Digital Democracies Institute

Wendy at SFU School of Communication Book and Speaker Series
2021-11-05 10:00 - 11:30 UTC | Online
The SFU School of Communication’s Book and Speaker Series is a space in which the School engages with recently published books by faculty and other members of the community. Experience an engaging conversation with the author about our featured publication of the month. Our goal is to encourage fluid conversations between faculty and students and to celebrate the achievements of our scholarly community, think critically, pose questions and search for new avenues for research and activism.
Wendy Chun (SFU School of Communication) and Alex Barnett (Flatiron Institute, Simons Foundation) will be in conversation with Mercedes Bunz (King’s College London). The new book Discriminating Data Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition, 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.
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/the-school-of-communication-book-speaker-series-tickets-200368636987

Wendy is a panelist as part of the exhibition »BarabásiLab. Hidden Patterns« at ZKM
2021-11-04 10:00 - 12:00 | Online
Details tbd

Alissa Antle presents to the lab
2021-11-03 12:30 - 13:30 | DDI, 7460 - TASC 2, SFU, Burnaby, BC, Canada
Alissa Antle is an innovator and scholar, whose research pushes the boundaries of computation to augment the ways we think and learn. As a designer and builder of interactive technologies, her goal is to explore the ways in which these innovations can improve, augment, and support children’s cognitive and emotional development. Her interactive systems have been deployed to facilitate collaborative learning about aboriginal heritage, sustainability and social justice; improve learning outcomes for dyslexic children; and teach emotion-regulation to disadvantaged children. In 2015, Alissa was one of 48 scholars inducted into the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists, acknowledging her as one of Canada’s intellectual leaders.

To see a descriptions of complete and current research projects, please view Alissa Antle’s research site.

Laura Marks presents to the lab
2021-10-27 12:30 - 13:30 | DDI, 7460 - TASC 2, SFU, Burnaby, BC, Canada
Laura Marks works on media art and philosophy with an intercultural focus, and on small-footprint media. Her most recent books are Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image (MIT, 2015) and Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (MIT, 2010). She programs experimental media for venues around the world. As Grant Strate University Professor, she teaches in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, on unceded Coast Salish territory of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) nations.

Wendy at Gray Area Festival 2021: Worlding Protocol
2021-10-23 14:00 - 14:40 | Online
About the Gray Area Festival 2021: Join us for our annual survey of culture through the lens of creative practice with artist presentations, conversations, workshops, and an exhibition — now freely accessible online around the world.
How do we negotiate the balance between our individual freedom and communal dependencies; and what practical reality can we build together?
As we take stock from within a still uncontained global pandemic, it is clear that the entangled web of ecological, economic, and social crises we face demands planetary scale cooperation. Even with the promise of new technologies enabling real-time simulation, distributed financial systems, and geoengineering, exclusionary and extractive power structures persist — rendering purely technical solutions ineffective. Anything is possible, yet nothing seems to change.
For our 7th edition, Gray Area Festival presents Worlding Protocol — a survey of interdisciplinary creators drawing upon indigenous knowledge, transhumanist philosophies, regenerative ecologies, and autonomous organizations to imagine new relational ontologies beyond utopian and fatalist worldviews.
Register here.

Iginio Gagliardone presents to the lab
2021-10-20 12:30 - 13:30 | Online
Iginio Gagliardone is Associate Professor in Media and Communication at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and Associate Research Fellow in New Media and Human Rights in the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy (PCMLP), University of Oxford. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science and has been living between Italy, Ethiopia, the UK, and South Africa, researching the relationship between new media, political change, and human development, and exploring the emergence of distinctive models of the information society in the Global South. His most recent publications include “China, Africa, and the future of the Internet” (ZED), “The Politics of Technology in Africa” (Cambridge University Press), and “World Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development” (UNESCO). His study “Countering Online Hate Speech”, supported by UNESCO, has rapidly become one of the most cited publications in the field, highlighting the need to develop bottom-up and contextually informed responses to the emergence of online hatred.

