Digital Democracies Institute

Meeting Street Podcast: Conversations in the Humanities
2020-12-18 10:00 - 11:30 UTC | Online
Wendy is being interviewed for the Meeting Street Podcast, Two episodes have been published thus far and the podcast presents a wonderful opportunity for Wendy to talk about the work the Institute is doing, and to present an informed discussion of digital democracies, responsible AI, and the humanities contribution to work on digital cultures and practices. The larger aim of the podcast is to explore topics of vital societal interest through conversations with scholars and writers whose voices have helped define issues and shape debates. Through the show, we’re hoping to present ideas and issues in such a way that they are appealing to the general public as well as other academics. The show is getting significant attention, and a transcript of the second episode is being published by the Chronicle.

Reading Group - Black and Indigenous Bodies
2020-12-09 15:00 - 17:00, 2020-10-28 15:00 - 17:00 | By zoom
Black and Indigenous Bodies: Resistance and Surveillance
Led by Karrmen Crey and Adjua Akinwumi.
If you are interested in joining the reading group, contact Dr. Karrmen Crey at kcrey@sfu.ca with a very brief (one or two sentence) explanation of why you would like to join the group by Friday, September 25th. Participants must be able to attend all meetings. You will receive an email to confirm your spot in the group.

Wendy speaks at the CIGI - Special Round Table Discussion: Digital Platform Governance
2020-12-07 09:00 - 12:00 | Online
The Centre for International Governance Innovations’s Global Platform Governance Network and the McGill Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy are pleased to invite you to a special virtual round table discussion on digital platform governance on December 7, 2020, from 12 to 3 p.m. (EST, UTC-5).

Governments around the world continue to grapple with how best to safeguard their citizens’ privacy, safety and security online, while maintaining the economic and social benefits of our unprecedented ability to connect. This tension has been exacerbated by the current COVID-19 environment, as worldwide lockdowns have increased our collective reliance on the online world for our work, education and social interactions. This situation has, however, also revealed an exponential growth in the negative aspects of digital platforms, including the spread of dis/misinformation and hate speech, increased risks to privacy and personal security, the concentration of market power among a few private companies, and the continued erosion of local newsrooms and democratic norms.

Canada has signalled its commitment to “create new regulations for social media platforms, starting with a requirement that all platforms remove illegal content, including hate speech.” As the federal government prepares legislation to address this commitment, it can benefit from the experiences of its allies and external experts who are tackling these same challenges.

The goal of this meeting is to foster an honest, open conversation between a small group of experts and senior government representatives at a strategic moment of government decision making. Through three 50-minute deliberative dialogues, the group will work collectively through key questions facing the government as it moves toward a legislative package regulating digital platforms:

What information should be included in a mandatory transparency requirement for platforms?
How should disputes about Canadian content moderation on digital platforms be adjudicated?
What powers should be given to a new regulator, and how should this regulator be structured?

We are pleased to welcome the minister of Canadian heritage, The Honourable Steven Guilbeault, and parliamentary secretary to the minister of justice and attorney general of Canada, Arif Virani, to join the round table discussion. The session will be supported by leading Canadian and international experts, who will join in conversation with government experts and decision makers to examine the issues underlying each question and come to a collective position.

The meeting will be held under CIGI Rule, a variation of the Chatham House Rule.

UC Irvine: Michael and Stacy Koehn Public Lecture in Critical Theory
2020-12-03 12:00 - 13:30
Authenticating Figures: Algorithms and the New Politics of Recognition
Originally planned for March 2020, but canceled due to the COVID-19 outbreak, UCI Critical Theory is proud to now present this event virtually.
What does recognition mean in an era of pervasive data capture and automatic pattern detection? Tracing the historical move from “pattern discrimination” to “pattern recognition,” this talk unpacks the logic and politics of recognition at the core of systems designed to automatically identify and classify users. It argues for the centrality of the humanities in understanding how we have become characters in a drama called “Big Data.”

Ganaele Langlois speak to the Lab
2020-12-02 12:30 - 13:30 | By zoom
Ganaele will be presenting on Research Persona methods

Reading Group - Black and Indigenous Bodies
2020-11-18 15:00 - 17:00, 2020-10-07 15:00 - 17:00 | By zoom
Black and Indigenous Bodies: Resistance and Surveillance
If you are interested in joining the reading group, contact Dr. Karrmen Crey at kcrey@sfu.ca with a very brief (one or two sentence) explanation of why you would like to join the group by Friday, September 25th. Participants must be able to attend all meetings. You will receive an email to confirm your spot in the group.

