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Masterclass Radhika Gajjala
by Leurs, K.H.A. (Koen) 16 May '16

16 May '16

Dear all, On 24 May Prof. Radhika Gajjala will give a masterclass at Utrecht University, the Netherlands on 'E-diasporas in big and small “data” space: A postcolonial and feminist perspective'. After the masterclass she will give a public lecture on 'Archives of Subalternity: Questions and Provocations for Digital Humanities'. Kindly forward to students who might be interested in this event. Deadline is flexible and taking credit is not obligatory. Kindly see: http://www.uu.nl/en/events/masterclass-and-public-lecture-by-radhika-gajjal… With kind regards, Koen Leurs

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Hong Kong Review of Books
by Alfie Bown 16 May '16

16 May '16

Dear all, I hope this is the right way to use the listserv. I am writing to share details of a new international book review site and generally extend the invitation to the academic community to contribute to the site. The Hong Kong Review of Books was launched in January and features reviews of international poetry, literary fiction and non-fiction, with a focus on critical theory. We also run an essay series and an interview series. We can provide review copies and token payments to all reviewers and essay writers, so please check out the site and consider getting involved. The website can be found at www.hkrbooks.com, along with all submission guidelines and information. All best, Alfie Dr Alfie Bown Assistant Professor Dept. of English HSMC, Hong Kong Co-Editor of The Hong Kong Review of Books <http://www.hkrbooks.com/> -- ********************************************************************************** *Hang Seng Management College is incorporated in Hong Kong with limited liability by guarantee.* This e-mail may be confidential and legally privileged. If you are not the addressee you may not copy, forward, disclose or use any part of it. If you have received this message in error, please delete it and notify the sender by return e-mail. Thank you! Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail. **********************************************************************************

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CFP: Feminist Media Histories, special issue on "Data"
by Lauren Klein 15 May '16

15 May '16

Please see below for a CFP for a special issue of Feminist Media Histories on “Data," including an option to submit digital projects for peer review. CALL FOR PAPERS Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal Special Issue on “Data” Guest Editors: Miriam Posner (UCLA) and Lauren Klein (Georgia Tech) “Data” has enormous cultural currency in the world today. Most of us understand that corporations are encoding and analyzing our habits, preferences, and behaviors on a massive scale. Personalized music suggestions, predictive policing, and Amazon recommendations are all part of this pervasive data regime. Discussions of this regime, and of data more generally, tend to focus on the present. But the concept of data also has a history, one embedded in a range of cultural, political, and material contexts. Building upon recent feminist scholarship that has drawn our attention to the various ways data shapes twenty first-century life--how data affects our experience of gender, how the effects of gendered data are felt differently across racial lines, and what feminist theory might bring to data and its visualization, to name only a few--this issue seeks to model how feminist histories of data might help us chart a range of unexplored futures. We ask not only how gender and identity can be brought to bear on the concept of data and its emergence, but also how theories and methods associated with feminist scholarship might be employed to illuminate the historical and cultural complexities of data. We seek both scholarly essays and born-digital works on topics including but not limited to: ● Data and media. Is data “media”? If so, what are its features and/or how is it expressed? ● Data and history. How does a renewed attention to certain historical subjects or events enrich our understanding of data, past or present? ● Data and narrative. What are the stories we tell about the history of data, and how can a feminist approach offer an alternative narrative of the concept? ● Data and gender. What are the ways in which gender is, or could be, represented as data? What are the gender effects of its visualization? ● Data and method. How can feminist methods inform a history or critique of data? ● Data as concept. What can the concept of “data” bring to feminist media history? What does the concept of “data” elide? ● Data as politics. How is data complicit in structures of power? How does data become part of how power is practiced, experienced, or expressed? ● Data as agent. How has data-driven decision-making influenced the history of media, particularly as it relates to gender? ● Data in the world. How can an intersectional feminist approach to data allow us to better understand its global impact? Potential contributors should send short proposals of 300-500 words to the guest editors directly (mposner(a)humnet.ucla.edu <mailto:mposner@humnet.ucla.edu> and lauren.klein(a)lmc.gatech.edu <mailto:lauren.klein@lmc.gatech.edu>) by no later than June 30th, 2016. Contributors will be notified by July 15th, 2016, with completed articles/projects due October 1st, 2016. All contributions, including digital projects, will be sent out for peer review shortly thereafter. The issue is scheduled for a Summer 2017 release (Feminist Media Histories 3.3). We welcome proposals for nontraditional digital projects, although Feminist Media Histories itself cannot host these projects. Should a digital project be accepted, we will publish a 500-1000-word author’s statement in the volume, which will include a link to the externally-hosted project. Feminist Media Histories is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal devoted to feminist histories of film, video, audio, and digital technologies across a range of periods and global contexts. Intermedial and transnational in approach, Feminist Media Histories examines the historical role gender has played in varied media technologies, and documents women’s engagement with these media as audiences and users, creators and executives, critics and theorists, technicians and laborers, educators and activists. Feminist Media Histories is published by the University of California Press. More information is available here: http://fmh.ucpress.edu/content/submit <http://fmh.ucpress.edu/content/submit> -- Lauren F. Klein, Ph.D. Assistant Professor School of Literature, Media, and Communication Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA 30332-0165 lauren.klein(a)lmc.gatech.edu <mailto:lauren.klein@lmc.gatech.edu> -- Lauren F. Klein, Ph.D. Assistant Professor School of Literature, Media, and Communication Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA 30332-0165 lauren.klein(a)lmc.gatech.edu

