Since 2012 DARC has organized a series of research/PhD workshops in collaboration with transmediale festival, Berlin, investigating contemporary digital culture. Since 2020, the workshops have been organized in collaboration with Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, London South Bank University. The workshops also include shifting partners from cultural as well as academic research institutions. At the workshops, participants interrogate the festival theme, but also reflect on possible relations to existing research practices, including peer-review, austerity measures, the scalability of research, and more.

As part of the workshop, participants are asked to write a paper and present it at a workshop. Based on this mode of peer-review they are then asked to shorten their research into the length of a newspaper article for distribution at the transmediale festival. All newspapers are published by DARC, and available on DARC's website. Following the event, they are invited to submit a full version to a special issue of A Peer-reviewed Journal About [the selected research theme] (APRJA).