Hi everyone! My name is Samantha, I’m an urban geographer based in Turin and I’ll be working for the next three years as principal investigator in the project “Sustainable Cities and Digital Participation”, in partnership with Edgeryders (thanks to @alberto) and in close collaboration with @chiara.certoma
The project’s provisional title is “Sustainable cities and digital participation. Analysing and modelling digital social innovation processes in the governance of urban sustainability in Turin and Brussels”. The project revolves around the identification, analysis and modeling of digitally enabled social innovation initiatives for tackling sustainability challenges in the city and fueling democratic participation processes. By adopting qualitative-quantitative research methods (including web-mining and mapping, Semantic Social Network Analysis 6 (thanks to Edgeryders’ support), participatory observation, discourse analysis and in-deep interviews) I will investigate the operational practices and the knowledge sharing fluxes that characterise the work of the social innovators working on (socio) environmental sustainability challenges in Turin and Bruxelles. Urban regeneration processes performed via ecological co-housing, green infrastructure restoration and public space commoning are potentially investigated.
The project has just started and I’ll be working on finetuning it during the next weeks. Very excited to start and learn more about the community!
Feel free to reach out if you need anything on the Brussels side of things.
The project looks very interesting and I look forward to learning more about it and see it developed.
Welcome, @samantha.cenere! Hopefully we’ll be able to help each other as our respective research progresses, as was @chiara.certoma’s vision.
I was thinking about how we could start getting an idea of what’s going on in Turin. A simple way would be this: why don’t you give us a kick-off seminar? We do it on Zoom, present it as an Edgeryders RezNet seminar, make a bit of noise on Twitter and Linkedin, do a couple of targeted invitations, and see where it leads us.
In fact, I think I would like to do a small seminar series with this formula. Two people immediately come to mind that I would like to hear from. One is @MartinBohle – I see his geoethics research grow closer to the social sciences, and am curious to learn more. The other is @markomanka. Marco does a lot of things, but in specific I would like to hear about his work with NATO on AI-powered rapid response systems in defence. This is intriguing, because it sits at the crossroads of computer science, epistemology (how can we trust that the algos “know” the correct information to trigger their decision?) and ethics (if an algorithm pulls the trigger, who is responsible for the consequences of the shot?).
If you all agree, we need to agree on precise titles and dates/times. I would start with your, Samantha.
All titles should be made more explanatory, and all dates are indicative, but something like:
February 22nd: Samantha Cenere, Sustainable cities and digital participation
March 22nd: Martin Bohle, Geoethics for the social sciences
Hello @alberto - I am happy to take part in the seminar exercise. However, to set out I have to understand ‘what are the expectations’ beyond helping mutually to develop the respective ‘agenda of studies’. Driven by discussions among those (mainly geoscientists) who develop(ed) the school of thought ‘geoethics’ I currently focus on questions like [1] or [2] compared to earlier works like [3]. I could develop a contribution like ‘Geoethics for the social sciences’ although one should notice phrasing like ‘No Geoethics without social sciences’ would be more productive. - best regards, Martin
@alberto: thanks for proposing to introduce the project through a seminar, sounds good to me. Just a few things to better frame the seminar:
I’ve joined the project only this week, so I’m at a very early stage. I could prepare a preliminary presentation of the project, maybe with some open questions regarding how to fine-tune it (mainly getting inputs from the literature in my fields of study), then show you some interesting cases here in Turin, and then open the discussion to get feedback and suggestions. Could it work?
If it’s so, did you mean the seminar to replace @chiara.certoma’s idea to have a first meeting/brainstorming? Should we close the doodle she launched and consider the seminar as the occasion in which we’ll have our brainstorming too?
And a more practical issue: if we all agree on this idea, could we move the date to the 25th? Both me and Chiara can’t make it for the 22nd, unfortunately.
Of course. We don’t expect full results. The point is to start discussions, and be in each other’s peripheral vision.
I had not thought about it until now, but yes. Basically, we do the brainstorming in public. That’s what a seminar is, after all. And of we need more brainstorming, then we schedule a meeting on top of it.
Of course.
Your call, Martin. The way I see it is: as a social scientist, how can I use your framework? What should I know?