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Call for Papers: 2017 BEA Research Symposium "Video Games: A Medium That Demands Your Attention"
by Nicholas Bowman 15 May '16

15 May '16

Looking for a unique outlet for your academic research and writings about video games? I'm pleased to announce that the Broadcast Education Association is hosting a one-day research symposium on the cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and social demands of video games! The event, "Video Games: A Medium that Demands Our Attention" is being held on Sunday, April 23, 2017 in Las Vegas (exact venue TBD), and papers are being accepted now. Manuscripts can be either data-driven or theoretically focused, so long as they: (a) adhere to one of the four main symposium tracks (cognitive, emotional, behavioral, or social) (b) are capped at 4000 words, including abstract and references (manuscripts will be made anonymous for the review process) (c) are submitted (via e-mail to the Symposium Chair) no later than midnight, EST on Thursday, December 1, 2016 There will be cash prizes for the top student papers, and some manuscripts will be invited for further development, to be included in a published volume on video games by Routledge (Taylor & Francis) as part of their "Electronic Media Research Series" (https://www.routledge.com/Electronic-Media-Research-Series/book-series/EMR) Complete Symposium details can be found at http://www.beaweb.org/wp/?page_id=3345. I can also answer any questions that you might have, at Nicholas.Bowman(a)mail.wvu.edu. ~nick Nicholas David Bowman, Ph.D. <http://ndbowman.info/>Associate Professor of Communication Studies; Research Associate, Interaction Lab (#ixlab) West Virginia University Associate Editor Journal of Media Psychology Editor-Elect (Receiving manuscripts as of 1 May 2016) Communication Research Reports Editorial Statement: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08824096.2016.1174536 Social and Digital Media Director Eastern Communication Association ______________________ Twitter @bowmanspartan Skype ID: nicholasdbowman

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Webinar: New Ethical Challenges in Experimental Political Science
by Michael T Zimmer 15 May '16

15 May '16

Many might be interested in this webinar organized by PRIM&R (Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research), that Elizabeth Buchanan recently brought to my attention: Webinar: New Ethical Challenges in Experimental Political Science June 8, 2016 1:00-2:30pm ET Overview Over the past two decades, political scientists have adopted experimental methods to interact directly with subjects in the United States and globally. This new wave of field experimentation has produced some very public controversies. Researchers have created illegal attack advertisements during political campaigns, exposed subjects to risks of violence through experiments conducted in authoritarian regimes overseas, and even gone so far as to commit crimes to measure police responses. These recent controversies have contributed to distrust among the public and made apparent the need to consider the ethical implications of this experimental work. How can IRBs guide political scientists in conducting ethically sound research while continuing to generate valuable knowledge about the political, economic, and cultural sphere? Full details are here: http://www.primr.org/webinars/june2016/ Michael -- Michael Zimmer, PhD Associate Professor and PhD Program Director, School of Information Studies Director, Center for Information Policy Research University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee e: zimmerm(a)uwm.edu<mailto:zimmerm@uwm.edu> w: www.michaelzimmer.org<http://www.michaelzimmer.org>