Wendy gives Keynote at Critical Borders Conference, Cambridge
2021-10-19 08:00 - 09:30
Wendy will be giving the keynote address at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies ‘Critical Borders: Radical (Re)visions of AI’ Conference.
The aim of this conference is to critically interrogate issues of bordering in artificial intelligence (AI). This conference examines both how AI operates at material borders, including national and bodily borders, and how AI produces or transgresses imagined, theoretical and ideological borders, such as categories of race, gender, age and class. Compelled by Gayatri Spivak’s insistence that we attend to borders (Spivak 2016), taking into account when border crossings are a violation and when they are pleasurable, we ask: what kinds of border-crossing are induced by AI, and what kinds are prohibited? Which borders does AI reinforce, and which borders does it render obsolete? We aim to explore the tension between the possibilities of transgressing boundaries, especially in the context of binary categorisation, and the risks of equating boundary subversion with emancipatory political practices. In particular, we are interested in scholarship that examines how AI’s transgression of boundaries can unintentionally entrench, rather than challenge, gendered and racialised norms.

Wendy at Arebyte Gallery
2021-10-14 00:00 | Online
Wendy will be taking part in a panel discussion based on visual artist Ben Grosser’s show Software For Less, which you can see more about here.
The event will aim to discuss software as culture, the politics of interface, and the power (im)balance between user and corporation within today’s digital technologies and social media platforms.
More details to be added once confirmed.

Zack McCune presents to the lab
2021-10-13 12:30 - 13:30 | Online
Zack McCune presents ‘Conflict, Consensus, and Creativity: Wikipedia at 20’.
Zack McCune is Director of Brand at the Wikimedia Foundation. He draws on a background in sociology and creative marketing. As a Master’s student at the University of Cambridge, he authored the first academic study of Instagram. McCune directed social media for MasterCard and Mountain Dew before returning to his roots in ‘free culture.’ Today he leads the Brand Studio at Wikipedia, a team of 9 creative staff and dozens of filmmakers, artists, and design agencies to inspire global participation in open knowledge.

Global Disinformation Index - Public Launch of Report & Results for Canada
2021-10-12 10:00 - 11:30 | Online
1-2.30pm EST / 10-11.30am PST
Register here for the launch event for this highly anticipated event. News websites have financial incentives to spread disinformation, in order to increase their online traffic and, ultimately, their advertising revenue. Meanwhile, the dissemination of disinformation has disruptive and impactful consequences. The COVID-19 pandemic offers a recent example. By disrupting society’s shared sense of accepted facts, these narratives undermine public health, safety and government responses.
To combat ad-funded disinformation, the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) deploys its assessment framework to rate news domains’ risk of disinforming their readers. These independent, trusted and neutral ratings are used by advertisers, ad tech companies and platforms, to redirect their online ad spending in line with their brand safety and disinformation risk mitigation strategies.
GDI defines disinformation as ‘adversarial narratives that create real world harm’, and the GDI risk rating provides information about a range of indicators related to the risk that a given news website will disinform its readers by spreading these adversarial narratives. These indicators are grouped under the index’s Content and Operations pillars, which respectively measure the quality and reliability of a site’s content and its operational and editorial integrity.
The launch event will see panelists discuss the findings of the research, and discuss the impacts of those findings, before taking Q&A from the audience:

Nobel Conference 2021
2021-10-05 08:00 - 2021-10-06 17:00
Nobel Conference 57 – Big Data REvolution
Wendy presents at the Nobel Conference on Beyond Verification. How do we reduce the spread of misinformation and disinformation? What makes any piece of info true? Fact checking alone is inadequate to such a task. Wendy Chun is working with a deeply multidisciplinary team of researchers that includes everyone from data analysts to dramaturgs, to develop a model that can answer that question, developing new ways to displace fake news. The project, called “Beyond Verification,” is part of the Digital Democracies Institute.

Wendy at Westminster Town Hall
2021-10-04 10:00 - 11:30 | Online
Democracy’s Digital Dilemma
Dr. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s upcoming book, Discriminating Data, delves into how social media platforms are designed to make us hate one another across political, racial, and class lines. She will speak at the Forum on how the internet and algorithms have undermined democracy and how they could be used in the pursuit of racial and social justice.
This forum will be presented in a virtual hybrid format. Dr. Chun will not be physically at Westminster. Instead, she will speak live from Canada which we will project in the Westminster Sanctuary. She will take questions from the live Westminster audience. This will all be available to watch on the Forum’s website and Facebook.

