Digital Democracies Institute

Wendy at Alliance Program Symposium
2022-05-23 10:00 - 16:00 (Europe/Paris)
Reshaping our Digital Interactions: Subjectivity in the Post-Cinema Age
Colloque en traduction simultanée anglais / français | Simultaneous French / English translation available at symposium
ENQUÊTES SUR LA SURVEILLANCE ET LES LOGIQUES ALGORITHMIQUES, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (Keynote), Antonio Somaini, Félix Tréguer
À propos de cet évènement
REMODELER NOS INTERACTIONS NUMERIQUES : La subjectivité à l’ère du post-cinéma
À l’ère de ce que Gilles Deleuze a appelé les « sociétés de contrôle » – gouvernées aujourd’hui à la fois par la prédictibilité algorithmique, les nouvelles formes de travail numérique ou l’« économie de l’attention » – quelles stratégies sont explorées par des artistes, des chercheurs et des usagers, pour produire de nouvelles relations aux dispositifs numériques, réflexives et émancipatrices, plutôt qu’addictives, compulsives et conspirationnistes ?
Ce colloque souhaite questionner des enjeux esthétiques, psychiques et politiques de la transformation rapide des technologies et des plateformes numériques, en confrontant différents diagnostiques critiques et en examinant des expérimentations artistiques à l’ère du « post-cinéma » (celle des reconfigurations du médium cinématographique à l’époque des médias connectés).
Projet Alliance porté par Nico Baumbach (Columbia University)et Judith Michalet (Université Paris 1)avec la participation de Aline Caillet (Université Paris 1), Yves Citton (Université Paris 8), Jane M. Gaines (Columbia University), Gwenola Wagon (Université Paris 8) et Damon R. Young (UC Berkeley), comme membres du comité scientifique.

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.fr/e/billets-colloque-international-remodeler-nos-interactions-numeriques-337204938047

Caroline Running Wolf presents to the DDI
2022-04-20 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver)
Caroline Running Wolf (Crow Nation), nee Old Coyote, is an enrolled member of the Apsáalooke Nation (Crow) in Montana, with a Swabian (German) mother and also Pikuni, Oglala, and Ho-Chunk heritage. As the daughter of nomadic parents, she grew up between USA, Canada, and Germany. Thanks to her genuine interest in people and their stories, she is a multilingual Cultural Acclimation Artist dedicated to supporting Indigenous language and culture vitality. After working for over 15 years as a professional nerd herder and business consultant in various fields, Running Wolf co-founded a nonprofit, Buffalo Tongue, with her husband, Michael Running Wolf. Together they create virtual and augmented reality experiences to advocate for Native American voices, languages, and cultures. Running Wolf has a Master’s degree in Native American Studies from Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

Jason Lewis presents to the DDI
2022-04-13 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | Online
Jason Edward Lewis is Full Professor of Design and Computation Arts. He is a digital media artist, poet and software designer. He founded Obx Laboratory for Experimental Media, where he directs research/ creation projects using virtual environments to assist Aboriginal communities in preserving, interpreting and communicating cultural histories, devising new means of creating and reading digital texts, developing systems for creative use of mobile technology. He is the director of the Initiative for Indigenous Futures, a seven-year SSHRC-funded Partnership focused on how Indigenous communities imaging themselves seven generations hence. Lewis co-founded and co-directs the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace research network that is investigating how Aboriginal people can participate in the shaping of our digital media future, and co-directs workshop combining traditional stories and game design at the Kahnawake First Nations’ high school. He is deeply committed to developing intriguing new forms of expression by working on conceptual, creative and technical levels simultaneously. Lewis’ creative work has been featured at the Ars Electronica Center, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, Urban Screens and Mobilefest, among other venues, his writing about new media has been presented at conferences, festivals and exhibitions on four continents and his work with Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace has won multiple awards.
He received his MPhil from the Royal College of Art for Dynamic Poetry: Introductory Remarks to a New Medium.

Wendy Chun's keynote address at UC Berkeley's Science Ethics and Policy Symposium
2022-04-09 17:00 - 18:00 (America/Vancouver) | Online
Beyond Ethical Tech: Understanding the Sociocultural History of Our Technological Defaults
Before we can talk about science policy issues, we need to talk about trust. How can we make sure science and its applications serve every community? Register to see the #SEPS2022 keynote with Wendy Chun on Saturday, April 9: http://seps2022.com.

