This year, the Netherlands Graduate Research School of Science, Technology and Modern Culture summer school focused on Ethnography, Digital Objects, and STS, under the guidance of Christine Hine. The yearly event takes place in the quiet former convent of Soeterbeeck, in Ravenstein, which is now a conference center of the Radboud Universiteit.
The goal of the Summer School was to reflect around how can researchers produce knowledge from digital objects, and what challenges does ‘The Digital’ imply for the methods of Social Sciences. The event consisted of a series of lectures by Christine Hine, who has developed extensive work on digital ethnography, and other STS scholars: Vlad Niculescu (Erasmus University Rotterdam), Nishant Shah (ArtEZ School of the Arts), Justus Uitermark (University of Amsterdam), Karin Wenz (Maastricht University), and Sally Wyatt (Maastricht University / Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences).
In addition to that, some of the attendees presented their own PhD research spanning a wide array of subjects, from period tracking apps, to mobility experiments, passing by digital patient records and The People’s Internet. I presented my work on Digital Shatter Zones: digital spaces in which public sector information and open data is made available without necessarily being accessible. You can see the slides here.