March 2023 - Air-L - lists.aoir.org

Digital Methods Summer School '23 - Univ. Amsterdam
by rogers＠govcom.org 29 Mar '23

29 Mar '23

Digital Methods Summer School 2023 ’Prompting and other algorithmic curiosities’ 3-14 July 2023 New Media & Digital Culture Media Studies University of Amsterdam Turfdraagsterpad 9 1012 XT Amsterdam the Netherlands Call for participation The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), Amsterdam, is holding its annual Summer School on ’Prompting and other algorithmic curiosities for knowing AI’. The format is that of a (social media and web) data sprint, with tutorials as well as hands-on work for telling stories with data. There is also a programme of keynote speakers including visual media scholar, Sabine Niederer, speaking on ‘prompt design'. The Summer School is intended for advanced Master's students, PhD candidates and motivated scholars who would like to work on (and complete) a digital methods project in an intensive workshop setting. 'Prompting and other algorithmic curiosities for knowing AI' Algorithmic auditing and probing are methodologies to tease out discriminatory, offensive and other undesirable outputs of AI-driven systems and may lead at once to critiques of reinforcement and reification as well as to subsequent efforts at debiasing, retraining, patching, editing and other means to moderate the content. One aspect of the auditing that is less well understood is how best to trigger the systems to show how well thought through the safeguards are. Journalistic and scholarly work on probing Google’s autocompletion has been undertaken for years, yet more attention is paid to the sometimes shocking outputs than how to elicit them. ‘Prompting’ strategy (and ‘prompt design’) may be considered elicitation methods for learning the machine’s capacity for offence and other auditing interests. Or more dramatically perhaps, how to learn what lurks within the machine? The Digital Methods Summer School is dedicated to machine curiosity and its methods to make AI knowable. At the Summer School there are the usual social media tool training tutorials for working on single and cross-platform analysis, but also continued attention to thinking through and proposing how to work critically with social media data, both from mainstream social media platforms as well as so-called alt tech. Apart from the keynotes and the training tutorials, there are also empirical and conceptual projects that participants work on. Projects from the past Summer and Winter Schools include: Detecting Conspiratorial Hermeneutics via Words & Images, Mapping the Fringe on Telegram; Greenwashing, in_authenticity & protest; Searching constructive/authentic posts in media comment sections, Mapping deepfakes with digital methods and visual analytics, “Go back to plebbit”: Mapping the platform antagonism between 4chan and Reddit, Profiling Bolsobots Networks, Infodemic cross-platform analysis, Post-Trump Information Ecology, Streams of Conspirational Folklore, and FilterTube: Investigating echo chambers, filter bubbles and polarization on YouTube. The most recent school had some of the following projects: Climate imaginaries; Repurposing Google Ads; What is a meme, technically speaking?; Tracing the genealogy and change of TikTok audio memes; Google Autocomplete: Racist results still?; and OK Boomer on Twitter. Summer School ’23 organisers: Richard Rogers, Kamila Koronska and Guillen Torres, Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. Application information at https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/bin/edit/Dmi/SummerSchool2023. Best regards Richard Rogers Media Studies University of Amsterdam

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Opportunity to work as a researcher with a deaf-led charity
by Harry Dyer (EDU - Staff) 29 Mar '23

29 Mar '23

Dear Colleagues, I have been asked to share the following opportunity to work as a researcher with a deaf-led charity exploring access in arts and culture. The full call can be found here (https://www.stagetext.org/working-for-stagetext/) Background Stagetext is a deaf-led charity that provides and advocates for captioning and subtitling of arts and culture, so that deaf, deafened and hard of hearing people have equal access to culture. We work with theatres, museums and other kind of cultural venues to make live plays, talks, conferences, videos and online content accessible, and to train cultural professionals in welcoming deaf audiences. We are developing our advocacy and research work, with a focus on putting deaf people's stories and experiences in accessing culture at the forefront. The project Stagetext is seeking a freelance research or social history professional to: 1. Identify and interview at least ten culture lovers who use captions or subtitles to access live cultural events. We are looking for people who are based outside of London, and who represent a variety of ages and a range of ethnicities. 2. Write a case study on each of the people interviewed, with a short summary supported by the transcript of the interviews themselves, a photo if the interviewee agrees, plus data on the age and location of the participant. Case studies will be used to develop communications pieces for publication, and to identify quotes for use on the website and in funding applications. Candidates should have strong written and verbal skills and ideally should have had deaf awareness training. The majority of deaf caption users have English as their first language, rather than BSL, so there is no specific requirement that the freelancer use BSL. We will provide an interpreter or live subtitles where needed. Responding to the brief: The deadline to respond to the brief is 9am Tuesday 11th April. We will hold interviews during w/c 11th April with a view to appoint and for the project to start immediately. Proposals should at a minimum include a summary of your experience, links to examples of relevant work, and proposed timeline and budget. Please email your proposal to Stagetext's Head of Advocacy and Research, Liz Hilder: liz(a)stagetext.org<mailto:liz@stagetext.org>, who you can also contact with any questions. All the best, Harry

