Digital Democracies Institute

Kate Crawford talks to the Institute
2021-04-07 15:30 - 17:00 UTC | Online
Prof. Kate Crawford is a leading scholar who has spent the last decade studying the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. She holds the inaugural chair of AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, is a senior principal researcher at MSR, and an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney. Her new book, The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (available here for pre-order) explores the hidden costs of artificial intelligence, from natural resources and energy to labor and data, and reveals how AI systems have saturated political life and depleted the planet.
She will be discussing the themes of her book with Wendy Chun. Wendy is Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media, and leads the Digital Democracies Institute where researchers investigate themes of mis- and disinformation, authenticity, and counterspeech, amongst many others. The conversation will be a wonderful opportunity to hear two leading academics discuss issues that are crucial to our time, with repercussions pertinent to our lives, both online and in our communities. Don’t miss it.
Click here to register [Attendees will also receive a flyer for 25% off when they order the book on registration]

Wendy at National Humanities Center at AI and the Humanities Conference
2021-04-14 10:30 - 14:00 | Online
Wendy will be presenting a keynote at the conference on “How Has Artificial Intelligence Challenged the Boundaries of Humanistic Thinking,”

Kara Keeling talks to the Institute
2021-04-21 12:30 - 14:00 | Online
Details tbd

Spry Memorial Lecture - Changing the Spectrum: Race, media and building democracy in Canada.
2021-04-23 12:00 - 13:30 | Online
The Spry Memorial Lecture has a long history of tackling key issues facing Canadian media and its role in the national conversation. For the 2021 event, Spry joins with Media Democracy Days and the Digital Democracies Institute to bring together leading figures in Canadian media in conversation about race, media and building democracy in Canada.
Our panelists Desmond Cole and Tanya Talaga, along with moderator Candis Callison, will consider recent attention over the escalation of commentary on the representation of Indigenous, Black, and people of colour; the structural challenges that currently impede calls for greater diversity; and discuss how institutions and platforms can foster a more constructive dialogue. At a time when violent events internationally, nationally, and locally are making headlines on a frequent basis, the urgency of this panel is incontestable. Not to be missed!
Register here for links
Part of Towards Equity, SFU Public Square’s 2021 Community Summit Series.

EDI in AI Workshop
2021-04-26 - 2021-04-27
After several exceptional months have passed, we started replanning for the EDI in AI workshop in consultation with the Quebec government: Hoping for a COVID19 recession by early next year, we aim to hold the EDI in AI workshop on 26th and 27th of April 2021 in Montreal.

The aim of this workshop activity is to identify potential collaboration priorities in research in equity, diversity and inclusion in AI under the upcoming Horizon Europe Programme (HEU 2021-2027), in order to boost EU-Canada STI collaboration activities in the area. The meeting will consist of a day for policy discussion and identification of common priorities and foresighting, and a second day for the identification of potential ways forward and mechanisms for cooperation by funding decision-makers (joint programming, twinning, program alignment etc.).

Anna Engelhardt & Niels Ten Oever talk to the Institute
2021-04-28 12:30 - 13:30 | By zoom
Niels ten Oever: The quantum state of topological infrastructure reconfigurations: the case of 5G
Niels is a postdoctoral researcher with the ‘Making the hidden visible: Co-designing for public values in standards-making and governance’-project at the Media Studies department at the University of Amsterdam. He is also a research fellow with the Centre for Internet and Human Rights at the European University Viadrina and an associated scholar with the Centro de Tecnologia e Sociedade at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas. His research focuses on how norms, such as human rights, get inscribed, resisted, and subverted in the Internet infrastructure through its transnational governance.
Niels tries to understand how invisible infrastructures provide a socio-technical ordering to information societies and how this influences the distribution of wealth, power, and possibilities.

Anna Engelhardt: Spectral Volumes of Russian Cyber Warfare

Anna(b. 1994, Kostroma, Russia) is a media artist, researcher, and writer based in London. Her main interests are the (de)colonial politics of algorithmic and logistical infrastructures in post-Soviet space. Anna is currently conducting her PhD on the electromagnetic infrastructure of Russian cyber warfare at Queen Mary, UoL, under the supervision of Laleh Khalili and Elke Schwarz. Anna’s recent projects include: Machinic Infrastructures of Truth (2020), an inquiry into the production of verification systems, presented at Transmediale as a part of ‘Adversarial Hacking’ symposium; Adversarial Infrastructure (2019), an investigation of how the Russian Crimean Bridge functions according to principles of adversarial machine learning, presented at Ars Electronica Kepler’s Gardens, 67th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, and Mute Magazine. She has recently took part at Recursive Colonialism, AI & Speculative Computation symposium with her research on racialised topologies of Russian logistics. With Sasha Shestakova, Anna is a co-founder of the Distributed Cognition Cooperative.