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Deadline extended! CfP conference: Fomenting political violence
by Steffen Krueger 15 May '16

15 May '16

Dear colleagues, due to problems with the conference-booking page, we are extending the deadline for the CfP until the end of May (31/05)! With all best wishes, Steffen *Fomenting political violence – Phantasy, Language, Media, Action.* A two-day international conference at the *Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex*, UK, September 9 – 10 2016, in co-operation with *Bournemouth University* and the *University of Oslo* (UiO), Norway. Steffen Krueger, postdoc and lecturer, Dept. of Media and Communication, University of Oslo Karl Figlio, Professor Emeritus, Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex. Barry Richards, Professor of Political Psychology, Bournemouth University. This two-day conference invites researchers from a wide range of disciplines to address the relationship between phantasy, language, media and action. Do language and phantasy feed into one another, especially in the contemporary mediascape, fostering an extremist mentality that foments violent political action? And, if so, how can we understand the relationship between action on the one side, and phantasy and language in their specific forms of mediation on the other? Although it is difficult to establish causal links between, for example, racist slurs and racist violence, we can nevertheless observe how increases in ethnocentric, xenophobic and fundamentalist speech in online forums and on social networking sites go together with increases in right-extremist criminal acts, as is presently the case in Germany. Various traditions of research into prejudice, extremism, violence and the media have taken different routes in conceptualising the links between the above concepts. Discourse analysis, for example, has pointed to the subtle ways in which language use can help make symbolic violence permissible. Social psychology, and especially the social identity tradition, has shown how typical tendencies in group dynamics suggest certain fault lines for larger-scale political behaviour. Media effect studies, in turn, have suggested a string of concepts based on social-psychological work, such as “uses-and-gratifications”, the “spiral of silence”, “agenda setting”, and “frame theory”, which can be instrumental in conceiving how people’s construction of reality, facilitated by media, might lead to widely held dispositions for the legitimation of socio-political action and/or the restraining and containing of such action. Although there is a substantial psychoanalytic literature on prejudice, ethnic and religious hatred, and fundamentalism, there is little on the process of fomenting violence, which moves from phantasy through language into action. With a view to intervening in and advancing the above traditions, the conference invites papers inquiring into how psychoanalysis can help understand the build-up to eruptions of violence. How can conceptions of sociality, relationality, divisiveness, exclusion and affect, developed in various psychoanalytic traditions, shed light on the often invisible ties that link what we do to what we feel, imagine, hear, see, read or say – or to an atmosphere of extremism? Can psychoanalysis contribute to deliberations around policy and practice in relation to freedom of speech, ‘hate speech’ and media regulation, as well as foster a sensitivity to implied prejudice in everyday encounters? The attempt to gain a more rounded, situated and dialectical way to understand these phenomena suggests ‘scenic’ methodology, for which the work of Alfred Lorenzer – a psychoanalytic-social theorist not well known in the English-speaking world – is central. We plan to reserve one session to explore his work, but we invite you imaginatively to address the full range of issues relevant to the topic of the conference. We encourage an open, exploratory manner and look forward to engaging discussions. *Indicative fields of research include*: - Psychodynamics and social dynamics of political violence, and their enmeshment / co-constitution. - Spaces, scopes and fields of action. - Gendered forms / gender dynamics. - Media discourses / media performances. - (Symbolic) interactions. - Internal and external worlds. - Freedom of expression vs blasphemy and prejudice. - -isms, -phobias and psychopathologies. - Methodological and/or theoretical reflections. - Researching across cultures. - Historical studies. - Humiliation and violence. - Violence and purification. - Bystanders and collusion with political violence. - Psychotic realities: Paranoia and delusions of threat. - Hate speech and hate actions. If you would like to offer a paper to the conference, relating to the above fields or to other aspects of the overall conference theme, please send an abstract of 300-400 words to: *cpsfv(a)essex.ac.uk* <cpsfv(a)essex.ac.uk>. *Deadline for abstract submission: May 31, 2016. * (Delegates are informed about the inclusion of their papers within two weeks from the deadline.) Conference fee is £150 (£100 for students and unemployed). *A LIMITED NUMBER OF DISCOUNTED PLACES FOR STUDENTS ARE AVAILABLE.* Affordable accommodation is available on campus. If you have questions regarding the conference or call for papers, please write to: steffen.krueger(a)media.uio.no. *Book your place at the conference here <http://www.essex.ac.uk/online_shop/conference/default.aspx?dept=PA&conferen…>. * *Book your on campus accommodation here: **https://kx.essex.ac.uk/BnB/* <https://kx.essex.ac.uk/BnB/> * Promotional code: CPS2016* -- Steffen Krüger, PhD lecturer and postdoctoral researcher Dept. of Media and Communication University of Oslo Forskningsparken II Gaustadalléen 21 0349 OSLO Norway skype: steff.krueger mob. 0047 4580 6466