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Assistant Editor position
by Mel Stanfill 29 Mar '23

29 Mar '23

Hi all, We at Transformative Works and Cultures ( https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc) are looking for 1 or 2 assistant editors as part of building a leadership pipeline for the journal and in the field more broadly. The announcement is at https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/announcement/view/129 as well as below, and feel free to reach out to me with any questions. Duties Under the supervision of the editors, the assistant editors will assist with editorial review of new submissions, managing the peer review process, and communicating with authors. Estimated time commitment is approximately 1 hour per week. Qualifications Applicants should be senior PhD students (ABD) or early career scholars (fewer than 5 years post-PhD). Applicants should have a record of peer-reviewed publications. Applicants need not be native speakers of English but must be competent in academic prose in English. Previous editorial experience is appreciated but not required. As part of our goal to support the ongoing diversification of fan studies, scholars of color and non-Western scholars are particularly encouraged to apply. To apply, submit a CV and cover letter detailing experience and interest to editor AT transformativeworks.org by May 31, 2023. Best, Mel Stanfill, PhD Associate Professor Texts & Technology / English University of Central Florida http://www.melstanfill.com

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Deadline approaching: The Datafied Family
by Ranjana Das 28 Mar '23

28 Mar '23

Deadline approaching on 28th February for the call for papers open for - *The Datafied Family* - a free, fully online day-long event on Wednesday 28th June 2023, hosted by Professor Ranjana Das of the University of Surrey, UK, with funding from the Institute of Advanced Studies. KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Confirmed keynote speakers include Professor Sonia Livingstone, London School of Economics, UK; Professor Usha Raman, University of Hyderabad, India; Dr Giovanna Mascheroni, Catholic University of Milan, Italy and Professor Veronica Barassi, University of St Gallen, Switzerland >From body-trackers, non-human digital support apps, smart home tech, parenting apps and gadgets, surveillance devices from the womb to the cradle, technologies of intimacy and play in the Internet of the Things, and wellbeing and wellness support bots - the textures of family life are changing - at disparate paces across global cultures and economies with a steady increase in family technologies, which are subtly, and not so subtly altering the doing of care, intimacy, leisure, learning, play, routine and more. WEBSITE: https://www.ias.surrey.ac.uk/event/the-datafied-family-algorithmic-encounte… CALL FOR PAPERS The Datafied Family - will raise and respond to a set of key questions - without restricting its topics to these alone. Overarchingly, we ask 1. In what ways have family dynamics - routines, caring, intimacies, leisure, play, learning, parenting and more - been interrupted, (re)shaped, or transformed by the steady algorithmizing of everyday family life? 2. What material artefacts - toys, apps, smart home tech, educational applications, portals and meta-portals - punctuate family life and to what effect? 3. What inequalities, injustices, and power dynamics are being rehearsed or reshaped through the datafication of family life? 4. How is the algorithmic shaping of domestic routines and rapports encountered in practice, resisted, or reshaped through human agency? 5. What global perspectives remain less visible and unincorporated in theorising the datafied family, including the disparities between the global north and south? The event welcomes paper submissions on its submission portal in the following areas - which are indicated below but not produced as an exhaustive list - * Surveillance technologies in the home * Body trackers * Geo-location devices and relationships * Datafication of intimacies and sexuality * Parenthood, parenting and platforms * Childhood, big data and datafication of childhood * Rights based perspectives on data technologies in the family * Kinship, routines, time and technology * Aging, care and emerging technologies * Smart home technologies * Leisure, play, learning and Big Data * Algorithmic cultures, resistance, play and algorithmic shaping of family life * Data driven discrimination * Data inequalities and injustices * Redefining 'family' in an era of datafication Abstract submission details: Final Submission Deadline:28th February 2023 Notification of Outcome:March 20th 2023 Event date:28th June, 2023, 930 am to 3 pmUK time. Submission portal: [*please submit your abstract here https://www.ias.surrey.ac.uk/event/the-datafied-family-algorithmic-encounte… ]. If any questions, please get in touch with Professor Ranjana Das, at r.das(a)Surrey.ac.uk<mailto:at%20r.das@Surrey.ac.uk> Professor Ranjana Das Professor in Media and Communication Co-Editor, Sociology<https://journals.sagepub.com/home/soc> Twitter: @ProfRanjanaDas<https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.c…> Web: Prof Ranjana Das | University of Surrey<https://www.surrey.ac.uk/people/ranjana-das>