Canadian Science Policy Conference 2020
2020-11-17 05:30 - 07:00 | By zoom
Due to the unprecedented circumstances generated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the 12th
Canadian Science Policy Conference, CSPC 2020, will be held completely online! The conference will be held virtually through the week of November 16th – 20th, 2020.
In the time of social distancing and with abundance of caution, we are excited to bring this year’s conference right to your offices and homes! CSPC has a rich history of hosting exciting in-person conferences. Expect no less from the virtual conference experience!
What to expect from a virtual conference:
CSPC 2020 will feature a week-long variety of engaging and informative online sessions including panel discussions, workshops, live interviews, online networking opportunities, and even virtual exhibitions. Registered participants will have the opportunity to watch sessions live and on-demand. Live sessions will be held throughout the day, such that participants across time zones will be able to attend them. Lower registration fees will permit much bigger and geographically diverse participation, including many from around the globe. We look forward to bringing the Canadian and global science and innovation policy communities together in these pivotal times and continue the crucial and insightful conversation on the world post-pandemic.
In order to accommodate this new conference format and acknowledging that individuals and organizations have been adapting to new realities, the panel proposal submission deadline,
as well as the individual short-talks submission deadline has been extended further by 1 month, to Friday, June 12th, 2020. Please review the revised criteria for panel proposal submissions and access the submission forms by clicking on the link below.

Workshop @ Cornell Tech - Understanding and Combating Online Manipulation: Setting an Interdisciplinary Research Agenda
2020-10-30 08:00 - 2020-10-31 12:00 | By zoom
Understanding & Combating Online Manipulation: Setting an Interdisciplinary Research Agenda
Public concern is coalescing around the problem of online influence—especially, the ability of data collectors to use information about individuals to influence their decision-making and shape their behaviors. Once confined to the realm of commercial advertising, post 2016, these worries have extended to the political sphere, where campaigns increasingly engage in sophisticated voter profiling and microtargeting, using information about voters to frame political pitches and appeals. Media manipulation and the problem of so-called “fake news”, for example, have attracted enormous attention in academic research from the social sciences to technical fields, such as machine learning, where efforts are underway to develop tools for distinguishing fake from genuine news.
Workshop Overview
This workshop takes up pressing questions about processes and mechanisms characterizing some of the stages that precede the altered behaviors and the impacts of targeting and fake news. It will focus on the nature of the efforts to influence, manipulate, and shape human thinking and human behavior, raising and investigating critical questions that require conceptual, ethical, empirical, technical, and policy attention. For example:

Ethical/Philosophical: What distinguishes persuasive appeals from manipulative ones? How are targeting technologies related to other worrying practices, such as “dark patterns”? Given the information collection required for individual targeting, how are these concerns related to concerns about privacy? What (if any) are the harms of online targeting and manipulation? Should they be weighed against certain goods? Are the differences between “nudging,” persuasive technologies, and recent manipulative practices ethical in nature?

Social Science: How effective are targeting technologies? On average, how well do people understand the ways they are being targeted? Does awareness of targeting mitigate its effects? How do these issues relate to prior art, including “nudging” and “persuasive technologies”?

Technical: What mechanisms and systems enable, deliver, and enhance manipulative practices? What mechanisms can be brought to bear to detect the pipeline of manipulative practices? What mechanisms exist (or could be developed) for inducing accountability in both collaborative and adversarial settings?

Policy/Regulation: How could policymakers address these concerns? Should policies intervene ex ante or ex post? Are new regulations needed to constrain certain targeting practices, and if so, how would they interact with free speech considerations? What successes and failures have policymakers encountered when responding to related issues of illegitimate influence in other contexts in the past?

This event brings together leading scholars working on diverse dimensions of the problem in computer and information sciences, social sciences, humanities, law, and policy, to coordinate and cohere these efforts, mapping an interdisciplinary research agenda that encourages, and against which to benchmark, further progress.
The workshop will take place via Zoom. We envision it as the first of two events; we will convene an in-person workshop at Cornell Tech in New York City when conditions allow.