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Forwarding for Tom Haigh: Shiva Ayyadurai Wants My Emails
by Michael T Zimmer 13 May '16

13 May '16

Dear AIR-L: My colleague, Thomas Haigh, asked me to forward to AoIR-L his post on the latest events related to a debate with Shiva Ayyadurai related to the invention of “email”…. Michael -- Michael Zimmer, PhD Associate Professor and PhD Program Director, School of Information Studies Director, Center for Information Policy Research University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee e: zimmerm(a)uwm.edu<mailto:zimmerm@uwm.edu> w: www.michaelzimmer.org<http://www.michaelzimmer.org/> Begin forwarded message: From: Thomas Haigh [mailto:thaigh@computer.org] Sent: Friday, May 13, 2016 11:48 AM To: members(a)sigcis.org<mailto:members@sigcis.org> Subject: Shiva Ayyadurai Wants My Emails! Hello SIGCIS, I’ve got a new post up at http://tomandmaria.com/Tom/emailgrab. The text is pasted below. It documents an attempt by Shiva Ayyadurai to obtain my emails though the Wisconsin open records. In other cases, this tactic has been widely condemned as an attack on academic freedom. Please forward to any other communities you think might be interested. Best wishes, Tom Shiva Ayyadurai Wants My Emails Thomas Haigh. www.tomandmaria.com/tom<http://www.tomandmaria.com/tom> thomas.haigh(a)gmail.com<mailto:thomas.haigh@gmail.com> Shiva Ayyadurai really, really wants to look through my emails. Remember Shiva Ayyadurai<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Ayyadurai>? The man who has been engaged for five years on a quixotic but energetic public relations campaign to convince the world that he, and he alone, is the true "inventor of email"? Ayyadurai literally wrote the book on internet publicity<http://www.amazon.com/Internet-Publicity-Guide-Marketing-Cyberspace/dp/1880…>. His big problem is that you can't invent something that's already in widespread use. Ayyadurai said that he "designed and deployed"<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/30/email-turns-29-infographi_n_941699…> a prototype in 1980, but historians knew very well that electronic mail had been around since at least 1965<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/06/20/opinion/20110620-who-invented…> and by the mid-1970s was the main source of traffic<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET> on what evolved to become the Internet. I'm a historian of information technology, working in the School of Information Studies of the University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee. As chair of SIGCIS<http://www.sigcis.org/>, the group for historians of information technology, I coordinated the response of the historical community to his bizarre claim. This included creating a report (www.sigcis.org/Ayyadurai<http://www.sigcis.org/Ayyadurai>) documenting what Ayyadurai was saying and comparing it to what we knew about actual email history. He rarely names me or any of the other historians who have worked on documenting the actual history of email, though his campaign has denounced the members of SIGCIS as paid stooges for Raytheon, revisionists, a cabal, and "sophisticated public relations agents that manufacture and package 'histories,' no different than clever propaganda, to perpetuate lies of the pre-eminence of the military-industrial-academic complex."<http://sophisticated%20public%20relations%20agents%20that%20manufacture/> By this theory the entire academic history of computing community is "unconsciously cutting and copying" the work of Gizmodo blogger Sam Biddle, "believing Biddle’s sensationalistic article to be the truth." According to Ayyadurai's recent lawsuit<http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160511/10135934407/guy-who-didnt-invent-…>, Biddle's pesky meddling has cost him at least $35 million. As I wrote in Communications of the ACM<http://www.tomandmaria.com/Tom/Writing/CACM-SevenLessons.pdf>, this is a fascinating case with many lessons to teach about public history, modern journalism, and the myths of invention. Anyway, I guess Ayyadurai has noticed me after all because now he now wants to read my emails. That's not a superuser perk that you get for having invented email. Your emails are perfectly safe from him. He's actually invoking the Wisconsin open records laws. These were originally passed in the Progressive Era<http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/a-brief-history-of…> to make sure that corrupt politicians couldn't hide their misdoings. Our current crop of politicians have made efforts to rewrite <http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/robin-vos-keeps-trying-to-gut-open-rec…> and reinterpret <http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/scott-walker-admin…> them to exclude themselves from scrutiny, but as the state Republican Party has found them a useful tool for harassing academics who have dared to comment on political issues<http://news.wisc.edu/chancellors-message-on-academic-freedom-and-open-recor…> they have been left in place for faculty in the University of Wisconsin system. His records request (http://www.tomandmaria.com/Tom/documents/AyyaduraiRequestRedacted.pdf) passed to me for action by UWM's public records custodian, demanded "a complete and thorough search of all filing systems and locations for all records maintained by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee pertaining to Dr. Thomas Haigh." The specific demand was for "all email correspondence - including email attachments - to or from Dr. Haigh containing" words such as Smithsonian, Shiva, and Raytheon. I dutifully searched through my university email account (thaigh(a)uwm.edu<mailto:thaigh@uwm.edu>) for matching documents and passed them on to our university records custodian for vetting. The resulting stack of paper was quite large, but conspicuously failed to provide the salacious material Ayyadurai was fishing for. It included a student paper misspelling the name of Siva Vaidhyanathan<http://mediastudies.virginia.edu/people/sv2r>, numerous job posting emails mentioning the Smithsonian, the annual merit review filings of my school's faculty, and an entire sample issue of History Research spammed to me by its reportedly predatory publisher<https://scholarlyoa.com/2015/10/15/david-publishing-company-a-massive-spamm…>. (Ayyadurai reportedly favors such journals <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/gmos-junk-science-by-henry-i--…> for his own publications, so maybe he should send his work on email history there.) When the emails of another Wisconsin historian, William Cronon, were requested by the state Republican Party, Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/opinion/28krugman.html> that The hard right — which these days is more or less synonymous with the Republican Party — has a modus operandi when it comes to