Jodi Byrd presents to the Institute
2021-05-05 10:30 - 11:30 | By zoom
Indigenomicon.

Jodi A. Byrd is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, Associate Professor of English and gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a faculty affiliate at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Byrd is the author of The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and their work has appeared most recently in Social Text, South Atlantic Quarterly, and in Joanne Barker’s Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (Duke UP, 2017).

Monthly Institute Team Meeting
2021-05-05 12:00 - 13:00, 2021-06-02 12:00 - 13:00, 2021-07-07 12:00 - 13:00 | Online
The Institute meets monthly to exchange updates on projects and share ideas.

Wendy is Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago - Lecture 1
2021-05-07 16:00 - 17:30 | Online
Since 2003, the Critical Inquiry Distinguished Visiting Professorship has been held by some of the world’s most renowned scholars. The CI Professor is in residence at the University of Chicago for an academic quarter, where he or she teaches a graduate seminar and offers two public lectures.
In Spring 2021 we are proud to welcome Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. She is author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (2016), and coauthor of Pattern Discrimination (2019). She has been Professor and Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she worked for almost two decades and where she’s currently a Visiting Professor.
Spring Seminar: Critical Data Studies
(with guest Carina Albrecht)
4/28 to 5/31: Mon. and Wed., 10:30am–1:20pm
The massive collection of data, we are told, changes everything. It’s allegedly the new oil, the new resource to be exploited, as well as the new hidden, “real” layer behind all media. It transforms the creative practice, public sphere, scholarship, and intimate relationships by making them “data-driven.” It raises the specter of absolute surveillance and vacuum-sealed echo chambers, all in the name of giving users the commodities, friendships, and security they really want. To explore the possibilities and limitations of the “data turn”––this course asks: what difference does the mass capture, storage, correlation, and analysis of data make to society, culture, media, ethics and politics? How does it affect fundamental concepts, such as reality, agency, identity, verification, and temporality? It will answer these questions by exploring four key terms, such as correlation, authenticity, recognition, and neighborhoods, from historical, critical theory, and technical perspectives. It will also encourage students to contribute to the burgeoning field of Critical Data Studies by exploring and experimenting with unusual interdisciplinary methodologies and collaborations.
Interested students must send a paragraph stating their interest to Critical Inquiry at cisubmissions@gmail.com.
Public Lectures

Public Lecture 1: Beyond Verification: Authenticity and Mis/Disinformation
That fake news has affected recent political events in the US and abroad has become a truism; the sense that combating fake news entails more than fact checking and verification similarly has become accepted wisdom. So how do we understand and respond to fake news? This talk will map out different approaches to fake news in diverse disciplines/sectors, and outline a response that focuses on understanding why and how users find information to be true regardless of its facticity. Framing fake news as an intermedial narrative, it will outline an approach based in dramatic/literary conceptions of authenticity.
Friday, 7 May, 6pm CST: Sign up for the virtual event here.

Kavita Philip talks to the Lab
2021-05-12 10:30 - 11:30 | Online
Kavita Philip is President’s Excellence Chair in Network Cultures as Professor of English with the UBC Department of English Language and Literatures. She was previously Professor of History & Informatics (by courtesy) at UC Irvine. She is author of Civilizing Natures (Rutgers University Press), and co-editor of five volumes curating interdisciplinary work in radical history, political science, art, activism, gender, technology studies, and public policy.
Diverse articles and public writing engage with colonial history, postcolonial studies, histories of environment and technology, feminist activism, and science fiction studies. Forthcoming books include Studies in Unauthorized Reproduction: The Pirate Function and Decolonization (under contract, MIT Press).

