of digital data that has accompanied this – has radically impacted how we understand key cultural, political, and social phenomena globally. "Datafication" as a term has emerged as an overarching theoretical framework to capture the significance of these changes – not only to societies around the world but also to the methods researchers have available to understand these changes. Debates on datafication (or "AI" more broadly) thus both represent a social phenomenon to investigate academically but also a potential paradigm shift in social sciences and humanities research about how knowledge about society itself is produced from new data sources available at a scale never possible before.

This workshop will introduce students to this double nature of datafication and AI as both an object of study and method. In the mornings, the workshop will focus on some of the key critical debates related to datafication and AI, including (but not limited to) debates on data colonialism, platform economy, critical data studies, surveillance, extreme speech algorithmic governance, AI bias, extreme speech social media content moderation. In the afternoons, the workshop will provide more hands-on examples of the new data tools, methods and approaches that are available to produce novel insights from large-scale open data sources available on social media and the internet, as well as the ethical and philosophical issues raised by these for social science and humanities research. The specific tools and methods will be determined by the interest and digital skill level of the participants of the workshop, who will develop exploratory research projects based on the themes of the workshop.

The aim of the DIGITALIZED! Society in the Era of Digital Revolution project is to develop new methods to intensify the cooperation between the universities of Una Europa, and to conduct scientific research. The project also endeavours to popularize and educate. Moreover, the additional goal is to implement and carry out projects in the socio-economic environment that are connected with the impact of the digital revolution which influences changes in the social world.

DIGITALIZED! is financed by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange as part of the Academic International Partnerships programme. The project also supported a special edition of Una Europa Seed Funding, the results of which were recently announced. Head to our DIGITALIZED! story to learn about the six successful projects.