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JOB - Canada Research Chair- Tier 2: Communication and Critical Disability Studies at Carleton University
by Tracey P. Lauriault 28 Mar '23

28 Mar '23

Canada Research Chair- Tier 2: Communication and Critical Disability Studies at Carleton University *Please note extended application deadline: April 24* https://carleton.ca/deputyprovost/2023/assistant-associate-professor-and-ca… <https://carleton.ca/deputyprovost/2023/assistant-associate-professor-and-ca…> -- Tracey P. Lauriault Associate Professor, Critical Media and Big Data Communication and Media Studies School of Journalism and Communication https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1847-2738

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REMINDER: Centre for Internet Studies Online Lecture Series: Inaugural talk by Mark Andrejevic March 29th 12pm CET
by Jakob Linaa 27 Mar '23

27 Mar '23

Dear colleagues A brief reminder. We have 40+ people signed up but there is space for more. Centre for Internet Studies, Aarhus University, DK, is pleased to launch our Online Lecture Series by welcoming professor Mark Andrejevic, Monash University, Melbourne. Mark is among the world’s leading surveillance theorists and renowned for several important books. This will take place March 29th at noon (12pm) CET on Zoom: https://aarhusuniversity.zoom.us/j/67387758776 Everybody is welcome. To get an idea of the audience, participants are requested to sign up by sending a mail to linaa(a)cc.au.dk Abstract: The 'Biases' of Automation: Pre-emption/Framelessness/Environmentality With a nod to the work of Canadian theorist Harold Innis, this presentation considers the "biases" of automated media systems -- not in the conventional sense of "bias," but to consider what tendencies of power and control we privilege when we make the choice to use automated systems (within the constraints of contemporary social relations). The presentation explores the relationship between environmental forms of governance (with reference to Michel Foucault's comments on "environmentality"), logics of pre-emption, and data collection without limits. It considers both the imperatives driving the development of automated media, and some of the cultural and political consequences of their adoption. Mark Andrejevic is Professor in the School of Media, Film, and Journalism at Monash University, where he is also a chief investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making and Society. He is the author of several books including Automated Media, and more than 100 journal articles and book chapters.

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Melbourne book launch event - 'Economies of Virtue: The Circulation of Ethics in AI'
by Thao Phan 27 Mar '23

