Computer Vision Networks

This post concerns my current research on the processes of building and interpreting computer vision networks with the purpose to develop visual digital methods for social and media research. This investigation started a couple of years ago (more precisely in 2017) and it has grown to a project that I’m developing as a research fellow at the Centre for Advanced Internet Studies, Bochum, Germany. I’ll be using this post as a research diary, sharing activities and empirical findings related to my research project and this YT playlist to share talks and hows to.

[Livro] Métodos Digitais

Web APIs over the years

With the intention to grasp the technicity of digital platforms, I´ve been following up social media APIs for a while. There is also this model (a work still in progress) that question what one should look at social media APIs. The main reason for looking at social media APIs, I argue, consists of two key strands that allow for repurposing of digital research (both in theory and in practice).

[paper] The Potentials of Google Vision API-based Networks to Study Natively Digital Images

I´m super proud to announce a new paper about The potentials of Google Vision API-based networks to study natively digital images (see the English and Spanish versions), and written in collaboration with Beatrice Gobbo, Elena Pilipets and Jason Chao. This article is part of Journal Diseña special issue on “Visual Methods for Online Images: Collection, Circulation, and Machine Co-Creation” edited by Gabriele Colombo and Sabine Niederer, with editorial by Renato Bernasconi. Check all the articles here.

[Ph.D. defense] Digital Methods and technicity-of-the-mediums

My Ph.D. defense will be on the 21st of September at 9 a.m. (Lisbon time) at the Campolide campus of NOVA University of Lisbon. For those interested in this event, please fill this form: https://forms.gle/pQzbhYfHUYAfydjD9 to later receive by email the Zoom link. It will be possible to attend the defense in person 🙂

CFP: The Data Sprint Approach to Research: Experiments, Protocols and Knowledge

I´m happy to announce this CFP that makes room for data sprint-based research and for the practice of digital methods in the context of communication and media studies. The special issue is coordinated by Beatrice Gobbo(Politecnico di Milano, Density Design Lab, Italy), Lorena Cano-Orón (University of Valencia, Spain), Ana Marta M. Flores (Nova University Lisbon, Portugal) and myself. We are welcoming manuscripts written before, during and after data sprints, yet in the short-paper format (4.500-6.000 words), giving priority to papers addressing the following topics:

What extra efforts mean in practice 🧐👩🏻‍💻?(when using digital methods)

The repurpose of digital media and data for social research is a challenging activity that comes with some extra efforts, because using digital methods is not about enquiring technologies from the outside in (see Marres, 2017), but about understanding, how to work with socio-technical assemblages and how to think along with a network of methods. This post exposes what extra efforts mean in practical terms and when using digital methods. My reflections are particularly based on the context of a data journalism workshop at King’s College London, also a good example of the demands required when teaching digital methods online.

Five years of #SMARTDataSprint

This post celebrates five years of the #SMARTDataSprint and, consequently, my experience in designing, conceptualising and coordinating data sprints at Nova University Lisbon; an initiative supported by iNOVA Media Lab, and later also by ICNOVA. Through the practice of digital methods, this event (or annual encounter if you wish) has been directly and indirectly contributing to new forms of design research, ask and respond to research questions.

Digital Methods for Hashtag Engagement Research

This article seeks to contribute to the field of digital research by critically accounting for the relationship between hashtags and their forms of grammatization—the platform techno-materialization process of online activity. We approach hashtags as sociotechnical formations that serve social media research not only as criteria in corpus selection but also displaying the complexity of the online engagement and its entanglement with the technicity of web platforms.

Stick & Flow: a critical framework for investigating bot engagement on social media

The working group Stick&Flow is a collaborative initiative to create innovative digital visual methods and methodologies for studying bot engagement on Instagram and Tumblr. The project is funded by CAIS – Center for Advanced Internet Studies, and it was officially presented this week (26 August, 2020) by myself and Elena Pilipets (Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt, Austria) at CAIS Colloquium. We are a total of six researchers fascinated with the life of bots: Jason Chao (University of Warwick/Universität Siegen, England/Germany), Mengying Li (Journalism School,

We had to take one of your papers down :(

If you are alone, you cannot fight the power of digital platforms. This post is an unfortunate description of moderation content [1], in particular the lack of capacity of Academia in checking a copyright request, and later, the lack of attitude towards publicly assuming the error.