The 2020 US Election, A View from Canada
2020-10-29 13:00 - 15:00 | By zoom
Dr. Jaime Lee Kirtz speaks at this panel:
Wondering how to make sense of this historic American presidential election? You’re not alone. Join us for a panel featuring historians, political scientists, and media experts as they weigh in on the significance of the 2020 election for the United States, Canada, and the world. Panelists will discuss the current state of American politics and society, where the 2020 election fits into the long history of American politics, and answer audience questions.
Featuring:
Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey, Historian, McGill University
Regina Bateson, Political Scientist, University of Ottawa
Jason Opal, Historian, McGill University
Jaime Lee Kirtz, Digital Democracies Institute, Simon Fraser University
Moderated by:
Melissa J. Gismondi, Writer & Journalist, University of Toronto
Shira Lurie, Historian, University of Toronto

SSRC Workshop - Keynote Event
2020-10-22 14:30 - 16:30 | By zoom
Disinformation, Authenticity, and Democratic Participation

OVERVIEW

The viral spread of false, misleading, and inaccurate information on topics from Covid-19 to racial justice threaten our social fabric and democracy worldwide.
With November’s elections looming, and as fraught questions about “truth,” “fact,” and “accuracy” are debated, BHS and the Social Science Research Council turn to the role authenticity plays as it relates to trust in politicians and institutions. Does an aura of authenticity enable misinformation? Are lies more palatable when generated by an ‘authentic’ source? Join three experts as they dig into identity, belonging, political participation and more: Sarah Banet-Weiser, London School of Economics professor and author of Authentic: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture; sociologist Francesca Tripodi of the University of North Carolina, whose expert testimony before the Senate Judiciary last year focused on censorship, technology and public discourse; and Andre Brock, associate professor of media studies at Georgia Tech and author of Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures. The program is moderated by Heidi Tworek, Associate Professor of International History and Public Policy at the University of British Columbia, author of the book News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900-1945, and advisor to governments around the world on how to address hate speech and disinformation.
Register here.

SSRC Workshop - Beyond Disinformation: Authenticity and Trust in the Online World
2020-10-22 08:00 - 2020-10-23 17:00 | By zoom
Invite only.
The viral spread of false, misleading, and inaccurate information threatens democracy globally. Originally lauded as inherently democratic, social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are now condemned as negligent outlets answerable for “post-truth” politics. An often unspoken assumption is that providing correct information will solve broader problems. Tellingly, however, the 2016 US presidential election was described both as “the authenticity election” and as normalizing “fake news”: the more certain politicians lie, the more authentic they appear. Central to the study of mis- and disinformation are thus questions of how and under what circumstances—social, cultural, historical, and technical—information is deemed “truthful,” “factual,” or “authentic,” when the concepts are related but not interchangeable. What is the role of authenticity in understanding why mis- and disinformation become accepted or meaningful for people? How does authenticity relate to other key concepts, such as truth, fact, and accuracy? What other key words or concepts are necessary, and yet perhaps undertheorized, in the study of information disorder and democracy?
This workshop invites responses that interrogate the centrality of authenticity to the viral spread of mis- and disinformation, as well as the relationship of authenticity to other key concepts such as “truth,” “fact,” “trust,” and/or “veracity.” We encourage responses that take on one or more of these key words or phrases (or others) and investigate their role in propagating or countering mis- and disinformation.
This research development workshop is convened by the Social Science Research Council’s Media & Democracy program and the Digital Democracies Group (DDG) at Simon Fraser University, established through Dr. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media. The goal of the workshop is to catalyze and develop rigorous research and public-facing scholarship. The workshop will provide participants an opportunity to give and receive in-depth feedback from their peers on in-progress research projects and to connect with others who work on similar topics.
We particularly encourage applications from emerging and underrepresented scholars; early-career scholars are encouraged to apply. We welcome applications from all relevant social science and humanities fields, including political science, history, anthropology, sociology, STS and media studies, communication, and journalism, as well as computer science, data science, informatics, and related fields. Applications with an emphasis on interdisciplinary work—that seek to answer questions that can’t be solved from the perspective of one discipline alone—are especially welcome.
Applications are due on September 9, 2020.
Participants will be expected to participate in a two-day virtual workshop (for approximately four hours or less each day) tentatively scheduled for October 22–23, 2020. Each participant will prepare an essay of approximately 1000 words related to the workshop themes, which will be circulated to peers in advance of the meeting. During the meeting, participants will offer substantive feedback to their peers with the goal of developing a longer essay or project for public circulation.
Workshop Themes
We welcome proposals for research that will foster interdisciplinary dialogue on the role of authenticity, trust, and authentication in the spread and control of false information online. Research proposals should consider:

How you might define authenticity
How you propose to study authenticity
Why and how authenticity matters to understanding mis- and disinformation
The relationship of authenticity to other key concepts such as “truth,” “fact,” “trust,” and/or “veracity” (or others you might suggest)

