Digital Methods Summer School 2026

Visual AI for internet research? On and beyond slop

29 June - 3 July 2026

Everyday location:
New Media & Digital Culture
University of Amsterdam
Turfdraagsterpad 9
1012 XT Amsterdam

Digital Methods Summer School and Data Sprint: Call for Participation

Visual AI for internet research? On and beyond slop

This year’s Summer School builds on the theme of using chatbots for internet research, particularly visual AI. Slop currently dominates the discussion of visual AI, especially given its routine use at the top of the US government, be it to denigrate street protestors demonstrating against policing policies or to depict the chief executive in a variety of costumes from the papal to the kingly. It’s also associated with other vocabulary attached to the effects of the deployment of generative AI in image and video: from brain rot to rage and engagement bait, including its accompanying creative and dark participatory cultures.

To date the exploration of chatbots for internet research has been related to text rather than still and moving images. It has included how-to’s and research-with-AI critique concerning prompting, annotation, classification, bias, guardrail sensitivity as well as ‘reference anxiety’, or how chatbots remix sources to create new lineages of ideas and concepts. But how to consider the work visual AI can do for research across the social sciences and the humanities?

One approach — studying its biases as well as using it as a prism for societal ones more generally — has been undertaken through creative prompting and reverse prompting. How to determine its offensiveness, sensitivities as well as hierarchies of concern? Apart from just prompting it, visual AI proclivities may also be teased out through inserting their output into content moderation APIs as well as other trained AI. But can visual AI be otherwise repurposed? The annual Digital Methods Summer School takes up this question for visual AI both for the frontier models as well as others in cross-cultural perspective.

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 summerschool [at] digitalmethods.net. Notifications of acceptance are sent 1-2 weeks after application. Final deadline for applications is 22 May 2026. The full program and schedule of the Summer School are available on or about 22 June 2026.

Tuition Fees, Completion Certificates & Accommodations

The fee for the Digital Methods Summer School 2026 is EUR 795, and upon completion all participants receive transcripts and certificates (worth 6 ECTS). To complete the Summer 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 3 August, or four weeks after the end of the Summer 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 Summer 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/
Use discount code: DIGIMETH20

To avoid disappointment, please contact them as early as possible.

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). The 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 #DMI26 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 Summer School is part of the EU Project, SoBigData++.