FemTechNet Network Gathering @ the 19th annual Allied Media Conference

 June 15-18, 2017

Do you lead technology or feminist focused courses, workshops, activities, or actions on your campus or in your community? Or are you interested in being involved with intersectional feminist media-based practice in your community — be that in your neighborhood, your local education center, or in other more formal educational and higher learning institutions?

Since 2013, FemTechNet (FTN) has organized, coordinated, and documented a distributed, open, collaborative course on the topic of feminism and technology. The work of maintaining this network has become the focus of our research, as well as our media, teaching and learning practices. In response to the precarious (be they financial, emotional, physical, spiritual, ideological) positions most of our members inhabit, and the inherent challenges of doing this work, we operate in a horizontal committee structure to prioritize the fair distribution of labor.

FTN aims to be an artist or activist collective that strives for mutual care and kick-ass projects that get done based on the interest and energy of participants. We also aim to provide a supportive community for the difficult work of feminist pedagogy. We invite you to build with us, so that we may support each other and create online spaces that value ethics, care, reciprocity, safety and privacy at their core. If this sounds interesting to you or if you’ve worked with FTN in the past and want to be a part of reshaping its future, Register by May 21st!

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Shaping Humanities Data: Use, Reuse, and Paths Toward Computationally Amenable Cultural Heritage Collections

Galleries, libraries, archives, and museums have been building digital collections for decades. Approaches developed to provide access to these collections often emulate analog research experiences that focus on supporting single object interactions and features like virtual “page” turners. While approaches of this kind have been very valuable for some kinds of scholarship, researchers and instructors seeking to leverage computation can find it difficult to work with collections developed in this vein. One barrier to developing approaches that better support these researchers is an incomplete understanding of how humanists, among others, are using and reusing cultural heritage data – and what they may need moving forward. Collections as Data is one of a range of efforts encouraging cultural heritage organizations to develop collections and systems that are more amenable to emerging computational methods and tools. Beyond simply designing-to-fit, the movement towards computationally amenable collections provides an opportunity to  reframe, enrich, and/or contextualize collections in a manner that seeks to avoid replication of long standing biases inherent in cultural heritage collection practice.

In this day-long Digital Humanities 2017 pre-conference workshop, we aim to engage directly with research and pedagogical practice that draws upon digital collection use. This workshop will ultimately inform the development of recommendations that aim to support cultural heritage community efforts to make collections available as data.

Proposals:

We seek proposals for talks, demonstrations (of projects, collections, tools, datasets, or other work), hands-on instruction, or walk-throughs that explore approaches and issues common to computational creation and/or use, and reuse, of digital collections. Proposals for talks can be brief (10 minutes) or extended (30 minutes). Similarly, proposals for demonstrations and hands-on instruction can be brief (30 minutes) or extended (60 minutes). We encourage submissions from all members of the DH community engaged with cultural heritage collection data, whether using data, preparing and stewarding data, or designing interfaces that enable discovery and access. We are invested in developing a program that reflects the international scope of DH work.

Submit your proposal (300 words) using the online form by May 7, 2017.

Notification of acceptances will be sent out on or before June 1, 2017.

For further information, or to check if your proposal will be appropriate, contact thomaspadilla@ucsb.edu

The Japanese Association for Digital Humanities is pleased to announce its sixth annual conference, to be held at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan, September 11-12, 2017.

The conference will feature posters, papers and panels. We invite proposals globally on all aspects of digital humanities, and especially encourage papers treating topics that deal with practices that aim to cross borders, for example, between academic fields, media, languages, cultures, organizations, and so on, as related to the field of digital humanities.

As creation of research data — collection, feature extraction, annotation, and organization —  is a seminal component of all DH projects, means and modes of this data-creation have been handled in various ways as digital approaches have evolved. Recently, the focus on methods of collaborating in data creation has been renewed with the rapid growth of projects that are crowd-sourced on the Web. The re-emergence of data creation based on this approach provides a wider range of data, as it has the potential to include contributors who are not only researchers, but also members of the general public. Such a new possibility should be taken due advantage of, especially given the difficult situation for the humanities fields in the academy. This year we strongly encourage you to submit proposals about methods and problems in collaborative approaches for data collection, especially crowd sourcing and other forms of public engagement. With this as our suggested central focus, we nonetheless welcome papers on a broad range of DH topics. For example:

Research issues, including data mining, information design and modeling, software studies, and humanities research enabled through the digital medium; computer-based research and computer applications in literary, linguistic, cultural and historical studies, including electronic literature, public humanities, and interdisciplinary aspects of modern scholarship.

