The Methodological Unit organizes a weekly Brown Bag Seminar to highlight novel methodological approaches in humanities and social sciences. The idea of the meetings is to introduce methodological innovations and cutting-edge research in various disciplines in an easily accessible manner and have an interdisciplinary discussion in an easy-going atmosphere over lunch. Bring your own lunch, we bring fresh methodological topics!
Every Wednesday at 12.15.
Please note: Weekly Brown Bag Seminars will be back from the summer break on 28th of August and will be held every Wednesday.
You are welcome to join us at seminar room 524, Fabianinkatu 24 A, 5th floor, or online via Zoom.
There will be a 20-minute introduction to the methodological theme, followed by an open discussion of 40 minutes. The seminars are open to everybody. We expect a multidisciplinary and methodologically curious audience from different faculties and units of the central campus. The language of the meetings can be Finnish or English.
The most important prerequisite for participation is not methodological expertise, but an open mind towards new methodological innovations and discussion across methodological and disciplinary boundaries.
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The operationalization on the concept of poverty into a poverty indicator has been regarded as one of the most difficult aspects of empirical poverty research. There exists a broad consensus on what poverty is; however, there is considerable disagreement regarding how it is best measured. During the last 120 years of modern poverty research, several different poverty indicators have been developed, but none are universally accepted. Debate about the best ways of measuring poverty would be futile if the indicators produced similar estimates about the prevalence and concentration of poverty. The presentation gives an overview on different poverty indicators and the results that these indicators produce.
Lauri Mäkinen holds a PhD in Social Policy from University of Turku, where he defended his thesis “What is needed at the acceptable minimum? Studies on the operationalisation of the concept of poverty”. Lauri’s research has focused on poverty, child poverty and especially poverty measurement. Before his current position at the Kela Research Unit, Lauri worked as a university teacher at the University of Turku and as a project researcher at Itla Children’s foundation.
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Throughout decades of technological change in internet protocols and digital platforms, the production and circulation of online content genres like e-mail chains, viral videos, exploitable images and copypasta has been consistently theorized as a continuation and expansion of vernacular creativity—a digital folklore. Recent advancements in machine learning applications have brought new forms of automation to the forefront of online interactions, exposing users of social media platforms and apps to different and unfamiliar kinds of algorithmic logics, which range from the curatorial biases of recommender systems and content analytics to the expansive possibilities offered by large language models and synthetic media. All these forms of automation are not only shaping how content circulates, but also how it is produced, and this is already evident in new genres of vernacular creativity that emerge in response to algorithmic tools and their logics.
In the first part of this presentation, I formalize a definition of algorithmic folklore - the outcome of vernacular creative practices grounded in new forms of collaboration between human users and automated systems - and sketch a typology of the sort of content that is likely to dominate digital ecosystems to come. In the second part, I discuss the possible methodological approaches to algorithmic folklore, focusing on ethnographic and experimental modes of qualitative inquiry which can enable a more critical and reflexive interaction with these new computational actors.
Gabriele de Seta is, technically, a sociologist. He is a Researcher at the University of Bergen, where he leads the ALGOFOLK project (“Algorithmic folklore: The mutual shaping of vernacular creativity and automation”) funded by a Trond Mohn Foundation Starting Grant (2024-2028). Gabriele holds a PhD from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica and at the University of Bergen, where he was part of the ERC-funded project “Machine Vision in Everyday Life”. His research work, grounded on qualitative and ethnographic methods, focuses on digital media practices, sociotechnical infrastructures and vernacular creativity in the Chinese-speaking world. He is also interested in experimental, creative and collaborative approaches to knowledge-production.
Click here for practical information on the Brown Bag Seminar events.