Hello all, The call is out for the upcoming Digital Methods Winter School. Would be pleased to welcome you to Amsterdam. Best regards Richard Rogers Digital Methods Winter School and Data Sprint 2026 Media Studies, University of Amsterdam 5-9 January 2026 Call for Participation Research-with-AI Critique The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), Amsterdam, is holding its annual Winter School on 'Research-with-AI critique'. The format is that of a (social media and web) data sprint, with tutorials as well as hands-on work for telling stories with data. There is also a programme of keynote speakers. It is intended for advanced Master's students, PhD candidates and motivated scholars who would like to work on (and complete) a digital methods project in an intensive workshop setting. Just a part of the pipeline Chatbots have become a ‘part of the pipeline’ in a number of research methodologies in the social sciences and humanities, contributing to formatting, summaries, annotation, labeling and the generation and use of synthetic data. One question is how to go about using chatbots in the first place for such research tasks, and make use of the many best practice guides that have been shared across the research landscape. These guides contain steps about how to prompt and query chatbots properly. But they also advise that the chatbots explain themselves and that researchers validate their outputs and claims. How does one gain confidence in how the chatbots work for the researchers? In other words, at each of these steps, one could consider how to ground chatbot findings, raising a series of questions such as when and now to undertake a manual and/or multiple chatbot comparison. Digital methods and AI Taking such a series of steps is in keeping with a digital methods outlook that would ask, what does this medium have to offer, and how can those offerings be repurposed for social and cultural research? And under which conditions can the findings be grounded in the medium? But it would also ask, what are AI native or medium methods? Can chatbots be used as societal and cultural reflections such as the promise of 'synthetic data'? How does the medium or the platform affect the data? Here is where guardrail auditing comes into the picture. How to detect the guardrails that have been put up by the chatbots so that they can interact with users without offence? How do they affect the quality of the data? The Winter School is dedicated to how to undertake research with AI through a critical, digital methods lens. 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 and a 100-word bio to winterschool [at] digitalmethods.net. Notifications of acceptance are sent within 1 week after application. Final deadline for the rolling applications is 12 December 2025. The full program and schedule of the Winter School are available by 19 December 2025. Full call for participation and all additional information is here: https://www.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/WinterSchool2026 Prof. Richard Rogers Media Studies University of Amsterdam T. Venturini & R. Rogers (2025) Digital Methods: A Short Introduction. Polity. R. Rogers (2024), Doing Digital Methods, Los Angeles: Sage. 2nd edition. R. Rogers (ed.) (2023). The Propagation of Misinformation in Social Media: A Cross-platform Analysis. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. R. Rogers (2023) Métodos Digitales. Guadalajara: ITESO - Universidad Jesuita de Guadalajara.