scholars expressing views it dislikes: never mind the substance, go for the smear. And that demand for copies of e-mails is obviously motivated by no more than a hope that it will provide something, anything, that can be used to subject Mr. Cronon to the usual treatment... After all, if you go through a large number of messages looking for lines that can be made to sound bad, you’re bound to find a few. Legally, Republicans may be within their rights: Wisconsin’s open records law provides public access to e-mails of government employees, although the law was clearly intended to apply to state officials, not university professors. But there’s a clear chilling effect when scholars know that they may face witch hunts whenever they say things the G.O.P. doesn’t like. Someone like Mr. Cronon can stand up to the pressure. But less eminent and established researchers won’t just become reluctant to act as concerned citizens, weighing in on current debates; they’ll be deterred from even doing research on topics that might get them in trouble. What’s at stake here, in other words, is whether we’re going to have an open national discourse in which scholars feel free to go wherever the evidence takes them, and to contribute to public understanding. Republicans, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, are trying to shut that kind of discourse down. It’s up to the rest of us to see that they don’t succeed. Anthony Grafton, writing in the New York Review of Books<http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2011/04/04/academic-freedom-cronon-affair/>, argued that Again and again in recent times, Republican operatives have used fragments snatched out of context from emails—as they have used fragments snatched out of context from recorded conversations<http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/mar/18/embattled-public-radio/>—to smear scientists, scholars and activists of whom they disapprove. Biddie Martin, then chancellor of the University of Wisconsin--Madison issued a statement <http://news.wisc.edu/chancellors-message-on-academic-freedom-and-open-recor…> noting that in processing Cronon's emails We are excluding exchanges that fall outside the realm of the faculty member’s job responsibilities and that could be considered personal pursuant to Wisconsin Supreme Court case law. We are also excluding what we consider to be the private email exchanges among scholars that fall within the orbit of academic freedom and all that is entailed by it. Academic freedom is the freedom to pursue knowledge and develop lines of argument without fear of reprisal for controversial findings and without the premature disclosure of those ideas. Scholars and scientists pursue knowledge by way of open intellectual exchange. Without a zone of privacy within which to conduct and protect their work, scholars would not be able to produce new knowledge or make life-enhancing discoveries. Lively, even heated and acrimonious debates over policy, campus and otherwise, as well as more narrowly defined disciplinary matters are essential elements of an intellectual environment and such debates are the very definition of the Wisconsin Idea. When faculty members use email or any other medium to develop and share their thoughts with one another, they must be able to assume a right to the privacy of those exchanges, barring violations of state law or university policy. Having every exchange of ideas subject to public exposure puts academic freedom in peril and threatens the processes by which knowledge is created. The consequence for our state will be the loss of the most talented and creative faculty who will choose to leave for universities where collegial exchange and the development of ideas can be undertaken without fear of premature exposure or reprisal for unpopular positions. Martin was soon to flee the state herself for the happier world of Amherst College. I agree with her, and with Krugman and with Grafton: requests of this kind are a crude intimidation tactic from the playbook of climate change deniers, designed to scare faculty members into steering away from public engagement or controversial topics and to force us to defer to the interests of the powerful. They've been embraced by conservative activists as a way of curtailing academic freedoms and smearing researchers with whose work they disagree by launching fishing expeditions for phrases that can be misrepresented or quoted out of context. This practice threatens the ability of any research university to function. The recent elimination of real tenure<http://www.aaup.org/news/tenure-weakened-wisconsin> across the Wisconsin system makes faculty here all the more vulnerable to this kind of pressure. When he was seeking revenge for his firing from an Indian research institution, Ayyadurai campaigned with the slogan "Innovation demands freedom" (innovationdemandsfreedom.com<http://innovationdemandsfreedom.com/> is one of Ayyadurai's many vanity domains). He presents himself as a liberal champion of the underdog, a plucky impoverished dark-skinned immigrant boy<http://vashiva.com/yes-a-darkie-invented-email-get-over-it/> fighting for what's right. His most prominent supporters are Noam Chomsky and his business associate Deepak Chopra. He insists that his public relations campaign to brand himself as the inventor of email "isn’t about my wanting glory... It’s about refusing to enact the script that’s been played out for much too long in the lives of people from my background." So it's a little ironic that Ayyadurai is now resorting to an ugly tactic used to erode the freedom of researchers. It's been a long time since Ayyadurai was a defenseless 14 year old boy. In 2016 Ayyadurai is a wealthy and well connected celebrity regularly featured in tabloid gossip pages, with access to the best lawyers and public relations executives. His own legal complaint <https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2829697-Gov-Uscourts-Mad-180248-1-0…> against Gizmodo describes him as "a world-renowned scientist, inventor, lecturer, philanthropist and entrepreneur" and insists that being recognized as the inventor of email would have added tens of millions of dollars to his net worth. In contrast I am an obscure scholar who has never appeared on television or in the Daily Mail's showbiz section<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2747398/Fran-Drescher-weds-sci…>. Because I have no financial interest in who did, or didn't, invent email my aim has been to serve the public by protecting the accuracy of the historical record. Now that conservatives have declared open season on faculty all over Wisconsin, we might ask why a self-proclaimed liberal crusader has embraced their tactics by, as Cronon termed it, abusing open records to attack academic freedom<http://scholarcitizen.williamcronon.net/2011/03/24/open-records-attack-on-a…>.