Luciana Parisi speaks to the Institute
2021-05-19 10:30 - 11:30 | By zoom

Thinking With | David Theo Goldberg | Tracking capitalism and the technologies of the racial
2021-05-20 09:00 - 11:00
We invite David Theo Goldberg, a scholar whose deep thinking about race and critical race theory (which examines how legal frameworks create, but can also correct injustices based on race), has informed and accompanied counter-colonizing thinkers such as Philomena Essed, Achille Mbembe, and Gloria Wekker. Goldberg will be in conversation with: Rokhaya Diallo; Wendy Hui Kyong Chun; and Nishant Shah, moderated by Wayne Modest.
On the event of Goldberg’s forthcoming publication on Dread: The Politics of Our Time, as part of both our Thinking With and Race, Racism, Antiracism – What can/should museum do?, we invite Goldberg to return, through his most recent critical approaches, to a question for which one of his books is titled: Are We All Postracial Yet? (2015).

Wendy is Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago - Lecture 2
2021-05-21 16:00 - 17:30 | Online
Since 2003, the Critical Inquiry Distinguished Visiting Professorship has been held by some of the world’s most renowned scholars. The CI Professor is in residence at the University of Chicago for an academic quarter, where he or she teaches a graduate seminar and offers two public lectures.
In Spring 2021 we are proud to welcome Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. She is author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (2016), and coauthor of Pattern Discrimination (2019). She has been Professor and Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she worked for almost two decades and where she’s currently a Visiting Professor.
Spring Seminar: Critical Data Studies
(with guest Carina Albrecht)
4/28 to 5/31: Mon. and Wed., 10:30am–1:20pm
The massive collection of data, we are told, changes everything. It’s allegedly the new oil, the new resource to be exploited, as well as the new hidden, “real” layer behind all media. It transforms the creative practice, public sphere, scholarship, and intimate relationships by making them “data-driven.” It raises the specter of absolute surveillance and vacuum-sealed echo chambers, all in the name of giving users the commodities, friendships, and security they really want. To explore the possibilities and limitations of the “data turn”––this course asks: what difference does the mass capture, storage, correlation, and analysis of data make to society, culture, media, ethics and politics? How does it affect fundamental concepts, such as reality, agency, identity, verification, and temporality? It will answer these questions by exploring four key terms, such as correlation, authenticity, recognition, and neighborhoods, from historical, critical theory, and technical perspectives. It will also encourage students to contribute to the burgeoning field of Critical Data Studies by exploring and experimenting with unusual interdisciplinary methodologies and collaborations.
Interested students must send a paragraph stating their interest to Critical Inquiry at cisubmissions@gmail.com.
Public Lectures

Public Lecture 2: Critical Data Studies
Data, we’re told over and over again, defines the twenty-first century. It’s allegedly the new oil, the new resource to be exploited, as well as the new hidden, “real” layer behind all media. It raises the specter of absolute surveillance and vacuum-sealed echo chambers, all in the name of giving users the commodities, friendships, and security they really want. To displace these visions, this talk addresses the possibilities for cross-disciplinary and cross-sector collaboration and investigations. It will take as its case study “neighborhoods.”
Friday, 21 May, 6pm CST: Sign up for the virtual event here.

Digital Media Workshop: White Supremacy, Affect, and Digital Culture
2021-05-24 14:00 - 16:30 | Online
The Digital Media Workshop will be hosting Christine Goding-Doty and Tara McPherson on May 24 for a panel about White Supremacy, Affect, and Digital Culture, moderated by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun.

Christine Goding Doty, Visiting Assistant Professor, Africana Studies, Hobart and William Smith Colleges – Christine Goding-Doty is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Previously, she was an A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for the Humanities and the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There she was a member of the 2018-2020 cohort of Mellon Fellows convened around the theme “Truth, Fact, and Ways of Knowing.” Dr. Goding-Doty received her PhD in African American Studies from Northwestern University in 2018. In the course of her study she also spent three years in cotutelle at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

Tara McPherson, Professor and Chair, Cinema & Media Studies, University of Southern California – Tara McPherson is Chair and Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts and Director of the Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Studies. She is a core faculty member of the IMAP program, USC’s innovative practice based-Ph.D., and also an affiliated faculty member in the American Studies and Ethnicity Department. Her research engages the cultural dimensions of media, including the intersection of gender, race, affect and place. She has a particular interest in digital media. Here, her research focuses on the digital humanities, early software histories, gender, and race, as well as upon the development of new tools and paradigms for digital publishing, learning, and authorship.

