The application of digital methods to internet-related research will be one of the central themes of the conference “Situating Digital Methods,” which will be presented by Professor Richard Rogers of the University of Amsterdam on October 22nd, starting at 5:00 p.m., in the Carangola Auditorium of the Faculty of Philosophy and Human Sciences at UFMG.

The conference is open to the general public, with registration through the Even3 platform. Certificates of participation will be issued. The conference will be in English, without translation.

In his summary, Richard Rogers explains that he will historically and theoretically contextualize the perspective of digital methods, situating them as part of the “computational turn” in internet-related research. According to him, this is a distinct approach to big data that contrasts, ontologically and epistemologically, with virtual or digitized methods, understood as the importation of methods from the humanities and social sciences to the web.

Drawing on his extensive experience as director of the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), at the conference, Richard Rogers will explore the specificities of how digital methods operate, as they enable the study of the “natively digital,” based on the possibilities of producing findings or research results grounded in the specificities of online environments (online groundedness). To develop his argument, Rogers will present reflections on how to study Wikipedia both as a cultural perspective and as an indicator of controversy.

The conference is organized by the Sociotechnical Network Studies Research Group (R-EST/UFMG), in partnership with the UFMG Graduate Program in Social Communication (PPGCOM), the Democracy and Disinformation Studies Network (REDD), and the Darcy Ribeiro Chair: Sovereignty, Education, and Politics, both initiatives of the Institute for Advanced Transdisciplinary Studies (IEAT) at UFMG. The visit is financially supported by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel Foundation (CAPES).

About the guest
Richard Rogers is Professor of New Media and Digital Culture in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He is the founder and director of the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI). His publications include Digital Methods (MIT Press, 2013), The Propagation of Misinformation in Social Media: A Cross-platform Analysis (Amsterdam University Press, 2023), and, co-authored with Tommaso Venturini, Digital Methods: A Short Introduction (Polity, 2025).

About the IEAT Darcy Ribeiro Chair
The IEAT Darcy Ribeiro Chair: Sovereignty, Education, and Politics, with the support of Federal Deputy Patrus Ananias, pays tribute to Darcy Ribeiro for his decisive contributions to the fields of anthropology, education, and Brazilian culture, and as founder of the University of Brasília, where a new conception of interdisciplinary knowledge emerged.