Appointments & Fellowships

New PhD researcher at the Maastricht Virtual Knowledge Studio
From the 1th of October 2009 Jess Bier is the new Ph.D. candidate in the department of Technology and Society Studies. She works under the guidance of Sally Wyatt and Bas van Heur. Jess is located in the Maastricht Virtual Knowledge Studio, where she is writing her dissertation on the recent transition to digital cartography in Jerusalem. Overall, her research aims to better understand the ways that conceptions of materiality influence scientific practice, and she specifically analyzes how the production of urban space, and resulting forms of segregation, inform the process of making digital maps. She also examines the role of technology in mapmaking, including the effect of the use of computers upon the development and communication of spatial data.

Jess comes to Maastricht University from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, where she earned her M.Phil. degree in geography with a study of the historical geographies of Arab Americans. This research investigated the influences of daily economic life upon conceptions of gender, race, and ancestry in the early 20th-century Syrian and Syrian American communities of New York City. In the past, Jess has worked as a freelance cartographer, mapping consultant, and community organizer, and she has taught or co-taught courses in geography, mathematics, physics, and academic writing. Her interests include critical cartography, the philosophy of science, political economy, postcolonial studies and the geography of the Middle East as well as the history of mathematics and computers.

Paul Wouters receives NCeSS Visiting Fellowship

The UK National Centre for e-Social Science has granted Paul Wouters a NCeSS Visiting Fellowship from 17 May to 5 July 2009.
Wouters will devote this to the study of the future of scientific and scholarly research by analyzing the ‘research dreams’ of prominent researchers at the University of Oxford.

This will result in an extension, both theoretical and empirical, of the recently published Website Research Dreams.

Franciska de Jong joins General Board NWO
Prof. Franciska de Jong, managing director of the Erasmus Studio, will join the General Board of NWO as of 1 November 2008. Cf.
More in the announcement at NWO’s website.

Places & Spaces: wetenschap in kaart gebracht

Tentoonstelling Erasmus Galerij, ingang UB, Rotterdam.

T/m 30 september 2008. In aansluiting op de oratie over kennisdynamica 27 juni 2008 van prof.
P.F. Wouters

Vind je het leuk wetenschap van bovenaf te zien? Wil je weten welke invloed een persoon of uitvinding kan hebben? Ben je benieuwd waar je vernieuwing kunt vinden? Snak je naar hulpmiddelen om enorme informatiestromen te verwerken? Of heb je gewoon een fascinatie voor kaarten? Bezoek dan de tentoonstelling “Places & Spaces: wetenschap in kaart gebracht” en beleef de kracht van kaarten om fysieke plaatsen en abstracte ruimtes te doorzoeken en te doorgronden.

De tentoonstelling heeft als doel om op interdisciplinaire wijze de discussie te bevorderen over de beste manier om menselijke activiteiten en wetenschappelijke vooruitgang over de hele wereld te volgen en te verbeelden. De tentoonstelling bestaat uit twee delen. Het fysieke deel biedt de mogelijkheid hoge kwaliteitsreproducties van kaarten van dichtbij te bestuderen. Het digitale deel http://scimaps.org geeft toegang tot een selectie van kaarten en hun makers, inclusief gedetailleerde uitleg over hoe de kaarten werken.

Deze expositie in Rotterdam is een deel van de oorspronkelijke tentoonstelling en sluit naadloos aan bij het thema van de oratie over kennisdynamica op 27 juni
2008 van prof. P.F. Wouters. Paul Wouters is wetenschappelijk directeur van de Erasmus Studio (www.eur.nl/erasmusstudio) en programmaleider van de Virtual Knowledge Studio (www.virtualknowledgestudio.nl) in Amsterdam.

Organisatie: in samenwerking met The Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences (KNAW) en de Universiteitsbibliotheek EUR.

Digitaal dromen over toekomst van wetenschap
Met de hulp van nieuwe media kunnen er allerlei nieuwe creatieve dwarsverbanden gelegd worden tussen de verschillende wetenschappelijke disciplines, aldus prof.dr. Paul Wouters, bijzonder hoogleraar Kennisdynamica aan de Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam. Wouters ontwierp een website die de dromen van onderzoekers over de toekomst van de wetenschap moet samenbrengen.

