Since the beginning of this
academic year, I have been a Postgraduate Representative on the committee of
the RGS-IBG Digital Geographies Research Group (DGRG). The DGRG brings together scholars and practitioners from a
wide range of disciplines, whose work engages with the relationship between the
digital and geography.
As part of our work within the
DGRG committee, we’ve been thinking about ways we can better provide a platform
for sharing the research that is happening in our community.
One popular and successful feature
of DGRG events in recent years has been our ‘digital shorts’. These are 2 – 5-minute
videos made by researchers to give an overview of an aspect of their work.
Digital shorts have proven
particularly popular during the pandemic, as a simple and quick way to communicate
research that does not require too much work from the presenter. There were 13
shorts presented during last year’s DGRG Annual Symposium and 11 created for the DGRG-sponsored session
Digital Geographies and the Everyday at the RGS-IBG Postgraduate Forum Midterm
Conference earlier this year. Other research groups such as the Participatory
Geographies Research Group have recently even begun to use the digital short
format for their own events.
Following the utility and
popularity of the videos in these events, we considered whether we could create
an ongoing programme of digital shorts, as a way to share
the diversity of digital geographies research with a public audience on a
regular basis.
This idea has led to the launch
of our new Work in Progress series on YouTube (also linked at the bottom of this post). This series will feature digital geographers
at different career stages and from different disciplinary and methodological
backgrounds discussing a wide range of current research.
A couple of weeks ago, we
released our first digital short by Phil Jones, discussing the opportunities and challenges of
analysing VR content.
Today, our second video has been
released. Created by Jeremy Crampton, it discusses his research interests in facial
recognition technology and its implications for surveillance in urban life.
We are aiming to publish a new
digital short roughly every fortnight from now on.
In the meantime, if you’re interested in hearing more about digital geographies research, you’re in luck. Our annual symposium ‘Where Next for Digital Geographies? Pathways and Prospects’ is taking place online this Wednesday 14th July and is completely free to attend. You can find the full programme and Eventbrite page to book your ticket here.
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