27 Mar '23

*Book Launch Event and Celebration* *Economies of Virtue: The Circulation of 'Ethics' in AIEdited by Thao Phan, Jake Goldenfein, Declan Kuch, and Monique Mann* *Date: *4pm, Wednesday April 26 2023 *Location: *Common Room, Level 9, Melbourne Law School *Details and registration: * https://events.unimelb.edu.au/ADM+s/event/28626-economies-of-virtue-book-la… <https://events.unimelb.edu.au/ADM+s/event/28626-economies-of-virtue-book-la…> Please join us in celebrating the launch of Economies of Virtue: The Circulation of ‘Ethics’ in AI, edited by Thao Phan, Jake Goldenfein, Declan Kuch, and Delcan Kuch published open access by the Institute of Network Cultures in late 2022. This event includes a brief panel conversation hosted by the editors and contributing authors followed by drinks and snacks. Speakers include: Prof Sarah Pink, A/Prof Michael Richardson, Dr Laura Bedford, Dr Jake Goldenfein, and Dr Jathan Sadowski, and chaired by Dr Thao Phan. The book is freely available online. Physical copies of the book will be available for FREE, in addition to other INC publications: https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/economies-of-virtue-the-circul… Those attending the launch event may also be interested in attending the ADM+S Public Lecture by Angieszka Leszczynski <https://events.humanitix.com/adms-public-lecture-angieszka-leszczynski>, Associate Professor in the Department of Geography & Environment at Western University in Canada. The lecture is titled “Urban platform materialities: aesthetics, glitches, amenities” and begins at 6pm at the Kaleide Theatre, RMIT (a short walk from the Melbourne Law School). *About the Book:* AI ethics has never been far from the industries it sought to critique. While originally designed to bring values such as fairness, accountability and transparency to Big Tech and its products, the lines between Big Tech’s PR initiatives and AI ethics funding has never been clear. In practice, AI ethics now operates as a means for the co-option of critics and to enable regulatory capture. It is used by corporations to create legitimacy and to further accumulate value. The result is that ‘ethics’ has now become a high-valued industrial commodity, and AI ethics its foundry. This anthology is a collective response to the reification of ethics into commodity forms. It explores how industry participation in ‘ethical AI’ research has created a new ‘economy of virtue’—a massive network of actors variously situated across industry, civil society, and universities, producing and circulating ethics as a service and a product. The contributors present both critical perspectives and first-hand experiences of this economy. They address a wide range of topics including: the contradictions and personal dilemmas of working in industry-funded spaces; case studies of AI ethics in domains such as defence, facial recognition, and standards setting; critical assessments of techniques like green-washing and the manufacture of trust; and the risks and practicalities of direct action such as speaking up, organizing against and dropping out. Together, these contributions give voice to the intractable problems of co-option, capture, and complicity that plague AI ethics, and give shape to the networks and circulations defining the field. *Authors: *Corinne Cath and Os Keyes; Sarah Pink; Rodrigo Ochigame; Sy Taffel, Laura Bedford, and Monique Mann; Angela Daly; Tsvetelina Hristova and Liam Magee; Michael Richardson; Jake Goldenfein, Lilly Irani, J. Khadijah Abdurahman, and Alex Hanna; Jathan Sadowski, Thao Phan, and Meredith Whittaker.

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New open access book: Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Chile (UCL Press)
by Fox, Alison 27 Mar '23

27 Mar '23

*** We apologise for any cross-posting*** UCL Press is delighted to announce the publication of a new open access book that may be of interest to list subscribers: Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Chile: The experience of Peruvian migrants by Alfonso Otaegui. Download it free: https://bit.ly/3JqS2Ne ******************************************* Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Chile The experience of Peruvian migrants Alfonso Otaegui Free download: https://bit.ly/3JqS2Ne ******************************************* What does it mean to be ageing in Chile as a migrant? What does it mean to be late middle-aged nowadays? How does living half of your life in a foreign country impact perspectives on later life? Is retirement an opportunity to go back to the home country? What will happen to the next generation, raised in a different country from their parents? Based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork, Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Chile analyses the experience of ageing for Peruvian migrants aged around 60, who have lived in Chile for over 20 years. Their life is informed by a series of experiences of being in-between. They live between two countries, two generations (their Peruvian parents and their Chilean children), two different stages in life (retained youth and menacing old age), between giving care (to their parents) and not wanting care (from their children) and between a continuing legacy (through their children, who have a promising future) and not transmitting legacy (some traditions will not pass on to the next generation). The Peruvian population has been one of the most studied in Chile with a wide variety of themes, from the insertion of migrants into the labour market to the spreading of Peruvian restaurants and also discrimination suffered by migrant children at schools, among many others. However, neither the experience of ageing of migrants in Chile nor the experience of late middle age has not been fully addressed. By focusing on the entanglement of ageing, migration and technology, this monograph is an ethnographic contribution to an unexplored subject in the vast literature on migration studies in Chile. Free download: https://bit.ly/3JqS2Ne ---------------------- uclpress.co.uk | @uclpress

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AI Technology as Interactional Human Culture - Workshop - EUV Frankfurt (Oder) 30 & 31 March 2023
by Marie-Theres Fester-Seeger 27 Mar '23