This research workshop is intended to generate a robust discussion among participants, foster possible collaborative research projects, and inform scholarly discussions about authenticity, trust, and verification as possible counters to mis- and disinformation. With an intentionally cross-disciplinary approach, we imagine that a data scientist and cultural theorist might debate the meaning of “authentication” from technical and social perspectives. A historian might examine shifting definitions of truthful political rhetoric over time in conversation with journalists and political scientists. A psychologist and an anthropologist might compare and contrast their disciplines’ understandings of trust.
What questions about authenticity might your study not address? What are the limitations of your approach? Applicants are encouraged to discuss the limits of their disciplinary approach in understanding authenticity—what questions of authenticity can your discipline not answer alone? How might quantitative and qualitative methods be jointly deployed to enhance our understanding of who the concept of authenticity is used in support of and who it is weaponized against? How is it deployed to counter misinformation? How does authenticity work in tandem with or counter to trust, fact, authority, and authorship?

UAAC / AAUC: Book Launch & Roundtable
2020-10-16 16:00 - 17:30 | By zoom
UAAC / AAUC: Book Launch & Roundtable

Friday, October 16 | 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM (PDT) | Zoom | FREE (link sent with registration)
Please check back HERE for the Zoom link
The Universities Art Association of Canada and the SFU School for the Contemporary Arts invite you to attend a virtual book launch and roundtable for two new publications, The Bomb in the Wilderness by John O’Brian (UBC Press, 2020) and Through Post-Atomic Eyes, edited by Claudette Lauzon and John O’Brian (MQUP, 2020).
Photography and contemporary art contribute significantly to shaping public perceptions of nuclear events, and offer a provocative lens through which to comprehend the by-products of the atomic age.
Join us for a roundtable conversation on a wide-ranging set of topics, from Canada’s nuclear footprint to weapons proliferation and climate change.
Speakers: John O’Brian, Claudette Lauzon, Lindsey A. Freeman, and Erin Siddall.
The event will include a live Q+A moderated by Svitlana Matviyenko.

The Future of the Humanities @ Google
2020-10-15 08:30 - 15:00 | By zoom
Wendy is invited to this closed conference
This series of round table discussions builds on Google’s history of engagement with academia, a history that started with the company’s founders. We sense a critical moment for modern democracy and for the humanist values at the core of our business. Although Google is a technology company, many of the biggest challenges we face are non-technical, motivating this outreach to learn from and collaborate with academic leaders in the Humanities.

The goal of these working sessions is to bring academics into conversation with researchers and practitioners at Google to better understand the increasingly complex landscape at the intersection of ethics, privacy, identity, and technology. By building a venue for conversation across institutional boundaries, we hope to find points of connection that will enable us to make change together.

DDI Presentation - DW Kamish
2020-10-14 12:30 - 13:30 | By zoom
DW will be presenting on his work to the team.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://sfu.zoom.us/j/94666559773?pwd=[REDACTED]

Meeting ID: 946 6655 9773
Password: [REDACTED]

Digital Citizen Initiative (DCI) at the Department of Canadian Heritage Conference
2020-10-14 10:00 - 12:00 | By zoom
Wendy is a panellist for the Digital Citizen Initiative (DCI) at the Department of Canadian Heritage Conference discussion.
This two-hour expert panel will be moderated by Doctor Colette Brin, and will feature doctors Elizabeth Dubois, Julia Zarb, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and Gordon Pennycook, as well as Marie-Pier Gingras, who is pursuing her doctorate in psychology at l’Université du Québec à Montréal. The conversation will be focused around key successful knowledge mobilization initiatives supported by the DCI, as well as on research projects of three of the recipients of the Joint Initiative for Digital Citizen Research between the Department of Canadian Heritage and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
This will be a moderated conversation, but all attendees will be welcomed to submit questions via the chat box during the presentation, as there will be a Q&A session with participants.
You will find attached biographies, as well as other complementary information. We also invite you to look at the Digital Ecosystem Research Challenge website and report, which can be found here.

Democracy XChange
2020-10-14 06:30 - 09:00 | By zoom
Open Democracy Project is a co-founder of DemocracyXChange – Canada’s annual democracy summit. Join us as we seize the opportunity to strengthen democracy in the recovery from COVID-19. This year our program will convene in two parts:

Our virtual Summit (October 13-15) will raise critical questions about systemic inequality, the relevance of our public institutions and how we can respond to this global moment with imagination.

Our Festival (October 16-22) enables participants to deepen their engagement with program material by attending online workshops, training sessions and events organized by non-profits, associations and community groups.

Wendy is a panellist for the Democracy XChange Day 2 Panel: Making Technology Work for All People.
More info found here