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western bias of facebook's trending topics
by kalev leetaru 13 May '16

13 May '16

Thought many of you would find of interest my piece this morning mapping the geography of Facebook's list of the 1,000 media outlets it uses for its Trending Topics. The map on the second page may be of especial interest. Its striking to see the heavy absence of even English language African and Middle Eastern news outlets, even outlets like AllAfrica, as well as its reliance on RSS feeds, which have largely been depreciated in the online news space: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/05/13/is-facebooks-trending-t… Facebook confirmed to me by email that the list of news outlets they use was provided as-is by comScore, which claims to cover only 44 countries with that media product and I've reached out to them for comment on why their coverage of the region is so poor in the list they provided Facebook. But, thought many of you would find of great interest. To me all of the conversation about conservative/liberal bias masks what I see as the even greater issue, which is the Western bias in the information streams that are increasingly filtering the world around us. As well as how Silicon Valley companies build services like Trending Topics on top of various datasets without deeply understanding their biases and limitations or at least being transparent about the inputs and filters they are using. Those of you using large teams of human reviewers might also like my previous piece, which looks at the unconscious bias and the apparently lack of inter/intracoder reliability assessment in Facebook's operations: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/05/12/does-facebook-suffer-fr… ~K http://kalevleetaru.com/ http://blog.gdeltproject.org/

