[okfn-labs] Fwd: PhD studentships at DensityDesign Research Lab, Milan

[Jonathan Gray]

This might be of interest to some of you. DensityDesign Research Lab have
been involved in the Mapping the Republic of Letters project, as well as
many other interesting things:

http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/

J.

---------- Forwarded message ----------

Hi All,

I would like to inform you about a PhD research proposal by the
DensityDesign Research Lab at the Design Department at Politecnico di
Milano, regarding the recent Call for Applications for PhD positions at the
Politecnico.

Focus of the proposal is “Communication Design and the Computational Turn
in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Tools, Methods, Interfaces” and its
aim is to investigate the contribution that communication and interface
design can bring into the definition of new research methods and practices
within the emerging intersections between digital technologies, humanities
and social sciences.

The PhD student could be part of the DensityDesign Lab in Milan, taking
advantage of well established collaborations with researchers and
organizations in both humanities and social sciences fields.

PhD student positions at Politecnico are salaried positions for up to three
years.
Deadline for application is May 24 and the PhD programme will start in
November, 2013.

Here an abstract of the proposal:

The rise of social media along with the recent progress in computational
tools that can process massive amounts of data, makes possible
fundamentally new approaches for the study of human beings, culture and
society. Both humanities and social sciences are today presented with new
opportunities to study social and cultural processes and dynamics through
and on digital media. Besides the study of non­-digital objects and
phenomena with the help of computers, there is a continuously expanding
space of cultural production and social interaction riddled by machine
mediation, which has been, from the beginning, tied to digital schemes and
formats. Traditional cultural artifacts like books or movies, ‘native’
digital forms such as software programs, online publications or computer
games, contribute to a growing mountain of data begging to be analysed.
Within these contexts, the design of visualizations and interfaces to
access, observe and explore these new data emerges as a central issue in
current research initiatives and agendas. Furthermore, social sciences and
humanities provide an almost­perfect context for design (especially
communication and interface design) and design thinking to apply and study
their situated, interpretative and user­-centered approaches. Stemming from
these considerations and looking at design as a valid interlocutor for the
definition of new methods and practices for digital research in the
humanities and the social sciences, the research aims at defining new
design methods and tools based on the study and the exploitation of digital
environments and data.

A complete description of the research proposal can be found here:
http://phd.design.polimi.it/ricerca/temi-di-ricerca-proposti/372-communication-design-and-the-computational-turn-in-the-humanities-and-social-sciences-tools-methods-interfaces

The official Politecnico PhD call:
http://www.ricerca.polimi.it/index.php?id=4731

More information about the DensityDesign Lab can be found here:
http://www.densitydesign.org/

For any further information, please write to info at densitydesign.org

Best regards,

Giorgio Caviglia
Postdoc Research Fellow
DensityDesign Research Lab
Design Department
Politecnico di Milano
www.densitydesign.org


-- 
Jonathan Gray <http://jonathangray.org/> | @jwyg <http://twitter.com/jwyg>
Director of Policy and Ideas
The Open Knowledge Foundation <http://okfn.org/> |
@okfn<http://twitter.com/okfn>
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