TU Berlin: 13:30-17:00, February 1st, 2023

Organized by Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver (Aarhus University), Lozana Rossenova (Open Science Lab TIB), Lukas Fuchsgruber (TU Berlin)

We invite artists, designers, data analysts, curators, computer scientists, archivists and others to collaboratively curate fermenting data. This event follows a 'kitchen' workshop organised as part of NordiCHI 2022 pre-conference in Aarhus in October 2022. In the canteen edition, we will continue to experiment with speculative methods for curating data, while sensing fermenting bodies. We will explore the process of fermentation at different stages by working with different sensors (analog, digital, biological) and we will jointly attempt to structure sensory data into an open, public database (Wikidata). This is a Bring Your Own [X] event - feel free to bring your own ferments, sensors and/or datasets.

Background:
In both machine learning and semantic web applications, a primary assumption about data – that data are raw and abstract and as such universal – continues to prevail. However, as a number of information studies, digital humanities and critical data studies scholars have argued, data has to be imagined in order to exist and function. In effect, data models which are designed to process myriad data points and network relations obscure the fact that these data come from somewhere and that they had been collected under specific conditions that are social, historical, cultural and technological. To account for processes that facilitate data capture data should be understood as ‘capta’, not given but taken. This workshop invites cross-disciplinary collaborations to practically and theoretically interrogate systems of data capture and processing by engaging with materials, sources and tools. Read the full abstract for the NordiCHI event here.

Activities:
13.30 - Reception
14.00 - Ferment tasting
14.30 - Show & Tell I
15:00 - Sensors jam
15.30 - Show & Tell II
16.00 - Data jam
17:00 - Show & Tell III

RSVP:
If you're planning to join us for the whole afternoon, please sign up by sending an email to info [at] fermentingdata.net
Spontaneous drop-ins are also welcome!

Workshop Organisers:
Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver is Associate Professor of Digital Communication and Culture at the Department of Digital Design and Information Studies at Aarhus University and Associate Researcher at Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University. She is curator of digital art and design and arts and humanities scholar of critical data studies. Her interdisciplinary research into computational cultures focuses on data as material practice where she explores how curating data can be a methodology for decolonial data practice.
Lozana Rossenova is a digital humanities researcher and designer. Her doctoral research focused on questions related to presentation and performativity in the online archive of born-digital art examined through the lens of interface design (theory and practice). Rossenova is currently based at the Open Science Lab at TIB, Hanover, working on the NFDI4Culture project towards a national research infrastructure of cultural heritage data. She is an active member of the Wikidata and Wikibase open source development communities, and a co-founder of the Wikibase Stakeholder Group.
Lukas Fuchsgruber is a post-doctoral researcher at TU Berlin in the collaborative project "Museums and Society - Mapping the Social" of TU Berlin, HU Berlin, the Institute for Museum Research of the State Museums in Berlin, and the Museum for Natural History Berlin. He studied art history and published his dissertation on the 19th century auction market in Paris (Das Spektakel der Auktion, 2021). Currently, he is investigating the digital image worlds created around museums, focusing on historical and contemporary social aspects of interfaces for digital commons.