Dylan Mulvin presents to the DDI
2022-04-06 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | Online
Dr Dylan Mulvin is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE, where he also serves as Programme Director for the MSc Media and Communications.
Dr Mulvin is a historian of media and technology. Drawing on methods from media studies, Science and Technology Studies, gender studies, and disability studies, Dr Mulvin investigates how standards, infrastructures, and defaults encode and crystallise assumptions about human perception and behavior. In other words, he studies the ways people make the stuff that we take for granted. He is the author of Proxies: the Cultural Work of Standing In (published open access with MIT Press).
Prior to joining the Department, Dr Mulvin was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research New England, where he was a member of the Social Media Collective. He earned his MA and PhD in Communication Studies from McGill University.

Tung-Hui Hu presents to the DDI
2022-03-30 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | Online
Tung-Hui Hu is associate professor at the University of Michigan in the department of English Language and Literature. He is the author of three books of poetry, The Book of Motion (2003), Mine (2007), and Greenhouses, Lighthouses (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), a chapbook, On the Kepel Fruit (Albion Books, 2017), and a study of digital culture, A Prehistory of the Cloud (MIT Press, 2015), which was described by The New Yorker as “mesmerizing… absorbing [in] its playful speculations”. His new book, an exploration of burnout, isolation, and disempowerment in the digital underclass, is Digital Lethargy, forthcoming from MIT Press.
His research has been featured on CBS News, BBC Radio 4, Boston Globe, New Scientist, Art in America, and Rhizome.org, among other venues. Hu has received awards from Yaddo, MacDowell, the NEA, the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, and the San Francisco Foundation, and his poems have appeared in places such as Boston Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, the Academy of American Poets’s Poem-a-Day, and the anthology Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of Hybrid Literary Genres. He is a member of the editorial board of Afterimage.

Wendy Chun at Latent Spaces - Performing Ambiguous Data
2022-03-22 11:00 - 12:30 (America/Vancouver) | Online
The value of ambiguity.
Data, Proxies and the limits of the computable via YouTube Stream
with Mireille Hildebrandt & Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, moderated by Felix Stalder
Mireille Hildebrandt:
The politics of ambiguity and the issue of proxies
In my talk, I will argue that what matters is not computable. However, it can be made computable, and in different ways. This difference in turn matters, it makes a difference for those who will suffer or enjoy the consequences. To make things computable developers need proxies, as computing systems cannot deal with the ambiguity of the languages we live in. Decisions on disambiguation and the choice of proxies have far-reaching implications, There is a politics in these design decisions that requires our keen attention. This is where transparency and agonistic debate are pertinent.
Mireille Hildebrandt is a lawyer and philosopher who works at the intersection of law and computer science. She is the Research Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel[1] and at Radboud University Nijmegen. She is also the principal investigator of the ‘Counting as a Human Being in the Era of Computational Law’ project (2019–2024). The research targets two forms of computational law: machine learning and blockchain technology.
Among her many publications, the most relevant for this series is:
Hildebrandt, Mireille. 2019. “Privacy as Protection of the Incomputable Self: From Agnostic to Agonistic Machine Learning.” Theoretical Inquiries in Law 20 (1): 83–121.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun:
The Politics of Proxies
Data proxies spell trouble and they are everywhere. They are the interfaces where the unknowable is translated into the known. They provide a measure for that which cannot be measured. As such, they are full of political assumptions, troubling the clean separation between data and model. The inherent ambivalence of proxies can open the space for a critique that is less about whether the models “get it right”, but about which models we want.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. Since its launch in 2019, she leads the Digital Democracies Institute which 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.
Among her many publications, the most relevant for this series is
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2021. Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. (in particular, the section on “proxies”).
This is the first event of a three-part series of talks and workshops that explore ambiguity and data.