Anti-Asian Sentiment Before Covid-19
2021-09-29 12:00 - 13:30 | Online
Join Grace Kyungwon Hong (UCLA), Lisa Nakamura (UMich) and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (SFU) for a discussion on anti-Asian sentiment before Covid-19. As many media accounts have recounted, Stop AAPI Hate reported that anti-Asian violence soared during the first wave of the 2020 COVID19 pandemic. From mid-March 2020 to the end of February 2021, 3,795 “Anti-Asian hate incidents” were reported to Stop AAPI Hate. North of the U.S. border in the Canadian province of British Columbia, “Anti-Asian hate crimes” reportedly increased by 717% in 2020. Focusing on recent developments in social media, this event will examine the longer historical context of anti-Asian violence, interrogating why and how sentiments such as “hate” and acts of violence committed by individuals have become the primary framework for understanding Asian racialization. Within this context, Wendy Chun will briefly outline the historical ties between sentiment analysis, homophily, discrimination and anti-Asian violence, Grace Hong will speak about “Affect, Sentiment, and the Human: Love and Hate in a Time of Anti-Asian Violence”, and Lisa Nakamura will discuss “Women of Color and the Digital Labor of Repair”.
This event is moderated by Kirsten McAllister (SFU), and respondents are Siyuan Yin (SFU), and Sun-ha Hong (SFU).

For registration, please click here, and we will then send out zoom link details 24 hours before the event.

Grace Kyungwon Hong is Professor of Asian American Studies at UCLA; she also holds a joint appointment in Gender Studies. Her research focuses on women of color feminism as an epistemological critique of and alternative to Western liberal humanism and capital, particularly as they manifest as contemporary neoliberalism.
She is the author of Death Beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) which won the Association for Asian American Studies Cultural Studies book prize, and The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Cultures of Immigrant Labor (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). She is the co-editor (with Roderick Ferguson) of Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Duke University Press, 2011). She is the co-editor (also with Roderick Ferguson) of the Difference Incorporated book series at the University of Minnesota Press.
Lisa Nakamura is the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor in the Department of American Cultures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the founding Director of the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan and she has been writing about digital media, race, and gender since 1994. She is author of Racist Zoombombing, with Hanah Stiverson and Kyle Lindsey (Routledge 2021); Technoprecarious, written as part of Precarity Lab Collective (MIT and Goldsmiths Press 2020); Race After the Internet, co-edited with Peter Chow-White (Routledge 2011); and Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet, (University of Minnesota 2007). She has written books and articles on digital bodies, race, and gender in online environments, on toxicity in video game culture, and the many reasons that Internet research needs ethnic and gender studies.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is 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 (MIT, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT 2016), 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.

Kirsten E. McAllister is a Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Her research and teaching focus on political violence, racism, migration and diaspora and her approach is interdisciplinary. She has conducted community-based research projects in national and transnational contexts.
Siyuan Yin is an assistant professor of Migration and Communication in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. She engages in interdisciplinary scholarship spanning the fields of cultural and media studies, feminist studies, social movements, and political economy. Siyuan’s current project examines mediated activism and cultural production among women and migrant workers in the local and transnational contexts.
Sun-ha Hong is an Assistant Professor at SFU. His research focuses on how the way we think and talk about technologies shape their human and social implications. He is currently working on a SSHRC-funded project entitled Personal Truthmaking. It traces the cultural and historical resonances between two different ways in which the idea of ‘truth’ and ‘facts’ are being weaponised today: (1) in the politically polarised, platform-amplified practice of ‘fact signalling’ that demonises the other side as irrational and antimodern; (2) constantly recycled technological futures that encourage us to dream of fully automated luxury objectivity through the power of algorithms and AI.

Simon Fraser University respectfully acknowledges the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), q̓íc̓əy̓ (Katzie), kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem), Qayqayt, Kwantlen, Semiahmoo and Tsawwassen peoples on whose unceded traditional territories our three campuses reside. While this is a virtual discussion, the servers that make this event possible are physical and also reside on unceded traditional territories.

Wendy gives President's Lecture at SFU
2021-09-28 18:30 - 19:30
In this President’s Faculty Lecture, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (SFU’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media) will discuss themes from her forthcoming book Discriminating Data about how big data and predictive machine learning currently encode discrimination and create agitated clusters of comforting rage (MIT Press).
The lecture is free with registration, which you can sign up for here.
This lecture will explore how polarization is a goal—not an error—within current practices of predictive data analysis and machine learning for these methods 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. The predictive programs thus seek to disrupt the future by making disruption impossible.