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CFP HICSS ’50 Minitrack on Collective Intelligence and Crowds
by Fichman, Pnina 13 May '16

13 May '16

CFP HICSS ’50 Minitrack on Collective Intelligence and Crowds Track: Digital and Social Media Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science (HICSS) January 4-7, 2017, Big Island, Hawaii, USA http://www.hicss.org/ Papers Due: June 15, 2016 This minitrack is open to analysis of collective intelligence, new sociotechnical configuration of knowledge creation, and crowdsourcing. Included also is the analysis of social interaction as a way of describing underlying social structure, and in particular the social construction of identity and roles. Thus the minitrack invites a range of content areas that lend themselves to the analysis of relations between people, collectives, and machines, as well as the products produced as a result of these sociotechnical relations. We live surrounded by socially constructed identities – organizations, nations, websites – all of which are constituted through a complex interplay of interactions, a kind of distributed cognition. To allow for these collectives to evolve, it is necessary to have not only a representation in an individual’s mind but also the knowledge that similar representations exist in the minds of others. The way we can create shared representations have changed with the proliferation of a wide range of Internet platforms. These Internet platforms allow people to aggregate knowledge from socially distant areas. They also allow diverse groups of people – and maybe machines in the form of artificial intelligences – to negotiate identities. With these socio-technical configurations we can build collective intelligences that themselves will steer the quest for knowledge. These collectives can be self-catalyzing, deciding individually or collaboratively what to do next, out of which novel and practical ideas emerge. While these open design collectives rely on organic growth and slow embedding of members in the network, alternative structures based on crowds can be assembled more rapidly. Between the two extremes are a host of different organizational and social structures, in which committed members of a community create, improve, and share ideas. The output of these socio-technical systems often takes the form of digital media, and their traces are varied, ranging from ephemeral short messages to curated collaborative knowledge repositories. We are interested in 1) papers that observe, analyze, or visualize these socio-technical structures and their outputs; 2) papers that analyze the phenomena of crowdsourcing, collective intelligence and collaborative mass knowledge production; 3) design research that creates and evaluates new tools and processes; and 4) papers that simulate the production processes and outcomes through software. We are looking for papers about the mechanisms that explain the emergence of collective identity. Particularly we are open to papers that explore unusual ways of modeling emergent organizations: models that demonstrate or reflect the influence of social systems on user behaviors, models that consider the multiple connections between people, technology, and institutions, models of technological and social affordances, models that break personal identity into sub-relations, models that examine the emergence of roles, identity, and institutions, as well as socio-technical models of deviance and disruption. We are interested in applying the ideas of James March, Mark Granovetter, Harrison White, Charles Tilly and related scholars to information systems. In sum, the content of the minitrack is open to analysis of collective intelligence, new sociotechnical configuration of knowledge creation, and crowdsourcing. Included also is the analysis of social interaction as a way of describing underlying social structure, and in particular the social construction of identity and roles. Thus the track is open to a wide range of content areas that lend themselves to the analysis of relations between people, collectives, and machines, as well as the products produced as a result of these sociotechnical relations. Important deadlines for authors: June 15: Submit full manuscripts for review. Review is double-blind. Aug 16: Review System emails Acceptance Notices to authors. September 15: Submission final papers. Oct 1: Early Registration fee deadline. Oct 15: Papers without at least one registered author will  be removed from the Proceedings. Organizers: Pnina Fichman, Associate Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing and the Director of the Rob Kling Center of Social Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington. fichman(a)indiana.edu<mailto:fichman@indiana.edu> Jeffrey V. Nickerson, Professor and Director of the Center for Decision Technologies in the Wesley J. Howe School of Technology Management at Stevens Institute of Technology. jnickerson(a)stevens.edu<mailto:jnickerson@stevens.edu> Donald Steiny, President and Founder of the Institute for Social Network Analysis of the Economy, a member of the Silicon Valley Network Analysis Project, and an instructor at the University of California Santa Cruz. steiny(a)steiny.com<mailto:steiny@steiny.com> ------------------------ Pnina Fichman Chair, Department of Information and Library Science Director, Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~fichman/