Lorena Jaume-Palasí presents to the DDI
2022-03-16 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | Online
Lorena Jaume-Palasí is the founder of The Ethical Tech Society, a non-profit organization researching processes of automation and digitization with regards to their social relevance. Lorena researches the ethics of digitization and automation. In this context, she also deals with questions of legal philosophy. In 2017 she was appointed by the Spanish government to the High Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence and Data Policy. She is one of the 100 experts of the Cotec Foundation for her work on automation and ethics. She is a Fellow of the Bucerius Foundation and a member of the Advisory Board on Education and Discourse of the Goethe Institute. Lorena has testified before the European Parliament and the European Commission on Artificial Intelligence and Ethics on several occasions. She additionally heads the secretariat of the German National Section of the IGF as well as projects on Internet Governance in Asia and Africa. Lorena is regularly consulted by international organizations, associations and governments. She has co-authored and edited various publications on internet governance and regularly writes on data protection, privacy and publicity, public goods and discrimination. In 2018 she was awarded the Theodor Heuss Medal for “her contribution to a differentiated view of algorithms and their mechanisms” for AlgorithmWatch initiative.

Discriminating Data: Wendy Chun in dialogue with Yuk Hui
2022-03-10 17:00 - 18:30 (America/Vancouver) | Online
Book Conversation: Discriminating Data by Wendy Chun
In dialogue with Yuk Hui
Thu 10 March 2022, 5pm PST / Fri 11 March 2022, 9am HKT
Online Event: Register to join via Zoom
Facebook Event: https://fb.me/e/304BhrtRH
In this event, Wendy Chun will discuss her latest book Discriminating Data (2021, MIT Press) in conversation with Yuk Hui.
In Discriminating Data, Chun reveals how polarization is a goal—not an error—within big data and machine learning. These methods, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and identity politics through their default assumptions and conditions. Correlation, which grounds big data’s predictive potential, stems from twentieth-century eugenic attempts to “breed” a better future. Recommender systems foster angry clusters of sameness through homophily. Users are “trained” to become authentically predictable via a politics and technology of recognition. Machine learning and data analytics thus seek to disrupt the future by making disruption impossible.
Chun, who has a background in systems design engineering as well as media studies and cultural theory, explains that although machine learning algorithms may not officially include race as a category, they embed whiteness as a default. Facial recognition technology, for example, relies on the faces of Hollywood celebrities and university undergraduates—groups not famous for their diversity. Homophily emerged as a concept to describe white U.S. resident attitudes to living in biracial yet segregated public housing. Predictive policing technology deploys models trained on studies of predominantly underserved neighbourhoods. Trained on selected and often discriminatory or dirty data, these algorithms are only validated if they mirror this data.
How can we release ourselves from the vice-like grip of discriminatory data? Chun calls for alternative algorithms, defaults, and interdisciplinary coalitions in order to desegregate networks and foster a more democratic big data.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication, and Director of the Digital Democracies Institute at Simon Fraser University. 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 (MIT, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT 2016), and Discriminating Data (2021, MIT Press), and co-author of Pattern Discrimination (University of Minnesota + Meson Press 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.

Jonathan Beller presents to the DDI
2022-03-09 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | Online
Jonathan Beller is a Professor of Humanities & Media Studies at the Pratt Institute.
One of the foremost theorists of the visual turn and the attention economy; works on the history of cinema and the way in which the screen-image has altered all aspects of social life; books and edited volumes include: The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle, Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalist Struggle and the World-Media System, and Feminist Media Theory (a special issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online); serves on the Editorial Collective of the internationally recognized journal Social Text.

Yuan Stevens presents to the DDI
2022-03-02 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | Online
Markets, Architectures, Norms, or Law? Regulating Automated Face Recognition in Canada
Yuan (“You-anne”) Stevens is a legal and policy expert focused on information integrity, data protection and human rights. She works towards a world where powerful actors—and the systems they build—are held accountable to the public, especially when it comes to equality-seeking communities. She brings years of international experience to her work, having examined the impacts of technology on marginalized populations in Canada, the US, and Germany. Yuan is a collaborator at the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy at McGill University and research fellow at the Centre for Law, Technology and Society at uOttawa. She previously worked at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society during her studies in joint degree in civil and common law at McGill University.

Wendy Chun at UCSC Computational Media Seminar
2022-02-28 12:00 - 13:00 UTC | Online
Wendy Chun at UC Santa Cruz Computational Media Seminar.
Register here.