Giulio Dalla Riva presents to the lab
2021-09-22 12:30 - 13:30 | Online
“Prolegomena to Antifascist Data Science: theory, praxis, but mostly pizza.”
In this talk Giulio is going to try and sketch how it may be possible to do data science in a way that is rooted in antifascist thinking and practice. He will try to do that by reflecting upon two intense years of research and activism around the online spreading of toxic ideologies. Both the research and activism are situated in Ōtautahi Christchurch, yet he has personal roots in the mountains of Veneto, in Italy, and date from long before. The sketch will be incomplete, idiosyncratic, and overall unsatisfying. He will offer more questions than answers. He will ask for help more than once.
Data scientist Giulio Dalla Riva explores and tries to make sense of what happens in complex, dynamical networks. He is interested in ecological networks and the evolutionary processes that modify them in time; in particular he develops mathematical and statistical tools to study the relationship between ecological biodiversity and evolutionary diversity.
He is also interested in Social Networks, especially online. He tries to understand what makes them work in the way they work.

Wendy Gives the 12th Annual Attallah Lecture at Carleton University
2021-09-16 15:30 - 17:30 | Online
Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication invites you to the 12th annual Attallah Lecture, on Thursday, September 16th at 3:30pm PST. This year’s speaker is Dr. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University.
Dr. Chun’s research draws from the humanities and social 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. Dr. Chun’s lecture, Discriminating Data, will explore how polarization is a goal – not an error – within current practices of predictive data analysis and machine learning. This is an urgent and timely topic, and the lecture promises to be thought provoking.
The 2021 Attallah Lecture is open to the public and will be held online via Zoom this year. We ask that you please register in advance.

Fenwick McKelvey presents to the lab
2021-09-15 12:30 - 13:30 | Online
Fenwick McKelvey studies algorithmic media – the intensification of software within communication infrastructure – through cases such as advanced Internet traffic management software and political campaign management software. His approach contributes to communication studies by demonstrating the opportunities to integrate software studies into the field while raising questions about the imbrication of software and communication.
Bell Canada, Canada’s largest telecommunications company, recently filed a request to Canada’s telecommunications regulator, the CRTC, to use machine-learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to filter fraud and spam calls (Marotta, 2019). Their request seems modest at first, helpfully eliminating a public nuisance. If approved, however, this decision will transform media regulation, establishing a precedent for using experimental automated systems to solve matters of open and free expression. This paper, in collaboration with Reza Rajabiun, takes Bell’s application as a critical case to understand the ramifications of AI for telecommunications regulation.
Bell’s request is part of a turn to increasing data surveillance to train automated systems that function as instruments of media policy (author; Kerr, Barry & Kelleher, 2020). We begin by situating Bell’s proposal within the historical and contemporary context of AI as/in media governance. From firewalls to deep packet inspection, telecommunications infrastructure has been the site of constant innovation in automation (author). AI builds on but departs from this tradition in its demand for data, its inscrutability and in the promise of ‘zero-touch’ networks. Next, we examine trade press coverage to identify the myths and motives driving adoption of AI. We conclude by critically reviewing Bell’s arguments before the CRTC, analyzing their implications for governance. As intervenors in these regulatory hearings, we bridge policy scholarship and action (Shepherd et al., 2014).
As the first public hearings about AI before a national media regulator, Bell’s case has global importance for the future of AI regulation (Balmer et al., 2020). First, the case undermines the effectiveness AI ethics as industry self-regulation (Greene, Hoffmann, & Stark, 2019). Bell Canada is located in Montreal, where the AI industry has agreed to the Montreal Declaration for the Responsible Development of AI—Bell is not a signatory. Outside of Montreal, Canada is perceived as a world leader in AI governance. It is among the first national governments to implement algorithmic impact assessments (author)—Bell has made no such commitment. Thus, this case demonstrates the ineffectiveness of ‘soft power’ regulation of AI through ethics proposals and government standards. Presently under review by the CRTC, Bell’s proposal could set national and international precedent.

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.”

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.

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

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.

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”