Moderated by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media, Simon Fraser University – Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University, and leads the Digital Democracies Institute which was launched in 2019. The Institute aims to integrate research in the humanities and data sciences to address questions of equality and social justice in order to combat the proliferation of online “echo chambers,” abusive language, discriminatory algorithms and mis/disinformation by fostering critical and creative user practices and alternative paradigms for connection. It has four distinct research streams all led by Dr. Chun: Beyond Verification which looks at authenticity and the spread of disinformation; From Hate to Agonism, focusing on fostering democratic exchange online; Desegregating Network Neighbourhoods, combatting homophily across platforms; and Discriminating Data: Neighbourhoods, Individuals and Proxies, investigating the centrality of race, gender, class and sexuality to big data and network analytics.

Co-sponsored by the Reproduction of Race and Racial Ideologies Working Group, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture and the Department of Cinema & Media Studies

Wendy gives Keynote at Digital (Im)Materialities Conference
2021-05-25 09:30 - 11:00 | Online
Digital (Im)materialities is a student-run conference organized by the first-year MA Media Studies cohort at Concordia University in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal.
As the pandemic continues to rage, we approach one year of conducting much of our lives: personal, professional, academic, online. This transition has proven in turns frustrating, alienating, and humorous but, more saliently, it has highlighted myriad questions and challenges in the realm of communications and media studies. Given these considerations, our conference encourages a self-reflexive approach which takes advantage of the unique affordances of virtual gathering and challenges the notion of the virtual as ahistorical and non-spatial: a global conference for a moment of global crisis. This year has not only seen the mainstreaming of such platforms as Zoom and TikTok, but has reiterated the importance of longstanding lines of inquiry of Queer and Disability studies scholars whose work attends to the importance of digital community and accessibility. By bracketing the “im” in immaterialities, we hope to emphasize the dual nature of digitally mediated life during the pandemic: both the ephemeral and the durable; absence and presence. Though these aspects are inherent to virtual existence, they are highlighted during moments of crisis. While this conference is presented by the Communication Studies department, we wish to foster scholarship which bridges fields of study and provokes diverse ways of thinking through seemingly discipline-specific questions. As such, we hope to offer an arena for graduate scholars, research-creators, and artists to critically engage with the issues of the moment, offer solutions and connect with fellow thinkers to both mourn what has been lost during the pandemic and to celebrate the unique possibility for reimagining the status quo.

Jutta Treviranus talks to the Lab
2021-05-26 10:30 - 11:30 | Online
Jutta Treviranus is the Director of the Inclusive Design Research Centre (IDRC) and professor at OCAD University in Toronto http://inclusivedesign.ca, formerly the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre. The IDRC conducts proactive research and development in the inclusive design of emerging information and communication technology and practices. Jutta also heads the Inclusive Design Institute a multi-university regional centre of expertise on inclusive design. Jutta is the Co-Director of Raising the Floor International. She also established and directs an innovative graduate program in Inclusive Design. Jutta has led many international multi-partner research networks that have created broadly implemented technical innovations that support inclusion. These include the Fluid Project, Fluid Engage, CulturAll, Stretch, FLOE and many others. Jutta and her team have pioneered personalization as an approach to accessibility in the digital domain. She has played a leading role in developing accessibility legislation, standards and specifications internationally (including WAI ATAG, IMS AccessForAll, ISO 24751 , and AODA Information and Communication).

ICA Conference - Javier Ruiz-Soler and Wendy Chun
2021-05-27 08:00 - 2021-05-31 17:00 | Online
Wendy Chun moderates a panel at ICA on How Conspiracies Work: National and International Approaches to Trust, Mistrust, and Authenticity
Chairs
Javier Ruiz Soler, Simon Fraser U, CANADA
Moderator
Wendy Chun, Simon Fraser U, CANADA
Participants
Beyond Verification: Authenticity and Mis/Disinformation
Javier Ruiz Soler, Simon Fraser U, CANADA
Locating COVID-19 Conspiracies in South Africa and Nigeria
Iginio Gagliardone, Wits U, SOUTH AFRICA
This is Lebanon: Affective Motivations, Migrant Labor, and the Kafala System
Heather Jaber, U of Pennsylvania, USA
The Code, the Clock, and the QAnon Conspiracy Theory
Moira Weigel, Data & Society, USA
This panel analyzes conspiracies and misinformation, and how conspiracies become accepted as authentic. We present study cases on selected topics from different regions and discuss the common features of authenticity. Each one of the panelists will discuss the methods they have used in their research, or present alternative methods to study misinformation beyond fact-checking. This panel is focused on specific topics (COVID-19, QAnon, Wexit and the kafala system) in South Africa and Nigeria, United States, Canada, and Lebanon.

