Making sense of our connected world
Sharing knowledge: Impact of Covid-19 on digital teaching
How can we address the many inequalities in access to digital resources and lack of digital skills that were revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic?
When will the first AI top the New York Times bestseller list?
Language generators based on artificial intelligence are producing increasingly convincing texts. This led us to wonder: Could an AI guest-author an article in Encore? This AI-written text is the result of our experiment.
Open Access, but not for free: Resilient financing for academic publishing
Open access publishing does cost money too. But if the reader does not pay, who else is? Modes of community publishing and funding provide answers and hint towards a crucial set of values for academic exchange. Several research projects follow-up on this and work on practical solutions.
Possibilities for Change – Higher Education and Digitalisation
Bronwen and Moritz highlight the institutional challenges posed to Higher Education Institutions by the pandemic and outline how these can be viewed as a window of opportunity
When Online Research Can Do Harm
While research ethics are a core component to all social research, digital ethnography poses an additional set of unique challenges that must be addressed while researching vulnerable populations, but still advice for digital ethnographers in terms of the ethical dilemmas of researching and marketing to vulnerable populations online is scarce.
Free technologies for the whole world to use – why open source hardware is in the public interest
Open source hardware (OSH) is an essential approach to public interest technology, not unlike well-maintained infrastructure. While OSH is a field with a range of challenges, we see tremendous potential for societal benefits, but it also needs support.
How COVID-19 impacts digital technologies
The current lockdown is boosting online activity – everything is increasingly shifting to the digital sphere. In this dossier we ask if, how and why the Corona pandemic will affect key subjects of digital technologies. What does this mean for the regulation of content on digital platforms? How is Covid-19 activating the digital society? How does it transform our online culture? How safe are tracing apps? What lessons can be learned regarding cyber security? Busy times for our researchers!
How metaphors shape the digital society
Cloud, Big Data, Piracy, Virus are common terms in the debates about digital technologies. At the same time they are methaphors that originate from other fields than technology. What normative or political baggage do they therefore carry? How does this vocabulary shape the emerging digital society? In the series of articles on the How metaphors shape the digital society different authors analyse the assumptions and meanings of metaphors in the digital era.