Some examples might include text analysis, corpora, corpus linguistics, language processing, language learning, and endangered languages; the digital arts, architecture, music, film, theater, new media and related areas; the creation and curation of humanities digital resources; the role of digital humanities in academic curricula; and more.

Abstracts should be of 500-1000 words in length in English, including title.

Please submit abstracts on the open conference system for conference below by May 8, 2017.

Full Call for Papers

Type of proposals:

1. Poster presentations: Poster presentations may include work-in-progress on any of the topics described above as well as demonstrations of computer technology, software and digital projects. A separate poster session will open the conference, during which time presenters should be on-hand to explain their work, share their ideas with other delegates, and answer questions. Posters will also be on displayed at various times during the conference, and presenters are encouraged to provide material and handouts with more detailed information and URLs.
2. Short papers: Short papers are allocated 10 minutes (plus 5 minutes for questions) and are suitable for describing work-in-progress and reporting on shorter experiments and software and tools in early stages of development.
3. Long papers: Long papers are allocated 20 minutes (plus 10 minutes for questions) and are intended for presenting substantial unpublished research and reporting on significant new digital resources or methodologies.
4. Panels: Panels (90 minutes) are comprised of either: (a) Three long papers on a joint theme. All abstracts should be submitted together with a statement, of approximately 500-1000 words, outlining the session topic and its relevance to current directions in the digital humanities; or (b) A panel of four to six speakers. The panel organizer should submit a 500-1000 words outline of the topic session and its relevance to current directions in the digital humanities as well as an indication from all speakers of their willingness to participate.

Mediated Populisms

The New York University Department of Media, Culture, and Communication invites graduate students, academics, activists, workers, and artists to submit conference paper proposals interrogating the role of media in the ongoing global rise of populist leaders and movements. The conference will be held on Friday, October 6 at NYU.

In this conference we will explore the relationship between “populism,” across ideological spectrums and national boundaries, and media—that is, the practices, economies, and politics of information circulation, production, and consumption through various industries, networks, and technologies. If we understand populism to be a political “logic” rather than orientation, as Ernesto Laclau famously argued in 2005, how is this logic mediated differently across a range of political alternatives? In what ways does the conflation of political logic and orientation foreclose political possibilities? How are multiple techniques and technologies—old and new—leveraged to assert or deny populist discourse? Crucially, this conference is interested in the relationship between the charge of “populism” perpetuated by information industries, its cultural and technological mediation, and the equating of divergent political platforms.

At 3:30 a.m. on November 9, just after the 2016 U.S. election results were announced, The New York Times published an article entitled “How Did the Media—How Did We—Get This Wrong?”. In the piece, four NYT correspondents struggled to find answers to how the media—they, themselves—might have partially abetted the electoral outcome. Their concerns reflect the contradictory position of news media facing authoritarian populist political figures. According to political communication scholar Gianpietro Mazzoleni, savvy media use (often articulated through media critique) is indispensable to the success of populist political figures, regardless of ideology. Mazzoleni claims that news media have undergone a process of “popularization,” increasing their focus on personalities over political content, thereby lending themselves more readily to the “diffusion” of populist ideas. Can populism exist independently of its mediation? And if media are involuntarily complicit in the spread of authoritarian populism specifically, what room do they have in resisting it?

This conference invites scholars to interrogate the role of media in the ongoing global rise of populist leaders and movements. For example, how do we understand the similarities that bridge these groups—their anti-woman, anti-LGBTQ, and ethno-nationalist foundations—while each has emerged within distinct economic, racial, and religious contexts? How can these similarities hold when national media industries are shaped by distinct market pressures and degrees of government regulation? With the election, nomination, and/or rise of leaders from Modi to Erdogan, Trump to Berlusconi, Le Pen to Orbán, and the implementation of nativist political maneuvers like Brexit and immigration bans, how have media represented these figures and actions as anti-establishment? As representative of the desires of “the people”? Can populism be said to have globalized? How have media promoted facile comparisons between leaders of opposing political movements, e.g., Castro and Chávez in Latin America to Trump and Erdogan in the U.S. and Turkey? As today’s right-wing populisms amplify anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment, what are media’s responsibility to their viewerships?

Further topics of consideration might include: the production of populist nostalgia; how algorithmically  customized or personally curated news sources nurture and solidify popular followings; mediated predictors of human behavior, such as polling or behavioral analysis of social media use in relation to the securing of a populist base; historical examples that shed light on today’s context; the denigration of class politics through facile use of the term “populism”; the “logic” of populist representations and re-presentations through text, image, video, and sound.

