Digital Methods Winter School 2027

Creative AI methods for digital research: Plumbing the vector space

4-8 January 2027

Opening day location:
University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam

Digital Methods Winter School and Data Sprint: Call for Participation

Creative AI methods for digital research: Plumbing the vector space

What do LLMs have to offer digital research? To date much of the attention to research with LLMs has been in the service of supporting or even supplanting existing methodological instrumentaria. In earlier discourse, these substitutive means would have been called the virtualisation of methods, referring to their emulation in a new realm. Whether working with LLMs, chatbots or agents, the question has been how (well) they can do our analytical work the way we usually do it. There are core analytical tasks AI is asked to perform. Can they annotate and classify data sets, extracting overt as well as latent meanings, narratives and discourses? Can they affirm or find fault with findings made by more standard qualitative and quantitative means? Can they synthesise data to a degree that it more or less mimics real-world material? Can they produce reference lists on a subject matter? But there is also some work that strives to repurpose their intended use, plumbing the vector space for social structures and cultural trends. For example, can their biases be studied as societal indicators? Can they show extant and emerging social and cultural associations? The Winter School is dedicated native AI methods and their creative uses.

The Winter School will also host data sprint projects connected to the Horizon Europe project ANTIGONE (From ANTagonism to aGOnism iN digital Ecosystems), led at UvA. Working with partners including VUB, University of Sheffield, ISD and AFP, Sprint projects will draw on emerging cases and datasets concerning “speech grey zones”: contested forms of online speech whose classification and governance are themselves at issue. Projects will explore digital methods appropriate to these cases, including creative AI methods where relevant, bringing researchers and practitioners together around shared empirical problems.

Important Links (work-in-progress)

1. Welcome package (includes the Schedule)
2. Schedule
3. Project descriptions (join a project!)
4. Tutorials
5. Templates for final posters: Example Figma Templates, Blank Figma Template
6. Template for project reports. And DMI wiki project write-up template

Applications: Key Dates

There are rolling admissions and applications are now being accepted. To apply please send a letter of motivation, your CV, a headshot photo, 100-word bio as well as a copy of your passport (details page only) to winterschool [at] digitalmethods.net. Notifications of acceptance are sent 1-2 weeks after application. Final deadline for applications is 11 December 2026. The full program and schedule of the Summer School are available on or about 18 December 2026.

Tuition Fees, Completion Certificates & Accommodations

The fee for the Digital Methods Winter School 2026 is EUR 895, and upon completion all participants receive transcripts and certificates (worth 6 ECTS). To complete the Winter School successfully all participants must co-present the one final presentation (poster session) and co-author one final project report, evidenced by the presentation slides or poster as well as the final report(s) themselves. Final reports should appear on this wiki (handy template) and contain a link to the final presentation slides or poster. They are due on 29 January, or three weeks after the end of the Winter School. There are no other attendance or completion certificates issued other than the transcripts.

Payment information is sent along with the acceptance notification. Students at the University of Amsterdam do not pay fees. Members of Dutch Research Schools and alumni of the University of Amsterdam pay half fees. There are no other scholarships or discounts.

The Winter School is self-catered. The venue is in the center of Amsterdam with abundant coffee houses and lunch places.

We have available accommodations at this hotel:

The Social Hub Amsterdam - two locations - center and west. This address is for west.
Jan van Galenstraat 335
1061 AZ Amsterdam
https://www.thesocialhub.co/
To receive a discount, scroll down the page and 'subscribe' for a 15% discounted rate.

We also have accommodations available at

The Volkshotel
Wibautstraat 150
1091 GR Amsterdam
https://www.volkshotel.nl/en/

To avoid disappointment, please book as early as possible using this link.

Please bring your laptop computer, your European plug as well as the HDMI/USB-C adaptor for connecting to the projector.

About DMI

The Digital Methods Summer School is part of the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), Amsterdam, dedicated to developing techniques for Internet-related research and to the study of the natively digital. The Digital Methods Initiative also holds the annual Digital Methods Winter Schools, which are intensive and full-time undertakings in January.

There is a practical textbook, Doing Digital Methods (Sage, 2024 - 2nd edition). There is also a more technical (still accessible) book, Digital Methods: A Short Introduction (Polity, 2025). The seminal Digital Methods book (MIT Press, 2015) provides the methodological outlook that frames and informs the work of the DMI. It is accompanied by a companion volume about mapping social and political issues with digital methods: Issue Mapping for an Ageing Europe (Amsterdam University Press, 2015), which is also freely available on the web as an open access monograph. Further information and resources about digital methods can be found at digitalmethods.net - including links to example projects, publications, tools, an introductory "founding narrative" about the Digital Methods Initiative as well as short bios of the affiliated researchers.

The coordinators of the Digital Methods Initiative are Prof. Sabine Niederer (Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences) and Dr. Esther Weltevrede (New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam), and the director is Richard Rogers, Professor of New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam.

About Digital Methods as a Concept

Digital methods is a term coined as a counterpoint to virtual methods, which typically digitize existing methods and port them onto the Web. Digital methods, contrariwise, seek to learn from the methods built into the dominant devices online, and repurpose them for social and cultural research. That is, the challenge is to study both the info-web as well as the social web with the tools that organize them. There is a general protocol to digital methods. At the outset stock is taken of the natively digital objects that are available (links, tags, threads, etc.) and how devices such as search engines make use of them. Can the device techniques be repurposed, for example by remixing the digital objects they take as inputs? Once findings are made with online data, where to ground them? Is the baseline still the offline, or are findings to be grounded in more online data? See R. Rogers (2009), The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Social

We are using the #DMI27 hashtag. Some pictures from a past Winter School. Here is the Facebook Group from one year, and from a Summer School. Here are pictures from a variety of DMI Summer and Winter School Flickr streams.

EU Projects

This Winter School is part of the EU Projects, FIMI-RESIST and ANTIGONE.