I’m on sabbatical from teaching at the University of Bergen this semester, and am spending the autumn here at MIT. Hooray!

It’s a dream opportunity to get to hang out with so many fascinating scholars. I’m at Comparative Media Studies/Writing, where William Uricchio has done work in algorithmic images that meshes beautifully with my machine vision project plans, and where a lot of the other research is also very relevant to my interests. I love being able to see old friends like Nick Montfort, look forwards to making new friends and catching up with old conference buddies. And just looking at the various event calendars makes me dizzy to think of all the ideas I’ll get to learn about.

Nancy Baym and Tarleton Gillespie at Microsoft Research’s Social Media Collective have also invited me to attend their weekly meetings, and the couple of meetings I’ve been at so far have been really inspiring. On Tuesday I got to hear Ysabel Gerrad speaking about her summer project, where she used Tumblr, Pinterest and Instagram’s recommendation engines to find content about eating disorders that the platforms have ostensibly banned. You can’t search for eating disorder-related hashtags, but there are other ways to find it, and if you look at that kind of content, the platforms offer you more, in quite jarring ways. Nancy tweeted this screenshot from one of Ysabel’s slides – “Ideas you might love” is maybe not the best introduction to the themes listed…

Thinking about ways people work around censorship could clearly be applied to many other groups, both countercultures that we (and I know we is a slippery term) may want to protect and criminals we may want to stop. There are some ethical issues to work out here – but certainly the methodology of using the platform’ recommendation systems to find content is powerful.

Yesterday I dropped by the 4S conference: Society for Social Studies of Science. It’s my first time at one of these conferences, but it’s big, with lots of parallel sessions and lots of people. I could only attend one day, but it’s great to get a taste of it. I snapchatted bits of the sessions I attended if you’re interested.

Going abroad on a sabbatical means dealing with a lot of practical details, and we’ve spent a lot of time just getting things organised. We’re actually living in Providence, which is an hour’s train ride away. Scott is affiliated with Brown, and we thought Providence might be a more livable place to be. It was pretty complicated just getting the kids registered for school – they needed extra vaccinations, since Norway has a different schedule, and they had to have a language test and then they weren’t assigned to the school three blocks from our house but will be bussed to a school across town. School doesn’t even start until September 5, so Scott and I are still taking turns spending time with the kids and doing work. We’re also trying to figure out how to organize child care for the late afternoon and early evening seminars and talks that seem to be standard in the US. Why does so little happen during normal work hours? Or, to be more precise, during the hours of the day when kids are in school? I’m very happy that Microsoft Research at least seems to schedule their meetings for the day time, and a few events at MIT are during the day. I suppose it allows people who are working elsewhere to attend, which is good, but it makes it hard for parents.

I’ll share more of my sabbatical experiences as I get more into the groove here. Do let me know if there are events or people around here that I should know about!