Wendy gives keynote at the Digital Humanities Conference at Congress
2021-06-02 08:00 - 09:30 | Online
Wendy gave the morning plenary for the CSDH at Congress 2021, titled “Discriminating Data + SFU’s Digital Democracy Institute”

Jonathan Gray & Liliana Bounegru speak to the Institute
2021-06-02 09:00 - 10:00 | Online
Please note the earlier start time of 9am PST for this talk.

Jonathan Gray is Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, where he is currently writing a book on data worlds. He is also Cofounder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org and he tweets at @jwyg.
Liliana Bounegru is Lecturer in Digital Methods at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London; researcher at the Digital Methods Initiative; research associate at the Sciences Po Paris médialab; and co-founder of the Public Data Lab. Her research interests include digital media, digital culture, digital journalism, inventive methods for new media research, digital methods, infrastructure studies, platform studies, issue mapping and controversy mapping. Her work has been published in New Media & Society, Big Data & Society, Visual Communication and Digital Journalism. More about her work can be found at lilianabounegru.org and on Twitter at @bb_liliana.

CIGI - Deplatforming Social Media
2021-06-09 05:00 - 06:00 | Online
Javier Ruiz-Soler took part in the CIGI’s Social Hour on Deplatforming Social Media

Adam Kingsmith, Max Haiven & Aris Komporos-Athansiou present to the Lab
2021-06-16 12:30 - 13:30 | Online
Conspiratorialism as Dangerous Play in an age of Technofinance: From the GameStop Hunger Games to the Capitol Hill Jamboree

We approach contemporary reactionary conspiratorialism as a dangerous form of play that emerges from gamified neoliberal financialization. Our examples are (1) the siege of the US Capitol of January 6 by those loyal to outgoing president Trump and (2) the “GameStop frenzy” that saw small-time investors use retail stock trading apps to inflate the price of shares in certain recognized but underperforming corporations. We see these conspiratorial events as emerging from a financialized and technologically accelerated capitalist society where many (if not most) non-elites see the economy and politics as a rigged game, but also one in the grips of gamification, where the logic and enticements of play are increasingly integrated into the circuits of accumulation and everyday life. We propose that to challenge these cultural politics and material structures it is imperative to take seriously how to otherwise meet the need for non-instrumental play that reactionary conspiratorialism today fulfills.

Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice and co-director of the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL) at Lakehead University. His recent books include Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts and Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization. More information can be found at maxhaiven.com.

Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou is Associate Professor of Sociology at University College London, where he leads the Sociology and Social Theory Research Group. He is the author of Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World (University of Chicago Press, 2021). His current book project, tentatively titled ‘Winning in the Real Fake’, is an intellectual history of conspiracy in finance capitalism.

A.T. Kingsmith is PhD Candidate in the Department of Politics at York University and Co-founder of EiQ Technologies, an emotion-AI start-up based out of the Design Fabrication Zone in the Creative Innovation Studio at Ryerson University. His forthcoming monograph, Anxiety as a Weapon: An Affective Approach to Political Economy, explores new modes for transforming the mental health landscape. For more, see atkingsmith.com.

Facing Recognition – Talk and Discussion at the Other(ing) Sensing Conference
2021-06-17 08:00 - 09:00 | Online
Wendy gives the keynote on Facing Recognition – Talk and Discussion at the Other(ing) Sensing. Practices, Politics and Ethics of Sensitive Media – Conference by the research group “SENSING: The Knowledge of Sensitive Media” at the University of Potsdam.
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.”

Summer School - Towards Responsible Machine Learning
2021-06-21 09:00 - 2021-06-25 14:30
This part-time, five-day course offers foundational Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data science concepts that are applicable in the humanities and social sciences. Offered by SFU’s Digital Democracies Institute and SFU’s Big Data Initiative, this course will have you examine best practices to critically evaluate and mitigate unwanted bias from sources such as data, algorithms or users. Through collaborative hands-on labs guided by SFU experts, you will come away with the kind of data science experience and knowledge that organizations and recruiters value.
Date:
This workshop will be held from June 21-25 everyday from 9am-2:30pm Pacific Time
Price:
$695 CAD (Taxes and fees included)
$500 Scholarship
Our partner Athena Pathways is offering a $500 scholarship designed to lower barriers for women pursuing careers in the AI and data science fields. This scholarship will be awarded after completion of the workshop. Any person who identifies as female and resides in British Columbia will qualify.
$350 Grant
You may qualify for the $350 Scale AI grant. Apply for the grant.You will be sent a discount code for this course after applying. This grant cannot be combined with the Athena Pathways scholarship.
Link to register: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/sfu-data-fellowships-towards-responsible-machine-learning-tickets-146802515275

