Grad Prog talks 4 June: PhD progression panels // Big Social Data

Please find below details for two talks on the graduate programme next Wednesday-in the first aimed at postgraduate researchers, Benjamin Halligan will give advice on preparing presentations for assessments and Vivas, and the second one at 4PM Mark Cote will be talking on the uses and misuses of Big Social Data...all are very welcome. Wednesday 4th June 2014, Media City room 2.20 from 3PM   Internal Speaker: Dr Benjamin Halligan (Director of Postgraduate Research, College of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Salford) “Slide Away”: PowerPoint Presentations and PhD Panels (3-4pm) This session will consider the do's and don'ts of PowerPoint presentations for IAs, IEs and Vivas. There is a minimum expectation that such presentations will be delivered by the candidate, but there is little consideration as to how they are to introduce, summarise, reflect and enhance the work under examination. Often a badly conceived and executed PowerPoint presentation will ensure that the candidate gets off to exactly the wrong kind of start! This session will provide some strategies for a good use of a PowerPoint presentation, in the context of a discussion about the challenges of talking about often highly complex research and analysis.

External Speaker: Dr Mark Cote (Kings College, London) Big Social Data: 'This Initial Supersaturation of Being?' (4-5pm) We generate data at an unprecedented pace at virtually every moment in our lives as ‘digital humans.’ Exposure of NSA/GCHQ programmes reveal that metadata is used to target ‘drone assassinations’ while the big social data we generate has become a key engine of growth for digital capital. Is this the dystopian end to our digital future? Are there radical political possibilities within the data we generate? This talk will examine the algorithmic practices that increasingly proscribe life, and consider how they might be rearticulated to create new kinds of potential through new relations of big social data.   Mark Coté is Programme Director of the MA in Digital Culture and Society at King’s College London. He has written extensively on social media, autonomist marxism, and the human and technology. He is Co-Investigator on the AHRC funded research project ‘Our Data Ourselves’ which examines ‘big social data’.