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Research Sketch

Prof. Richard Rogers is a Web epistemologist, an area of study where the main claim is that the Web is a knowledge culture distinct from other media. Rogers concentrates on the research opportunities that would have been improbable or impossible without the Internet. His research involves studying and building info-tools. He studies and makes use of the adjudicative or ‘recommender’ cultures of the Web that help to determine the reputation of information as well as organizations. The most well-known tool Rogers has developed with his colleagues is the Issue Crawler, a server-side Web crawler, co-link machine and graph visualizer. It locates what Rogers and colleagues have dubbed “issue networks” on the Web – densely interlinked clutches of NGOs, funders, governmental agencies, think tanks and lone scientists or scientific groups, working in the same issue area. Unlike social networks, issue networks do not privilege individuals and groups, as the networksalso may be made up of a news story,adocument, a leak, a database, an image or other such items. Taken together these actors and ‘argument objects’ serve as a means to understand the state of an issue either in snapshots or over time. Rogers and colleagues also developed the Election Issue Tracker, a pre-RSS newspaper query machine employed in the Netherlands to understand whether media aided the rise of populism. Recently, Rogers and collaborators have embarked on building the Issue Scraper, which undertakes comparative analysis of the newssphere and the blogosphere. The lead question is: What is the quality of the blogosphere? Other tools Rogers and colleagues have developed include the Web Issue Index of Civil Society, also known as the Issue Ticker, where the campaigning behavior of NGOs is monitored. The Index is a novel form of attention cycle research, showing whether attention to issues is rising or falling, according to civil society (as opposed to the newspapers). Some of the tools by Rogers and colleagues were featured at the ZKM, in the 2005 exhibition, entitled “Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy,” curated by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel.

Biographical Sketch
Richard Rogers holds the Chair in New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He is also Director of the Govcom.org Foundation (Amsterdam) and the Digital Methods Initiative. Previously, Rogers worked as Senior Advisor to Infodrome, the Dutch Governmental Information Society initiative. He also has worked as a Researcher and Tutor in Computer Related Design at the Royal College of Art (London), as Research Fellow in Design and Media at the Jan van Eyck Academy (Maastricht), and as a Researcher in Technology Assessment at the Science Center Berlin (WZB) and in Strategic Computing in the Public Sector at Harvard University (JFK School). He earned his PhD and MSc in Science Studies at the University of Amsterdam,and his B.A. in Government and German at Cornell University. Over the past decade, Rogers and the Govcom.org Foundation have received research grants from the Dutch Government (the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science), the Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. Most recently, he was Annenberg Fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Rogers is author of Technological Landscapes (Royal College of Art, London, 1999), editor of Preferred Placement: Knowledge Politics on the Web (Jan van Eyck Press, 2000), and author of Information Politics on the Web (MIT Press, 2004/2005), "the 2005 Best Information Science Book of the Year Award presented by the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST)." He is also author of The End of the Virtual (Amsterdam University Press, 2009). His forthcoming book on Digital Methods is with MIT Press.

Publications (new media books, articles, maps, info-graphics, movies)

Digital Methods Initiative - Research into the "natively digital"

Issue Crawler -WebNetwork Location Software

Issue Ticker - Web Issue Index of Civl Society

The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods, Prof. Inaugural Speech / Oratie