Wendy Chun at Brown University's COGUT Institute for the Humanities
2022-02-18 09:00 - 10:00 UTC | Online
Discriminating Data: A Conversation with Wendy Chun
Register for the event here.
In Discriminating Data (MIT Press, 2021), Wendy Hui Kyong Chun reveals how polarization is a goal — not an error — within big data and machine learning. These methods, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and identity politics through their default assumptions and conditions. Correlation, which grounds big data’s predictive potential, stems from twentieth-century eugenic attempts to “breed” a better future. Recommender systems foster angry clusters of sameness through homophily. Users are “trained” to become authentically predictable via a politics and technology of recognition. Machine learning and data analytics thus seek to disrupt the future by making disruption impossible.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media and leads the Digital Democracies Institute. She is the author of several works including Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT Press, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT Press, 2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT Press, 2016), and Discriminating Data (MIT Press, 2021).
The series “Democracy: A Humanities Perspective” is convened by Amanda Anderson, Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University. Through both the format and the content, we aim to showcase the forms of layered understanding and analysis that humanities scholars bring to the study of democracy, with special emphasis on current challenges in the U.S. and abroad. The events are free and open to the public.

Seda Gürses presents to the DDI
2022-02-16 12:30 - 13:30 UTC | Online
Seda is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Multi-Actor Systems at TU Delft at the Faculty of Technology Policy and Management, and an affiliate at the COSIC Group at the Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT), KU Leuven. Previously she was an FWO post-doctoral fellow at COSIC/ESAT, a research associate at the Center for Information Technology and Policy at Princeton University, and a fellow at the Media, Culture and Communications Department at NYU Steinhardt as well as the Information Law Institute at NYU Law School.
Her work focuses on privacy enhancing and protective optimization technologies (PETs and POTs), privacy engineering, as well as questions around software infrastructures, social justice and political economy as they intersect with computer science.

Wendy Chun at Berkeley Center for New Media
2022-02-14 17:00 - 18:30 UTC | Online
Discriminating Data with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Canada 150 Research Chair and Professor in New Media; Director of The Digital Democracies Institute, Simon Fraser University
Register for Zoom link here!
Or watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/gx3SrPAWW1g
In Discriminating Data, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun reveals how polarization is a goal—not an error—within big data and machine learning. These methods, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and identity politics through their default assumptions and conditions. Correlation, which grounds big data’s predictive potential, stems from twentieth-century eugenic attempts to “breed” a better future. Recommender systems foster angry clusters of sameness through homophily. Users are “trained” to become authentically predictable via a politics and technology of recognition. Machine learning and data analytics thus seek to disrupt the future by making disruption impossible.
About Wendy Chun
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.
Dr. Chun is also the author of Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (2016), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (2011), and Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (2006), as well as numerous articles and edited collections. She has received fellowships from various foundations and institutes, including the Guggenheim Foundation, ACLS, American Academy of Berlin, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She was Professor and Chair of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she worked for almost two decades. Currently, Dr. Chun works with the Digital Democracies Institute to undertake the proliferation of misinformation, abusive language and discriminatory algorithms. Through the investigation of natural language processing (NLP), political theory and critical data studies, the group aims to develop methods for creating effective online counterspeech and alternative models for connection.
Accessibiilty
The event is free and open to the public and will take place virtually over Zoom with a simultaneous livestream on BCNM’s YouTube Channel. All of our broadcasts will be live-captioned, and our Zoom Webinar experience offers an additional Streamtext window with options to customize caption text size and display. Please contact info.bcnm [at] berkeley.edu with requests or questions.
With the consent of featured speakers, all recorded videos will be available on the BCNM YouTube channel immediately after the event and event transcripts will be posted to this page one month after the event. We strive to meet any additional access and accommodation needs.
BCNM is proud to make conversations with leading scholars, artists, and technologists freely available to the public. Please help us continue this tradition by making a tax-deductible donation today. If you are in the position to support the program, we suggest $5 per event, or $100 a year.