Op vrijdag 27 juni 2008 presenteert Paul Wouters de website www.researchdreams.nl tijdens zijn oratie Dolend dromen van het wereldbrein. De leerstoel Kennisdynamica wordt gefinancierd door de Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen.
Artikel in de Volkskrant 5 juli 2008

Bas van Heur appointed as Postdoctoral Researcher at VKS

He will be working on Cities and Citizens Writing History and Shaping the Future

Duration: 1 April 2008 – 31 March 2012

Bas is a postdoctoral researcher for the Maastricht Virtual Knowledge Studio within the project ‘Cities and Citizens Writing History and Shaping the Future’. His research for this project builds on earlier work in the fields of cultural history, geography, media and cultural studies as well as urban studies, but continues these interests in an explicitly transdisciplinary setting. Having studied at Utrecht University (MA Cultural History, 2004) and the Humboldt University in Berlin, he started his PhD in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Relocating to Berlin, he was a DFG-Fellow at the Center for Metropolitan Studies and recently submitted his PhD dissertation (‘Networks of Aesthetic Production and the Urban Political Economy’) at the Department of Earth Sciences of the Freie Universität in Berlin. He has also taught various courses in media and cultural studies at Utrecht University and Goldsmiths College.

His empirical research interests are diverse and wide-ranging, but always focus on the emergent tensions between political economic transformations and cultural and aesthetic practices. So far, this has led to research on transnational ethnic conflicts (MA thesis), music networks and the creative industries (PhD) and urban branding, local histories and digitalization (for the current post-doc). Theoretically, he is interested in those approaches that try to answer the general questions concerning socio-spatial change, while remaining sensitive to the differentiation of the contemporary world. This includes work on the regulation approach, state theory, critical geography, network theories, governance and governmentality, knowledge and innovation, historical sociology and cultural political economy. He has also become increasingly interested in methodological debates in the field of critical realism and complexity studies as well as research on the temporality and historicity of social life.

Challenging the Digital Imperative

Sally Wyatt gave her inaugural lecture called Challenging the Digital Imperative on Friday 28 March 2008 at Maastricht University. In the lecture, attended by over one hundred people, she first reflected on the digital imperative, on the everyday use and non-use of digital technologies, on the ways in which health information is mediated and on the inaugural lecture as a form of knowledge representation and performance. She then looked ahead to what these mean for the work of the Maastricht Virtual Knowledge Studio. She talked about what digitization means for what counts as valid knowledge within and between academic disciplines as well as within and between social spheres such as politics, healthcare, transport and cultural heritage. She concluded by returning to questions of non-use and the digital imperative. Full text can be downloaded.

Stefan Dormans appointed as Postdoctoral Researcher at VKS
Stefan Dormans started in February 2008 as post doc researcher on the VKS-project Social-technological aspects of collaboratory projects in social and economic history. The project entails an ethnographic study of the practices, risks and opportunities of the implementation of collaboratories (virtual research environments) in the humanities. The selected collaboratories are mainly organized by the International Institute of Social History and center around specific data and research topics, such as wages and prices, strikes, and trade unions. The project focuses on the sociological and organisational, as well as on the technological dimensions of these collaboratories. One of the aims of the project is to compare the results to findings on collaboratory practices in the (life) sciences (see recent and current projects for more information on the project).

Stefan studied Human Geography at the University of Nijmegen. From 2001 until 2007, he was both a junior lecturer and a PhD-student in urban and narrative geographies at the Human Geography department. His PhD is titled Narrating the City. Urban tales from Tilburg and Almere and comprises a narrative study that brings together a multiplicity of voices from two Dutch cities. Diverse locally grounded urban tales are juxtaposed with the life stories of urban dwellers and the academic stories of urban theorists, to create a space for fruitful dialogue between the various voices of the city. The narrative analysis of these tales brings to light the ways in which many different voices can integrate in complex and often contradictory ways to build a previously unavailable image of the city.

Matthijs Kouw appointed as PhD researcher at the Maastricht-VKS
He will be working on Simulation and the Vulnerability of Technological Culture
Duration 1 Jan 2008 – 31 Dec 2011

Matthijs Kouw is a PhD researcher for the M-VKS – a collaboration between the Virtual Knowledge Studio in Amsterdam, and the Maastricht University. His current research focuses on the ways in which simulations enable knowledge of complex systems.

By studying the epistemological, historical, and social dimensions of simulations, his research will improve understanding of how different social groups deploy simulations, and the extent in which modeling and simulation are influenced by new technological developments, such as interconnected data sources and increases in computational power. In this regard, simulations are understood as being both harmful societal prostheses that make contemporary societies more dependent on technology, and innovative instruments with emancipatory effects due to their ability to make societies more resilient to external influences.