27 Mar '23

Dear All, We'd like to invite you to the following workshop: AI Technology as Interactional Human Culture - Language, Data Practice and Social Struggle "In this interdisciplinary workshop, we discuss AI culture from a critical anthropological, sociological, and linguistic perspective. We treat AI culture as human and interactional practice and investigate it as embedded in wider social structures and linguistic conditions. Within this view, users and programmers of AI are no autonomous individuals but part of communities based on social affiliation, language, shared cultural practice, and economic intentions. Together with scholars and practitioners, we seek to give attention to the people "behind" and "in" the systems and their societal and linguistic embeddings and critically engage with the role of living human and 'enlanguaged' beings within AI systems." Keynote speakers: *Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi (University of Warsaw) *Emily M. Bender (University of Washington) *Nicolas Flores-Herr (Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems) *Andreas Hepp (University of Bremen) The workshop takes place on Thursday, March 30, and Friday, March 31, 2023, at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. You can attend in person and online (on zoom). Please find the program on this website: https://www.kuwi.europa-uni.de/de/lehrstuhl/sw/sprachgebrauch-und-migration/ Vortraege_-Talks/AI-Technology-as-Interactional-Human-Culture/index.html If interested in this workshop, please register with me (fester-seeger(a)europa-uni.de <mailto:fester-seeger@europa-uni.de> ) to receive the meeting links and/ or directions. Best wishes, Theres Marie-Theres Fester-Seeger, PhD Postdoctoral Fellow, Postdoc Network Brandenburg Professur für Sprachgebrauch und Migration Europa-Universität Viadrina Kulturwissenschaftliche Fakultät Große Scharrnstr. 59 15230 Frankfurt (Oder) Germany <mailto:mt.fester.seeger@gmail.com> mt.fester.seeger(a)gmail.com | <mailto:fester-seeger@europa-uni.de> fester-seeger(a)europa-uni.de International Workshop "AI Technology as Interactional Human Culture: Language, Data Practice and Social Struggle" at European-University Viadrina (March 30 &31, 2023). You can find further information here. <https://www.kuwi.europa-uni.de/de/lehrstuhl/sw/sprachgebrauch-und-migration /Vortraege_-Talks/AI-Technology-as-Interactional-Human-Culture/index.html>

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CLEF 2023 LongEval Lab on Longitudinal Evaluation of Model Performance
by Elena Kochkina 27 Mar '23

27 Mar '23

Call for Participants LongEval: Longitudinal Evaluation of Model Performance CLEF 2023 Lab 18-21 September, Thessaloniki, Greece -------------------------------------------------------- ** Registration open, training data available ** The CLEF 2023 LongEval lab is motivated by recent research showing that the performance of information retrieval and text classification models drops as the test data becomes more distant in time from the training data. LongEval differs from traditional IR and classification shared tasks with special considerations on evaluating models that mitigate performance drop over time. It encourages participants to develop temporal information retrieval systems and longitudinal text classifiers that survive through dynamic temporal text changes, introducing time as a new dimension for ranking models performance. The lab consists of two tasks: * Task 1. LongEval-Retrieval: The goal of Task 1 is to propose an information retrieval system which can handle changes over the time. The proposed retrieval system should follow the temporal timewise evolution of Web documents. Contact: longeval-ir-task(a)univ-grenoble-alpes.fr<mailto:longeval-ir-task@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr> * Task 2. LongEval-Classification: The goal of Task 2 is to propose a temporal persistence classifier which can mitigate performance drop over short and long periods of time compared to a test set from the same time frame as training. Contact: r.a.a.alkhalifa(a)qmul.ac.uk<mailto:r.a.a.alkhalifa@qmul.ac.uk> Registration ------------ Please use the CLEF registration form (http://clef2023-labs-registration.dei.unipd.it/) to register to the tasks. The registration closes on Friday, 28 April 2023. Timeline -------- April 2023: Test data release 28 April 2023: Registration closes 10 May 2023: End of Evaluation Cycle [submission of runs] 5 June 2023: Submission of Participant Papers [CEUR-WS] 5–23 June 2023: Review process of participant papers July 2023: Camera ready paper submission September 2023: CLEF Conference Organisers ---------- Rabab Alkhalifa, Iman Bilal, Hsuvas Borkakoty, Jose Camacho-Collados, Romain Deveaud, Alaa El-Ebshihy, Luis Espinosa-Anke, Gabriela Gonzalez-Saez, Petra Galuščáková, Lorraine Goeuriot, Elena Kochkina, Maria Liakata, Daniel Loureiro, Harish Tayyar Madabushi, Philippe Mulhem, Florina Piroi, Martin Popel, Christophe Servan, Arkaitz Zubiaga.

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