Webinar - Protecting Expert Advice for the Public: Promoting Safety and Improved Communications
2022-02-11 11:00 - 12:00 UTC | Online
COVID-19 has highlighted the extent to which researchers who publicly share their expertise and the results of research face harassment and personal threats. The intimidation of experts has recently garnered significant media attention, but it is a problem that has affected the safety, well-being, and work of those who produce knowledge for some time. There is significant risk not only to researchers, but also to the public if the threat of intimidation prevents researchers from sharing knowledge and expertise.
These risks, and some steps to mitigate them, are articulated in the Royal Society of Canada Policy Briefing on Protecting Expert Advice for the Public.
On February 11, at 2:00 pm EST, the RSC is hosting an hour-long free virtual Town Hall convening the authors of this report to discuss key challenges in ongoing efforts to draw on expert advice to support effective public debate and decision-making to help Canada through, and beyond, the pandemic. Register for the event here.
Moderator
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Professor, Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University
Panelists
Amanda Clarke, Associate Professor, School of Public Policy & Administration, Carleton University
Matthew Herder, Associate Professor, Department of Pharmacology, Faculty of Medicine, and Director, Health Law Institute, Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University
Howard Ramos, Professor, Department of Sociology, Western University
Julia M. Wright, FRSC, George Munro Chair in Literature and Rhetoric, Department of English, Dalhousie University

Critical Tech Talk 2: Wendy Chun — Discriminating data
2022-02-10 15:00 - 18:00 UTC | Online
University of Waterloo – Thursday, February 10, 2022, 6 to 9 p.m. online in three parts | Register now
Have you ever observed a divisive, rage-fuelled fight online and wondered about the role technology played in the background?
In her most recent book, Discriminating Data (2021), Wendy Chun reveals how polarization is a goal—not an error—within big data and machine learning. These methods, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and identity politics through their default assumptions and conditions. Correlation, which grounds big data’s predictive potential, stems from twentieth-century eugenic attempts to “breed” a better future. Recommender systems foster angry clusters of sameness through homophily. Users are “trained” to become authentically predictable via a politics and technology of recognition. Machine learning and data analytics thus seek to disrupt the future by making disruption impossible.

6:00-7:00 p.m.
Data Jam
In this pre-conversation event, co-organized with the qcollaborative, participants will engage in a group design activity inspired by Wendy Chun’s book, Discriminating Data. Limited space available.

7:00-8:00 p.m.
Discriminating Data: A Conversation with Wendy Chun
Participants include Marcel O’Gorman (moderator) with respondents Brie Wiens and Queenie Wu.

8:00-9:00 p.m.
2D Social Mixer
Join in Gather Town for the “Data Jam Showcase” and a surprise jam room.

Courtney Radsch presents to the DDI
2022-02-09 12:30 - 13:30 UTC | Online
AI and Disinformation: State-Aligned Information Operations and the Distortion of the Public Sphere
Courtney C. Radsch, PhD, is a journalist, scholar and practitioner whose work focuses on the intersection of technology, media, and human rights. Currently, she is a fellow at UCLA’s Technology, Law and Policy Institute; a senior fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and the Center for Media, Data and Society (CMDS); and a visiting scholar at Annenberg’s Center for Media at Risk. Her research focuses on internet governance and the geopolitics of technology, media sustainability and the future of journalism, and power dynamics in digitally inflected information ecosystems. She is the author of Cyberactivism and Citizen Journalism in Egypt: Digital Dissidence and Political Change (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016) based on her pioneering doctoral research and her work has been published in top media outlets and peer-reviewed academic journals. She is a frequent public speaker and frequent media commentator including for CNN, Al Jazeera, NPR, and other global media outlets. Dr. Radsch has led advocacy missions to more than a dozen countries and has provided expert testimony to Congress, the OSCE, OECD, and the United Nations.
She spent seven years as Advocacy Director at the Committee to Protect Journalists, where she led its technology policy advocacy and campaigns to free imprisoned journalists, redress impunity for journalist murders, and combat online harassment. As a scholar-practitioner and former journalist in the Middle East, Radsch is deeply interested in the practical implications of her research and serves on a variety of advisory bodies and civil society networks including the Multistakeholder Advisory Group of the UN Internet Governance Forum, the International Science Council’s Panel of Experts, and the internet governance academic research network GigaNet. She is a founding member of the Coalition Against Online Violence (COAV), The ACOS Alliance (A Culture of Safety), and the Christchurch Call Advisory Network. She serves on the board of Tech Policy Press and the advisory board of the Dangerous Speech Project and Ranking Digital Rights. She holds a Ph.D. in international relations from American University. Find her on Twitter @courtneyr and www.mediatedspeech.com.

