Project Details

The battle over representations and perceptions of war is transformed in an era of billions of images, videos and other digital content of war being produced, shared, edited, liked, linked, fabricated and deleted on smartphones, social media platforms and messaging apps. 

War in the twenty-first century is participative. People can record and document war, and unwittingly and deliberately transmit data points that can generate targets on the battlefield. Smart devices are both a way to represent war and a node in its practice.

This project will produce new interdisciplinary understanding of how and why digital participation is transforming how individuals and societies (including militaries and states) fight, experience, and understand (perceive, explain, and de/legitimise) warfare. 

It will illuminate how smart devices, apps and platforms enable a wide range of actors – militaries, states, journalists, NGOs, private companies, soldiers, citizens, victims – to participate in warfare in an immediate and ongoing fashion.

At the same time, this project engages the revolution in machine-learning and AI methods which enable mining and measuring of online behaviour at scale, and the illumination of multiple modes of communication (messages, images, video, memes and emojiis) that together shape participation and meaning in warfare. 

In experimenting with AI and machine learning methods, it will break new interdisciplinary ground (social and computing science, art, visual, media and communication studies) to test what kinds of knowledge about twenty-first century participative war (how it is fought, experienced, contested, legitimized, and remembered, for multiple actors) can be acquired and used.

It takes the hybrid messenger service/social media platform of Telegram as its principal case study, an unbounded ‘new war front’, central to the waging and experiencing of the 2022- Russian war against Ukraine.Access all areas

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For queries about the project and scholarships, please contact the Principal Investigator and Supervisor, Professor Andrew Hoskins andrew.hoskins@ed.ac.uk

For queries about the application process, please contact Toni Jenkins pgresearch.sps@ed.ac.uk