What are your ongoing research projects in SHAPE about? 

I am a post-doctoral researcher in the newly created SHAPE centre at Aarhus University, within the project Digital Activism. I explore modes of digital activism through search infrastructures, revealing users’ agentic capabilities when searching online. I am investigating Google’s ranking and ‘personalisation’ by capturing screenshots as well as searching for alternatives, for example the creation of a European open and public web index. (https://shape.au.dk/en/news/article/artikel/ethics-of-search-infrastructures-blogpost-by-shape-researcher-renee-ridgway) I am also researching the ‘future of search’ in regard to the proliferation of chatbots, such as ChatGPT and what this means for search.  

What is your professional background and primary research domain? 

I am a researcher, educator and media artist based in Aarhus, DK, having studied at the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA)/Brown University, Piet Zwart Institute/ Plymouth University (MA). Before I began my PhD on searching online databases with search engines, I searched physical libraries and archives in various countries (IN, NL, DE, BE, UK, US) and indigenous territories as public sources of information for my artistic/media research projects that have been exhibited internationally as video installations, photographs, drawings, prints and objects in museums and biennials, as online interactive media, interventions in public spaces and as printed publications. I am also a dedicated and highly motivated educator, having taught contemporary art and new media at several universities/art academies in the Netherlands and abroad. 

During my PhD I was a 3-year fellow at Copenhagen Business School in the Management, Philosophy and Politics department and a Research Associate at Leuphana University’s CDC (Centre for Digital Cultures), Digital Cultures Research Lab (DCRL) in Lüneburg, DE, financed by the Volkswagen Stiftung. Situated at the interstices of organisation studies, media theory and artistic research, my monograph Re:search - the Personalised Subject vs. the Anonymous User (2021) explores the ‘personalisation’ of Google Search and ‘reimagines search’ with the anonymity browser Tor (The Onion Router). More recently, my research domains include (feminist) STS, media and communication studies, digital ethnography and software studies. 

What future projects do you have in the pipeline? 

The past months I have been completing an article, ‘Deleterious consequences: How Google’s original sociotechnical affordances shaped “trusted users” in era of surveillance capitalism’ for the special issue, ‘The State of Google Critique and Intervention’ in Big Data & Society (DOI: 10.1177/20539517231171058). Currently I am working on a research article entitled ‘Critical feminist screenshotting: creating healthier information search ecosystems through visualisation’ for submission to ‘Healthier Information Ecosystems’, a special issue in JASIST (Journal of the Association for Information and Society).  

Additionally, I will be continuing with the Ethics Working Group, where we are developing an ethical framework, or a ‘values compass’, for open internet search as well as initiating public discourse and awareness about ethical search at stages along the way. In addition to online meetings, I will be attending the upcoming ELSA (Ethical, Legal, Societal Aspects) workshop of Open Web Search on-site in Graz, AT on April 19-20, where we plan to formulate our thoughts and ideas into a position paper and, eventually, a journal article. I will (again) be presenting my research on search at the yearly Open Search Symposium (#ossym2023) conference at CERN, CH during October 4-6, 2023. 

I am also part of a collective in Aarhus called Code & Share, which meets once a month on Saturday afternoons, organized around a chosen topic with invited guests by the artist/programmer Anders Visti. During the coming months, members of Code & Share will organise the yearly PCD (Programming Community Day) in September at a location in Aarhus where around 100 people come together to work on coding skills and invited artists and programmers will make presentations of their work. This year’s theme is (search) infrastructures, entitled ‘INTRA’ and will involve various artists, artists’ collectives and programmers who have made data visualisations with Processing software, or facilitate ‘feminist servers’ and are coding alternative infrastructures. Everyone is welcome to attend! 

Some of my planned upcoming presentations at conferences include Critical Feminist Screenshotting at AI and Archives: Exploration, Possibilities and Challenges, organised by Sussex Humanities Lab, Brighton, UK and Feminist Stack. April 27th, 2023. I will be conducting a workshop Critical Feminist Screenshotting Workshop at HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory), June 8-10, 2023, in collaboration with Pratt Institute, NYC, US. I will also present ‘Ecological ‘matters of care’? Capturing mental therapy chatbot ‘intra-actions’ through screenshotting’ at the Arts & Humanities in Digital Transition conference, organized by IC (Institute of Communication) NOVA, July 6th-7th, 2023 in Lisbon, PT. 

The coming months I will be applying for grants in Denmark and internationally with partners, as well as completing a book chapter ‘Matters of care? Exploring mental therapy chatbots through a critical ethnography of the self’, for ‘Digital Futures in the Making’, to be published with Routledge/University of Hamburg, DE.