Wendy Chun at McMaster University: "The Digital Democracies Institute and why interdisciplinary work is effective, productive, and necessary."
2022-02-08 13:30 - 15:00 UTC | Online
Join McMaster University for a public talk (on Zoom) by Dr. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun entitled “The Digital Democracies Institute and why interdisciplinary work is effective, productive, and necessary”. Dr. Chun is a 2022 Hooker Distinguished Visiting Professor at McMaster University, sponsored by the Department of Communication Studies and Media Arts, the Department of English and Cultural Studies, the School of the Arts, the Centre for Networked Media and Performance, the Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship, the graduate program in Gender and Social Justice, and the undergraduate program in Global Peace and Social Justice. Full details below – please note that advance registration on Zoom (free) is required.
When: Feb 8, 2022 01:30 – 3:00 PM PST
Dr. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun: “The Digital Democracies Institute and why interdisciplinary work is effective, productive, and necessary.”
Abstract: The Digital Democracies Institute (DDI) integrates research in the humanities and data sciences to address questions of equality and social justice. Our work aims 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. A range of disciplines provides rich perspectives on democracy’s ideals and practices in the Internet age. Yet, despite the best efforts of specialists in various disciplines and sectors, the problems of misinformation, radicalization, echo chambers, and abusive language persist. A lack of communication across disciplinary and sectoral boundaries means that insights into these problems may be replicated and not shared, and solutions that may depend on insights from another discipline may not be considered. In addition, the lack of a common vocabulary inhibits the development of shared theoretical frameworks and solutions. The Digital Democracies Institute aims to bridge this gap through interdisciplinary collaboration and knowledge mobilization.
Bio: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication and Director of the DDI. 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 (MIT, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT 2016), and Discriminating Data (2021, MIT Press), and co-author of Pattern Discrimination (University of Minnesota + Meson Press 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. She has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania, Member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and she has held fellowships from: the Guggenheim, ACLS, American Academy of Berlin, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She has been a Visiting Professor at AI Now at NYU, the Velux Visiting Professor of Management, Politics and Philosophy at the Copenhagen Business School; the Wayne Morse Chair for Law and Politics at the University of Oregon, Visiting Professor at Leuphana University (Luneburg, Germany), and a Visiting Associate Professor in the History of Science Department at Harvard, of which she is an Associate.

Susan Schuppli presents to the DDI
2022-02-02 12:30 - 13:30 UTC | Online
Susan Schuppli, Goldsmiths University of London, is an artist-researcher and writer. She is currently Director & Reader of the Centre for Research Architecture. Through investigative processes that involve an engagement with scientific and technical modes of inquiry, her work aims to open up new conceptual pathways into the material strata of our world.
While many projects have examined media artefacts—photographs, film, video, and audio transmissions—that have emerged out of sites of contemporary conflict and state violence, current work explores the ways in which toxic ecologies from nuclear accidents and oil spills to the dark snow of the arctic are producing an “extreme image” archive of material wrongs. Creative projects have been exhibited throughout Europe as well as in Canada, Asia and the US.
She has published widely within the context of media and politics and am author of the forthcoming book, Material Witness (MIT Press), which is also the subject of an experimental documentary.
She is an affiliate artist-researcher and Board Chair of Forensic Architecture. Previously she was Senior Research Fellow and Project Co-ordinator of Forensic Architecture. In 2016 she received the ICP Infinity Award for Research and Critical Writing.

Wendy Chun at University of Notre Dame
2022-01-26 16:00 - 18:00 UTC
Life in Pixels hosts an ongoing series of transdisciplinary conversations thinking about how we can make sense of, and live with, our computational social condition today. Considering sociocultural, aesthetic, politicoeconomic, environmental, racial, and historical registers of technology together, the series will bring together people who think and do technology beyond disciplinary boundaries. The events are all designed as an ongoing series of conversations between scholars and practitioners in Media Studies, Science and Technology Studies, History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Critical Digital Studies, and Literary Cultural Studies.
Life in Pixels is generously sponsored by the Ruth and Paul Idzik College Chair in Digital Scholarship, the Program in History and Philosophy of Science, the Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society, the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship, and the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame.
Wednesday, January 26th, 4:00 pm PST (zoom book talk)
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication where she leads the Digital Democracies Institute. 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 (MIT, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT 2016), and Discriminating Data (2021, MIT Press), and co-author of Pattern Discrimination (University of Minnesota + Meson Press 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.
Registration required for this event must take place prior to the virtual book talk.

