We're Sponsoring EPIC for 2026

At Reduct, we spend a lot of time thinking about context: The context in which our product is used; the context our product is used to uncover and tell stories about; the context of a given highlight, buried deep in a recording elsewhere in Reduct; the context window of the large language model underpinning some of the AI-powered features in the product.

EPIC - "Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Community" - is an organization that has been convening members of the qualitative research community for over two decades, discussing and making sense of the entanglement of technology and culture, through the lens of social science.

We are thrilled to sponsor EPIC for the 2026 season, with the focus being… "Context." We couldn’t put it better ourselves: As industries and governments race to model, predict, and act within increasingly complex environments, context is the central challenge. The tools we build, the decisions we make, and the futures we imagine depend on how we define and operationalize context right now. The EPIC 2026 calendar kicked off with the launch event in February, where the theme was introduced and the season got underway.

As sponsors of EPIC 2026, we'll be part of the entire EPIC calendar: Learning Week in May, and the conference in Chicago this October, and everything inbetween.

Learning week in May

EPIC’s Learning Week is a virtual event held in May 4–8, 2026. Join us to build expertise and explore emerging challenges with a generous and innovative community of change makers. The sessions are entirely free for EPIC members - which costs just $150 for the year (and includes a discount on the conference in October!).

Reduct will be hosting a session on May 4th titled "The Interpretive Assemblage: Finding the Balance in Hybrid Sensemaking", where we will explore the role of (human-selected!) taxonomies and tagging as a form of interpretive praxis within a hybrid, AI-augmented workflow. We’ll be showcasing how to take advantage of some recently released features.

We’ll also be providing transcripts, summaries, and highlights of sessions for all EPIC members.

See the full calendar of incredible sessions - we hope to see you there!

Chicago in October

EPIC’s showpiece event is the conference - held this year in Chicago, from October 26–28. We’ll be there in person, and hope to meet you there!

Grab your spot and register for EPIC 2026 right away. There are discounts for EPIC members (who also get free access to Learning Week), as well as early-bird pricing.

If you're part of the EPIC community, or just curious about what we're building, we'd love to connect.

About EPIC

EPIC is a nonprofit organization, annual conference, and global network of professionals activating context and culture at the heart of computational and business systems.

EPIC stands for the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Community. It’s a nonprofit organization that has been around since 2005, founded by two social scientists, Ken Anderson and Tracey Lovejoy. They saw, way before most people, that technology and culture were going to become totally entangled.

Today, it’s a global network of researchers, creators, and leaders who use "interpretive science" to make sense of the world. These are the people companies call when they need to understand complex human systems, innovate responsibly, or just figure out what’s actually going on with their customers. EPIC Members are innovators, creators, researchers, and leaders working across all industries and sectors. We advance interpretive science – the disciplined practice of understanding human meaning, cultures, and contexts – to help organizations innovate responsibly, manage risk, and generate value.

The program is built around two big questions:

Modeling context: How do we build frameworks — digital and social — to represent complex human lives without stripping away what makes them real?

Deploying context: What happens when those models hit a hospital, a school, or a boardroom? How do people use them, or push back against them?