Matthijs obtained his MA in Philosophy from the University of Amsterdam (2005), where he focused on philosophy of science, philosophy of technology, (new) media theory, and contemporary French thought (Bergson, Simondon, Deleuze, Alliez). His thesis developed a conceptualization of technology in the work of Deleuze and Guattari along the lines of an early essay on Simondon by Deleuze.

An additional MSc in Science and Technology Studies at the University of Amsterdam (2006) culminated in a thesis discussing the incursion of the Internet into the material world – the so-called ‘Internet of Things’. Epistemological repercussions of this phenomenon stress the need for certain innovations in the realm of data modeling and visualization: rather than emphasizing states of affairs, visual representations need to affirm the informational multi-dimensionality of the material-informational world by articulating inclinations and probabilities rather than states of affairs.

After spending some time working in the field of innovation policy and software development, Matthijs decided to further pursue an academic trajectory that met his desire to understand the ways in which technology and society are intertwined. He is currently engaging the field of simulation and modeling along the aforementioned lines under the supervision of prof. dr. Sally Wyatt and prof. dr. ir. Wiebe Bijker.

Spring 2008 Postdoc Fellow
We are happy to announce the new VKS Post-doctoral fellow for Spring 2008: Dr Kyriaki Papageorgiou. She is a recent graduate from the Cultural Anthropology Programme of the University of California, Irvine, and has pursued extensive fieldwork in Cairo. Her work addresses the intersection of modernity with tradition, and the changing boundaries between science and religion. During her fellowship, Kyriaki will work on the topic of ‘Time, Space, Cyberspace and Beyond: towards a sense of the field’ and further analyze the mediated knowledge practices that figure in her fieldwork. She will join us from February, for a period of three months.

Sally Wyatt professor of Digital Cultures in Development at Maastricht University
As of 1st November 2007, Sally Wyatt has been appointed professor of Digital Cultures in Development at Maastricht University, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. She is also Director of the Maastricht Virtual Knowledge Studio, which was inaugurated by UM President Jo Ritzen and KNAW Director Theo Mulder on 14th October 2007. Prof. Wyatt will give her inaugural lecture on 28th March 2008.

Paul Wouters professor of Knowledge Dynamics, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Press statement 27 November 2007
As of 1 November 2007 Paul Wouters has been appointed professor of Knowledge Dynamics with the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. The position is funded by the Royal Academy of Sciences (KNAW). Wouters is scientific director of the Erasmus Studio and programme leader of the KNAW Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

More information: http://www.eur.nl/nieuws/detail/article/3102/

Scientometrics
Dr. Andrea Scharnhorst has accepted an invitation to join the editorial board of international journal Scientometrics.
Link to Scientometrics

First VKS post-doctoral fellowship:
We are delighted that Sebastian Olma has joined us for a short period, starting in the middle of August. Sebastian studied Political Science, Sociology and Philosophy at Leipzig, Rutgers and Binghamton. He wrote a Ph.D.thesis on organisational mutations in contemporary capitalism (Vital Organising: Capitalism’s Ontological Turn and the Role of Management Consulting) at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College. A regular contributor to Theory, Culture & Society as well as Mute Magazine, he has published on Vitalism, Autonomist Marxism, and questions of temporality and creativity in contemporary capitalism. He will continue on these themes while at the VKS.

Paul Wouters is visiting professor at the University of Washington (Seattle, US) from 27 April until May 10. He has been invited by the Honors Program, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, the Department of Communication, and the Information School. Paul has given a lecture at the Simpson Center on May 1 discussing the way controversies about the application of ICT in research can be studied as a struggle in which new scholarly identities are shaped. On May 4, he has given a lecture at the iSchool about the roles information scientists can play in the humanities and social sciences. Paul teaches in the Honors Program and participates in PhD classes in communication science (led by Kirsten Foot).

Matt Ratto has been appointed Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Science, Technology, and Society, Santa Clara University, (http://www.scu.edu/sts/).

Katie Vann has been appointed as Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Center for
Science, Technology and Society at Santa Clara University, directed by Geoffrey Bowker.

Andrea Scharnhorst and Paul Wouters have been appointed as Visiting Professor of Cybermetrics at the University of Wolverhampton for the period of 3 years, starting 1 April 2006.

Scientific Advisory Board
April 2006 The Scientific Advisory Board of the Virtual Knowledge Studio has been appointed by the KNAW.