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, asthe networks also may be made up of a news story, document, leak, database, 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. Some of the tools by Rogers and colleagues were featured at the ZKM, in the exhibition, entitled "Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy," curated by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. More recently, Rogers and colleagues have developed a suite of tools for the capture and study of Web data. The tools form the infrastructure of the Digital Methods Initiative, which specialises in repurposing online devices (and 'methods of the medium') for research that goes beyond the study of online culture only. 

Biographical Sketch    
Richard Rogers is University Professor and 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), Research Fellow in Design and Media at the Jan van Eyck Academy (Maastricht), and 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, Soros Foundation, Open Society Institute, Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Mondriaan Foundation, MacArthur Foundation and the Gates Foundation. Recently, he was Annenberg Fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and Visiting Scholar in Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  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 book Digital Methods (with MIT Press, 2013) was awarded the best book of the year by the International Communication Association (ICA) in 2014. Rogers co-authored Issue Mapping for an Ageing Europe (Amsterdam University Press, 2015) with Natalia Sanchez and Aleksandra Kil. His most recent book, Doing Digital Methods, is with Sage (2019). He is currently working on the book project, Critical Analytics for Social Media.

Google Scholar page, https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=pt6XuMYAAAAJ
Rogers Twitter handle @richardrogers