I already have a tentative “yes” from @markomanka, so we can probably go ahead with the scheme. I’m on it.
Welcome @samantha.cenere. I also live in Turin; I’m currently working out of Toolbox, down the hall from the Future Urban Legacy Lab. I know it’s Politecnico and not the University of Turin, but if you’re ever around, it would be great to say hello.
Hi @schmudde, I’m answering on behalf of @samantha.cenere too, it would be nice to meet you in Turin - me and Samantha are having an online meeting on the 18th at 4pm, maybe you can join, just ten minutes to tell us a bit about your research, prior of our operative meeting? If this is fine for you we can meet at https://unito.webex.com/meet/chiara.certoma
Hi @schmudde! Unfortunately, we had to postpone our meeting. But I’ll let you know soon when we reschedule it and/or when we could meet in person for a coffee!
Thank you all for the seminar on Friday, unfortunately I was able to only listed to Samantha’s presentation and grasp a few of your comments (but I had a chat with Samantha later in the evening and she told me about your reactions!). I need to apologise as I was supposed to be on a train, but in fact I was. Sorry about it!
Hi everyone! Few weeks have passed since we had the meeting/seminar/brainstorming, and I was wondering if you’re still on the project you mentioned at some point during our conversation. You said something about a proposal you were writing that somehow resonates with the topics of my research project… Maybe there’s already a thread in one of the categories? Sorry for asking, but I couldn’t find anything on that. Thanks! @alberto@nadia@marina@chiara.certoma
Hi @nadia! No problem, we can arrange another meeting in the future in a moment which works better for you (are you in a different timezone?).
For the moment, I guess we could say that the best option is Monday 10, 2.30-3.30, since both @ivan and @Nica are available. Thanks to all of you! If it’s ok for both of you, I’ll send you a link to my virtual room on Webex before the meeting.
ciao!
Hi everyone! It’s been a while As some of you know, the research project I’ve been working on includes a step in which I’m going to use SSNA to scope the topic through the Edgeryders’ platform. Within the project, SSNA is conceived as a tool to directly enter the conversations among the members of the online community and get first-hand data on the knowledge produced regarding my research topic.
I had a preliminary introduction to SSNA a while ago with @alberto first and then with @ivan and @Nica , who showed to me the different options I have in applying the methodology to the study of my research topic via the platform (i.e., a. convey people on the platform and make them participate to a conversation on the research topic; b. transcribe in-person interviews; c. use conversations already on the platform adding a specific tag). For various reasons, I opted for the last option. So, the research question guiding this phase of my research would be: how does an online community of peers produce knowledge on how to live in a more sustainable way at the urban level (and, eventually, co-produce alternative forms of sustainable urban life – in case of SSNA on The Reef; see below).
I’ve identified two (plus one; see my question at the end) ways in which I could apply SSNA to study how the Edgeryders community has been dealing with the topic: 1) making a free search through keyword/s (for example: sustainability; green; etc.), then select the useful conversations; 2) select useful conversations through the tags already inserted by you.
I have doubts and a lot of questions on both options and on the Open Ethnographer tool in general, and I think that having a further discussion with some you may help me clear up my mind, since you both have a full understanding of the methodology and know which “material” (in terms of conversations”) is available.
So, I guess I would like to share my thoughts with you on these issues: 1. I’ve been reading the Open Ethnographer manual, but I would probably need a specific training to better learn how to use it; 2. Scoping the material on SSNA and assessing the possible research options I have, I came up with some doubts, questions, and ideas that probably those of you that have a full understanding of both the conversations going on now and past uses of SSNA could help me deal with; 3. How and when becoming a member of the annotator discourse group (is it something I should do right away to better understand how Open Ethnographer works or something that I could do in a second moment, once I’ve decided which research strategy to adopt?). A further question (this is the “plus one” I mentioned before, regarding the ways in which to apply SSNA): Is there already someone conducting SSNA on The Reef project?
As some of you know, the research project I’ve been working on includes a step in which I’m going to use SSNA to scope the topic through the Edgeryders’ platform. Within the project, SSNA is conceived as a tool to directly enter the conversations among the members of the online community and get first-hand data on the knowledge produced regarding my research topic.