In considering the role and responsibility of media users, professionals, and scholars in resisting authoritarian populism, this conference calls for an investigation of industries, markets, algorithms, networks, policies, technologies, and practices as they shape politics and media landscapes. Possible frames of analysis include (but are by no means limited to):

Media and Information Industries – news media; social media; network-mediated political topographies; national, transnational, and multinational political-economic and relevant legal frameworks; governance, regulation, intellectual property; infrastructure; sovereignty; institutional transformations; privatization; public interest and policy; market logics; big data; measure; audience; production, circulation, and distribution.

Digital Inequalities: power relations in technology; white supremacy; trolling; online racism; digital sociology; infrastructures and systems of control; labor; online performance; network dynamics; politics of code; algorithmic biases and big data; accessibility; politics of space; digital transformations within capitalism.

Activist Media: social movements; race, violence, and citizen journalism; witnessing; solidarity, coalition, and alliance; networked protest; privacy and surveillance; social justice; feminist media; politics of representation; affect and politics; environmental justice; pipelines and jobs.

Political Futurity: decolonization; indigenous sovereignty and futurity; queer of color critique; Black studies; feminist technoscience; afrofuturism; afro pessimism; speculative methods; settler colonial critique; migration; mobility and territory; transpolitics; job creation; the abolition of the wage; critiques of liberalism; complicity; affinity; vulnerability; (in)security and threat; imperialism and empire; crisis; risk and precarity.

Submit an abstract of no more than 250 words by Monday, May 1, 2017

KEYNOTE: Zeynep Tufekci is an associate professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with an affiliate appointment at the Department of Sociology. She is also a faculty associate at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and was previously a fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at the Princeton University. Tufekci’s research interests revolve around the intersection of technology and society. Her academic work focuses on social movements and civics, privacy and surveillance, and social interaction. She is also increasingly known for her work on “big data” and algorithmic decision making. Originally from Turkey, and formerly a computer programmer, Tufekci became interested in the social impacts of technology and began to focus on how digital and computational technology interact with social, political and cultural dynamics. Her work has appeared in a wide range of outlets, from peer-reviewed journals to traditional media and blogging platforms. Her forthcoming book Beautiful Teargas: The Ecstatic, Fragile Politics of Networked Protest in the 21st Century, to be published by Yale University Press, will examine the dynamics, strengths and weaknesses of 21st century social movements.

Join the University of Oregon Graduate School, schools of Journalism and Architecture & Allied Arts, the Institute of Ecology & Evolution, the Office of Sustainability, and the New Media & Culture Certificate at the 7th Annual ‘What is Life?’ Conference in Portland, April 6-8th!

We bring together scholars, government and community officials, industry professionals, alumni and students, as well as scientists, artists, filmmakers, grassroots community organizations, and the public for a conference-experience to engage communication, media, and nature by examining everyday life — our lifeworks and lifestyles — emphasizing the lifeworlds we live in. It will investigate how communication/media constitute and permeate all avenues and forms of life — from scale, pace, and pattern to the public, private, and organic. By building bridges through multidisciplinary networks, the event emphasizes how communication is instrumental in and for living systems. What is life and how is life mediated?

What is Life? (2017) builds on last year’s conference-experience, What is Media? (2016), expanding a transdisciplinary notion of medium/media with special attention to its material, historical, and ecological ramifications. It marks the second collaboration with scholars from the natural sciences (physical and life sciences) and the arts.

Schedule Highlights

• Thursday, April 6th: Commencement lecture – 2017 Leonardo da Vinci Lecture with Fritjof Capra from Schumacher College and The Center for Ecoliteracy
• LIFEWORLDS Exhibition,  7:00pm

• Friday, April 7th, 8:30am: Technological Culture & Aesthetics professor Jussi Parikka (Univ. of Southampton) and Toby Miller (Loughborough Univ. London)
• Plenaries: Salma Monani (Gettysburg College, PA) and Brendan Bohannan (Biology, UO)

• Saturday, April 8th, 4:30pm: an EXPERIENCE at the Portland Japanese Garden with the Media Literacies for a Living World Roundtable featuring Divina Frau-Meigs (Univ. Sorbonne Nouvelle, France), Renee Hobbs (Univ. of Rhode Island), Antonio López (John Cabot Univ., Italy), Ed Madison (UO), and W. James Potter (UCSB)
• Plenaries: Gabriela Martínez (UO) and Douglas Rushkoff (Queens College, CUNY), philosopher of language, Mark Johnson (UO) and philosopher of living technologies, Mark Bedau (Reed College).