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Call: 2016 Challenging Media Landscapes conference, November 2016
by Christian Fuchs 13 May '16

13 May '16

Sent on behalf of Simpson Seamus <S.Simpson(a)salford.ac.uk>: 2016 Challenging Media Landscapes Conference Access, Participation and the Mediatised World CALL FOR PAPERS AND PANELS: SUBMISSION DEADLINE WED 22 JUNE SUBMIT PROPOSALS TO:artdes-cmlabstracts@salford.ac.uk http://blogs.salford.ac.uk/research/2016/04/19/2016-challenging-media-lands… Conference date: Monday 14 November 2016 Venue: MediacityUK, Salford, Manchester. This conference is hosted and organized by the University of Salford and is part of the four day 2016 Salford International Media Festival (see:www.salfordmediafestival.co.uk) KEYNOTE SPEAKERS Professor Christian Fuchs (University of Westminster, UK) Professor William Uricchio (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA) Access, Participation and the Mediatised World In a world replete with media networks, content and services delivered through traditional and newer wired and wireless environments, the opportunities for access to, and participation in, media are seemingly proliferative. The accessible and inclusive nature of media is often emphasised and celebrated strongly by commercial players and governmental interests, as well as a considerable number of academic voices. Others, hailing from academia and civil society quarters, whilst recognising the accessibility and participative affordances of media environments, also point to serious deficiencies. Whilst some endorse strongly the ease of access and participation in media environments driven by commerciality, others point to a perceived devaluation of public service media of various kinds. Whilst some herald the existence of diversity of supply of content and point to a plurality of voices engaged in rich, vibrant and challenging exchange, others are concerned by a lack of variety of content beyond the mainstream, as well as the latter's marginalisation despite network expansion. Whilst some are enthused by the increased creative agency that the digital landscape affords media users, others are critical of the imbalanced power structures within participatory cultures that typically result in media corporations exploiting users' labour. The increased technological sophistication and capability of easily accessible media environments celebrated by some, stands in contrast to concerns over network security, including covert intrusion into, and surveillance of, online mediatised environments leading to concerns over the quality of participatory life in a mediatised world. Yet again, the activism of a wealth of civil society groups and other alternative voices to the 'mainstream' - arts organisations, those campaigning for participative rights of various kinds; and media industry reform campaigners to mention but a few - points to uneasiness with the idea of a fully accessible and participative media system, as well the role and potential of these voices as agents for change. This conference calls for individual papers and themed panels which engage critically with these ideas and approaches. We welcome a range of work which might be conceptual and theoretical, 'applied' subject focused, practice-as-research, or advocacy based, in orientation. We are interested in papers in - or across - following broad areas and themes: * Access, participation and gender * Access, participation and ethnicity and diversity * Access and participatory approaches and experiences in television * Access to, and participation in, social media environments * Journalism (encompassing citizen journalism; literary journalism, and journalism as a participative practice) * Access to, and participation in, media and cultural policy processes * Access to, and participation in, media education practice * Participatory digital cultures and the Web * Participatory approaches in film making * Computer and videogames and participation Conference Panel Session Proposals Proposals for subject panels are invited in any of the above areas. Your proposal should be no more than 500 words long and submitted in Word document format by Wed 22 June 2016 to: artdes-cmlabstracts(a)salford.ac.uk. The panel proposal should include an indication of the topics to be covered by each speaker (including a draft title of each presentation, if possible). Panels should comprise 3-4 participants. Proposals should give the names, institutional affiliations and email addresses of all panel speakers. You will be notified of acceptance by Tuesday 12 July, 2016. Individual Conference Abstract Proposals Abstracts of no more than 400 words should be submitted in Word document format by Wed 22 June 2016 to: artdes-cmlabstracts(a)salford.ac.uk. Your abstract should address one of the above themes and have a separate cover sheet providing your name(s), institutional affiliation(s) and e-mail address(es). You will be notified of acceptance by Tuesday 12 July, 2016. Full papers are due no later than 1 November, 2016. Details on booking registration and accommodation options will follow on acceptance of your proposal. For further enquiries, contact: Seamus Simpson, Professor of Media Policy, University of Salford, MediaCityUK, Salford Quays, Salford. Manchester M502HE Email:s.simpson@salford.ac.uk

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