Dr. Sabine Niederer is Professor of Visual Methodologies with the Visual Methodologies Collective at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences Faculty of Digital Media and Creative Industries, specialises in developing visual methods for social and cultural research.

Research

Sabine is specialised in the study of online content, and online images in particular. She is rooted in the humanities and the arts, and interested in the visual language of social and cultural issues, such as sustainability and climate change.

Motivation

Developing novel techniques for visual and digital research with a special focus on images is an exciting and relatively new field of research. It is highly motivating to attune these techniques to the urgent issues of our times, and train our students to use these methods to get a better sense of the contributions they can make to their field and to society.

Current research projects

Sabine is currently working on an array of visual methods materials, from a book, to a teaching toolkit, and formats for participatory applied research. She is also working on the project Climate Futures, an experiment in (machine) learning from climate fiction in literature, indigineous stories, visual arts, and Hollywood cinema.

Furthermore, Sabine and colleagues participate in various applied research projects with other research groups and external partners, including CAMERA (on the urban foodscape of young people in Nieuw-West, headed by Health & Environment), STEC (on tools for citizen empowerment, headed by Play & Civic Media), and EMPOWER 2.0 (on empowering tools for the European energy transition, headed by Urban Analytics).

Current teaching activities

Sabine is responsible for developing and teaching the course in Issue Mapping for sustainable fashion, at the Amsterdam Fashion Institute (AMFI), together with her colleague Carlo De Gaetano, where she also supervises theses in the MA Fashion Enterprise Creation. Furthermore, Sabine and her colleagues of the Visual Methodologies Collective are involved in the new Learning Communities on Storytelling and Critical Making.

Education

In 2016, Sabine obtained her Ph.D. with the University of Amsterdam, with a dissertation titled

Networked Content Analysis: The case of climate change, with supervisors Professor José van Dijck and dr. Bernhard Rieder. She obtained her MA from Utrecht University, where she studied art history and new media & digital culture.

Previous activities

In 2014, Sabine founded the Citizen Data Lab, as part of the centre of expertise Amsterdam Creative Industries Network, as a lab specialising in participatory data practices around urban issues. It is still active, as a collaboration of three research groups: Visual Methodologies, Play & Civic Media, and Urban Analytics.

Sabine has been curator of new media arts since 2001 for media arts festival Impakt and other programs such as Cinematiek and hoogt4.

From 2004 until 2012, Sabine worked at the Institute of Network Cultures with its founder Geert Lovink, coordinating numerous publications and events.