Nathan Schneider talks to the Institute
2021-06-23 12:30 - 13:30 | Online
The implicit feudalism of online communities

An “implicit feudalism” informs the available options for community management on the dominant platforms for online communities. It is a pattern that grants user-administrators absolutist reign over their fiefdoms, with competition among them as the primary mechanism for quality control, typically under rules set by platform companies. Implicit feudalism emerged from technical conditions dating to early online networks. In light of alternative management mechanisms with more democratic features, it becomes all the more clear that implicit feudalism is not a necessary condition. This talk will both diagnose the problem and explore some possible avenues for fostering a more diverse, accountable, and participatory range of governance options for online communities.
Nathan Schneider is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Media Enterprise Design Lab. His most recent book is Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy.

Aleena Chia presents to the Institute
2021-06-30 12:30 - 13:30
Aleena Leng An Chia is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication specializing in the ethnography of gaming cultures. Her research investigates practices at the margins of the digital and analogue, and in the interstices between work and play. Her work examines gaming’s boundary work as structuring categories in post-Fordism, as achievement systems in player communities, and as moral calculations in the new economy. In addition to ethnographic and qualitative approaches, she uses media archaeology and critical discourse analysis to study marginal forms of media: artefacts such as neuro-wearables for lucid dreaming and practices such as digital minimalism in social media disconnection. Her goal across these projects is to politicize the emotional and spiritual undercurrents of instrumental rationality in digital media.
Aleena received her PhD in Communication and Culture from Indiana University Bloomington in 2017 and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Academy of Finland’s Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies in 2018. Her work has been supported by training from the School of Criticism and Theory, funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and a Research Internship at Microsoft Research New England’s Social Media Collective.

Histories of AI: A Genealogy of Power
2021-07-12 07:00 - 10:00 | Online
Wendy gives a keynote at Histories of AI: A Genealogy of Power (A Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar) at Cambridge, part of the Summer School on the same topic.
The University of Cambridge is hosting a Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Histories of AI: A Genealogy of Power from May 2020–April 2021. The Seminar is co-hosted by the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, and the Faculty of English. Sawyer Seminars support comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments. This Seminar aims to develop an international interpretive community capable of offering a structural, historical perspective on the promises and problematics of AI and machine learning.
This new community will include participants from a variety of fields and backgrounds including activists, AI practitioners, artists, citizens, critical theorists, decolonial scholars, historians of science and technology, and scholars of race, gender, and disability studies. We will engage in critical and comparative research, from antiquity to the present, on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments in AI technologies to investigate their entanglement in systems of politics, power and control. Four themes will guide our considerations: hidden labour, encoded behaviour, cognitive injustice and disingenuous rhetoric. These themes direct our inquiry without narrowing the contributions we plan to support.
The Seminar’s activities include a week long Summer School at Homerton College, Cambridge, with arrival and a welcome dinner on Sunday 12 and meeting from Monday 13 to Saturday 18 July 2020.

Caroline Colijn presents to the Lab
2021-07-14 12:30 - 13:30 | Online
Caroline’s work is at the interface of mathematics and the epidemiology and evolution of pathogens. She holds a Canada 150 Research Chair in Mathematics for Evolution, Infection and Public Health. In this group we develop mathematical tools connecting sequence data to the ecology and evolution of infections. She also has a long-standing interest on the dynamics of diverse interacting pathogens. For example, how does the interplay between co-infection, competition and selection drive the development of antimicrobial resistance? To answer these questions, the group is building new approaches to analyzing and comparing phylogenetic trees derived from sequence data, studying tree space and branching processes, and developing ecological and epidemiological models with diversity in mind.
She is also a member of the DDI Steering Committee!

Tarleton Gillespie presents to the lab
2021-09-08 12:30 - 13:30 | Online
Prof. Gillespie’s research focuses on the ongoing controversies surrounding digital media and commercial providers. His past work examined the move to technical solutions to copyright, their political and cultural implications, and how this move reveals underlying tensions between law, technology, and culture. His new research examines the implications of online media platforms as the new distributors of cultural and political discourse, and the mediating role played by algorithms for public knowledge and participation.
