A Summer Workshop Surveying Experimental Digital Methods for Researchers in the Humanities

“We need, in other words, to invent an art of experiment
which can up the methodological ante. I am looking, then, for
a social science which promotes a rewoven empirics which,
most particularly, generates the quality of provocative
awareness. That means an experimentalist orientation must
be in-built which can start and restart association.”
~Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory

The Digital Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin will host the Digital Field Methods Institute (DFMI) from July 1-12, 2024. DFMI is an annual event that offers emerging and established researchers opportunities to gain practice collecting, analyzing, and organizing data for publication while providing tools and technologies that participants can explore and experiment towards innovating new methods for scholarly research.

DFMI guides researchers to cultivate and innovate methods for responsible, accessible, sustainable, and inventive research projects that work with and through digital media. The institute takes place both online (July 1-5) and on-site (July 8-12) at the University of Texas at Austin, offering a range of shared readings, lectures & keynote talks, discussions, media practice, editing workshops, and project consultations.

DFMI events facilitate robust discussions about digital methodology; organize hands-on practice with digital tools for collecting qualitative digital research data; offer structured practice for processing that data for analysis; and provide extensive guidance for publishing scholarship that incorporate digital artifacts from fieldwork as part of that research’s composition.

DFMI 2024 | WAVES

Light. Sound. Immigration. Information. Heat. Communication. Radiation. Crime. And on and on and…As with any body of water, movement stretches through and surfaces the ebbs and flows of resonance, of legibility, of change. We are, in short, awash in waves. Waves carried our species to the shores and continue to ripple through all aspects of our existences. Waves, then, will direct our questions and practices for DFMI 2024. As researchers, how do we identify, track, predict the waves that carry our objects of inquiry? What models, modes, and media should we adopt and/or adapt to examine and explore the flows of events and circumstances? How might we inventory the deluge and clamor, the refractions and returns, the rhythms and intensities that shape our practice?