Timnit Gebru presents to the DDI
2022-01-26 12:30 - 13:30 UTC | Online
Timnit Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR). Prior to that she was fired by Google in December 2020 for raising issues of discrimination in the workplace, where she was serving as co-lead of the Ethical AI research team. She received her PhD from Stanford University, and did a postdoc at Microsoft Research, New York City in the FATE (Fairness Accountability Transparency and Ethics in AI) group, where she studied algorithmic bias and the ethical implications underlying projects aiming to gain insights from data. Timnit also co-founded Black in AI, a nonprofit that works to increase the presence, inclusion, visibility and health of Black people in the field of AI, and is on the board of AddisCoder, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching algorithms and computer programming to Ethiopian highschool students, free of charge.
Email ddi_lab@sfu.ca for a Zoom link.

Discriminating Data: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun in Conversation with Sarah Banet-Weiser
2022-01-19 09:30 - 10:30 UTC | Online
In Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun reveals how polarization is a goal—not an error—within big data and machine learning. These methods, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and identity politics through their default assumptions and conditions. Correlation, which grounds big data’s predictive potential, stems from twentieth-century eugenic attempts to “breed” a better future. Recommender systems foster angry clusters of sameness through homophily. Users are “trained” to become authentically predictable via a politics and technology of recognition. Machine learning and data analytics thus seek to disrupt the future by making disruption impossible.
Chun, who has a background in systems design engineering as well as media studies and cultural theory, explains that although machine learning algorithms may not officially include race as a category, they embed whiteness as a default. Facial recognition technology, for example, relies on the faces of Hollywood celebrities and university undergraduates—groups not famous for their diversity. Homophily emerged as a concept to describe white U.S. resident attitudes to living in biracial yet segregated public housing. Predictive policing technology deploys models trained on studies of predominantly underserved neighborhoods. Trained on selected and often discriminatory or dirty data, these algorithms are only validated if they mirror this data.
Join the online event at the University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg School for Communication here.

How to re-claim digital platforms for democracy in Canada
2022-01-18 13:00 - 14:30 UTC | Online
Taming Big Tech: Exploring the Alternatives – How to re-claim digital platforms for democracy in Canada
Wendy Chun in conversation with Andrew Clement.
Wendy Chun is Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University. She leads the Digital Democracies Institute which aims to develop methods for creating effective online counterspeech and alternative models for connection to combat the proliferation of online “echo chambers,” abusive language, discriminatory algorithms and mis/disinformation. Join Wendy in conversation with Andrew Clement, host of the CFE Taming Big Tech series and Professor Emeritus at University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information. This event is #7 in CFE Series.
Co-sponsors: Edmonton Public Library, Milton Public Library, Thunder Bay Public Library, Toronto Public Library, Vancouver Public Library.
Zoom link to event ryerson.zoom.us/j/91941276567
This is a free event and no registration is required.
Please contact cfe@ryerson.ca if you require accommodation to ensure inclusion in this event.

Sheelagh Carpendale presents to the DDI
2022-01-12 12:30 - 13:30 UTC | Online
Sheelagh Carpendale from Simon Fraser University’s School of Computing Science presents to the DDI. Her research interests include: information visualization, interaction design, large display interaction, visual analytics, personal visualization, human computer interaction, interactive technologies, collaborative interaction, open data, data empowerment.
More details TBD. Email ddi_lab@sfu.ca for Zoom link.

Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein present at DDI
2021-12-15 12:30 - 13:30 UTC | Online
What does feminist data science look like?
What is feminist data science? How is feminist thinking being incorporated into data-driven work? And how are scholars in the humanities and social sciences, in particular, bringing together data science and feminist theory in their research? Drawing from our recent book, Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020), we will present a set of principles for doing data science that are informed by the past several decades of intersectional feminist activism and critical thought. In order to illustrate these principles, as well as some of the ways that scholars and designers have begun to put them into action, we will discuss a range of recent research projects including several of our own: 1) A participatory design project about feminicide that uses machine learning to reduce the labor of feminist data activists 2) a thematic analysis of a large corpus of nineteenth-century newspapers that reveals the invisible labor of women newspaper editors; and 3) the development of a model of lexical semantic change that, when combined with network analysis, tells a new story about Black activism in the nineteenth-century United States. Taken together, these examples demonstrate how feminist thinking can be operationalized into more ethical, more intentional, and more capacious data practices, in the digital humanities, computational social science, human-computer interaction and beyond.
Catherine D’Ignazio is Assistant Professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT.
Lauren F. Klein is Associate Professor of English and Quantitative Theory and Methods at Emory University.

Discriminating Data with Wendy Chun and Hito Steyerl
2021-12-15 11:15 - 12:30 UTC | Online
In her book ‘Discriminating Data‘ (2021), Wendy Chun reveals how polarization is a goal — not an error — within big data and machine learning. These methods, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and identity politics through their default assumptions and conditions. Hito Steyerl and Wendy Chun will discuss how can people release themselves from the vice-like grip of discriminatory data and consider alternative algorithms, defaults, and interdisciplinary coalitions in order to desegregate networks.
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. She studied Systems Design Engineering and English Literature and is author of Control and Freedom (2006), Programmed Visions (2011), and Updating to Remain the Same (2016).
Hito Steyerl works as a filmmaker, philosopher, and cultural critic. Her work takes the form of essays, lectures, installations, video, and photography. She is professor for experimental film and video and the co-founder of the Research Center for Proxy Politics at the Berlin University of the Arts.
In English
Organized by: Stanford-Leuphana Winter Academy on Humanities and Media and the Centre for Digital Cultures of Leuphana University Lüneburg in cooperation with the ICI Berlin.
How to attend: Video-meeting with the possibility of audiovisual participation (please register, using this form). Public livestream on this page with the possibility to ask questions via chat (no registration required).

Wendy at DISCO Network
2021-12-06 09:00 - 10:30 UTC | Online
DSI & DISCO Network Book Talk | “Discriminating Data” with Wendy Chun in Conversation with Lisa Nakamura
Register for the event here.
In “Discriminating Data,” Wendy Hui Kyong Chun reveals how polarization is a goal—not an error—within big data and machine learning. These methods, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and identity politics through their default assumptions and conditions. Correlation, which grounds big data’s predictive potential, stems from twentieth-century eugenic attempts to “breed” a better future. Recommender systems foster angry clusters of sameness through homophily. Users are “trained” to become authentically predictable via a politics and technology of recognition. Machine learning and data analytics thus seek to disrupt the future by making disruption impossible.
DISCO Network is a new network of researchers, artists, technologists, policymakers, and practitioners that challenges digital social and racial inequalities. Racism and ableism are at the heart of digital industries and are taken for granted all through its development, implementation, and user culture.

Dara Kelly presents to the lab
2021-12-01 12:30 - 13:30 UTC
Dr Dara Kelly is from the Leq’á:mel First Nation, part of the Stó:lō Coast Salish. She is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Business at the Beedie School of Business, SFU. She teaches in the Executive MBA in Indigenous Business and Leadership program, and on Indigenous business environments within full-time and part-time MBA programs.
Dr Kelly is a recipient of the 2020 Early in Career Award for CUFA BC Distinguished Academic Awards. Her research helps fill in gaps in the literature on the economic concepts and practices of the Coast Salish and other Indigenous nations. She has presented in numerous conferences and public spaces in an effort to challenge conventional economical practices and inform positive change by drawing on knowledge of Indigenous economics. She is Co-Chair of the Indigenous Caucus at the Academy of Management and serves on the board of the Association for Economic Research of Indigenous Peoples.
She conducts research using research methodology emerging from Coast Salish philosophy, protocols and worldview. A paper stemming from her thesis won the Best Paper in Sustainability Award at the Sustainability, Ethics and Entrepreneurship (SEE) Conference in Puerto Rico in February 2017.

Wendy at McGill's Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy
2021-11-30 09:00 - 10:00 UTC
Join Centre for Media, Technology & Democracy Research Director, Sonja Solomun for a discussion with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun about her newly published book Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition (MIT Press). Register for the event here.
