Sybille Lammes new professor of New Media and Digital Culture
Sybille Lammes is leaving Warwick University in Britain to research digital culture in daily life at Leiden University. She will start as professor New Media and Digital Culture on September 1st 2017
Digitalisation
“The continuity and discontinuity that digitalisation brings to daily life is interesting”, says Lammes. “On the one hand daily life has changed dramatically because of digital technologies. On the other, some things remain the same. We still speak to each other, even though we now often use the mobile phone or social media to do so.”
When she looks at digital culture, Lammes refrains from a judgmental perspective on the positive and negative effects of digitalisation. “I’m mostly interested in how digital culture invites people to do things in a different way.”
Interdisciplinary
Lammes’ work is interdisciplinary. She often steps over the borders of Humanities to work with cartographers and social scientists. For her current project, the app Playfields, she uses cartography to approach scientific fieldwork in a different way, by using digital, mobile maps.
Students using the app, can do fieldwork research outside of the classroom while receiving assignments remotely. “Playful learning”, Lammes calls it, meant to develop new methodologies and promote thinking outside of the box.
Teaching
Next to continuing her research at the Leiden Institute for Arts in Society, Lammes will also teach in study programmes that cover digitalisation in society. Such as International Studies, Arts, Media & Society and Art History. When Playfields is ready for use, she would like to implement this in her teaching at Leiden University as well.