Building a Feminist Future: On (Digital) Pedagogical Praxis

The Mandel Center announces the 2017 Curt C. and Else Silberman Seminar for Faculty. This year’s seminar will explore how Digital Humanities offers new opportunities for students and faculty to teach and learn about the Holocaust and its representation. Digital Humanities integrates digital tools into the work of analyzing and representing this past. Mapping, data visualization, and text analysis invite new modes of thinking about the experiences of Jews during the Final Solution as well as the way survivors have remembered and commemorated this past over the course of the last 75 years.

“From Facebook’s News Feed algorithm that shapes the posts and updates we see, to Spotify’s recommendation service that introduces us to new music that we might love, to dating site algorithms that attempt to match us with potential romantic partners, algorithms play an increasingly important role in shaping many aspects of our daily lives. We seek to bring together a community of researchers interested in taking a human-centered perspective on studying the experience of algorithms.”

To this end, we will be holding a half-day workshop on Monday, May 15th, 2017 in Montreal, Canada. The objective of this workshop is to articulate the grand challenges of studying the user-algorithm relationship and to bring together participants interested in developing projects to address these grand challenges. This workshop is action oriented, and we welcome participants from a variety of disciplinary perspectives who are interested in starting new projects on studying user perceptions and experiences with algorithms or who are in the early stages of an ongoing project. This workshop is part of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM).

Participation:

• Participants must submit a 1 – 2 page position paper to studyingusers@gmail.com

The position papers may address any of the following:

• What are the grand challenges of studying user perceptions and experiences with algorithms?
• What are the methodological or theoretical entry points for studying this relationship?
• A potential empirical study or an early stage project dealing with user perceptions and experiences with algorithms.
• Design implication or policy position papers that address how we can design systems such that users can better identify algorithmically mediated experiences or can better understand how specific algorithms work.

Topic areas might include: trust in algorithms, user belief about how algorithms work, algorithmically mediated experience, transparency and algorithm black-boxing, how different groups of users engage with algorithms, filter bubbles, user interventions with algorithms, or the discursive construction of algorithms.

Deadline March 4, 2017

More information about the workshop can be found at: www.studyingusers.org

Reach the organizers with any questions at studyingusers@gmail.com

We invite applications to attend Early Modern Digital Agendas: Network Analysis, a two-week institute to be be hosted at the Folger Institute, Washington DC, from 17-28 July 2017. This will be the third iteration of Early Modern Digital Agendas, each of which has been generously supported by the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities.

Under the direction of Ruth Ahnert (Queen Mary University of London) and Jonathan Hope (University of Strathclyde), and with an expert visiting faculty, our focus will be on the best practices for building and curating network analysis projects while ensuring that each participant comes away with their own understanding of how such work fits into broader developments within the disciplinary fields of early modern studies and Digital Humanities. The ultimate aim is to give participants the practical skills to use these methods in their own work. The visiting faculty are some of the most exciting people working in this area at the moment from the US, Canada, Ireland, and the UK.

A program overview may be found here: http://folgerpedia.folger.edu/EMDA_2017 , and application and eligibility guidelines are here: http://folgerpedia.folger.edu/EMDA2017_Application_Guidelines . The twelve individuals selected to participate in this institute will each receive a stipend of $1,750 to help with the costs of travel and accommodation. The application deadline is 1 March 2017.

Please contact institute@folger.edu (link sends e-mail) with any application-related questions.

The Historical Network Research group is pleased to announce its 4th annual conference, held at the University of Turku in Turku, Finland, on 17-20 October 2017.

The 4th Historical Network Research Conference seeks to further strengthen and foster the awareness of historians for the possibilities of network research and create possibilities for cross- and multidisciplinary approaches to the networked past by bringing together historians, social scientists and computer scientists.

The organisers welcome proposals for individual contributions discussing any historical period and geographical area. Topics might include, but are not limited to: historical social netwoks, policy networks, kinship and community, geospatial networks, cultural and intellectual networks, and methodological innovations.

Deadline for submissions: March 31, 2017

Full CFP and Submission details

“In both historical and contemporary contexts, the development of new technology has been pivotal in establishing and modulating global patterns of connectivity, and in setting the rhythm and pace of interaction through asynchronous flows of material and information. In our current moment, the capability of algorithmic processes to further mediate meaning and integrate networks of sensorial and computational content offers the possibility for connections to be performed with new timing, layering multiple presents and mixing potential realities. These changes in techno-social dynamics shape artistic, scientific, and cultural practices, and have a profound impact on the ways in which we singularly and collectively construct meaning through a shifting relationship to temporality and interconnectivity.”

For its third annual Graduate Symposium- “Frequencies: Patterning Interconnectivity & Networked Temporality”– the Student Caucus of Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts & Technology is currently inviting cross-disciplinary proposals which consider presence, permanence, and performativity in digitally mediated contexts, and which critically engage with the ways that these concepts challenge contemporary notions of causality, authorship, and intentionality. We are interested in global resonances and emerging properties that reflect an ever-growing distribution of process across biological, technological, and social systems, and how these may be viewed from a variety of cultural perspectives. We seek proposals which situate these trends in relation to artificial intelligence, telepresence, and augmented reality, and emerging scholarship which explores structures of consciousness and modes of perception through the lens of both human and non-human interaction. We encourage presentations that reflexively consider process, research-creation, and collaboration, and link academic and performative modalities.

Deadline: March 1st, 2017 at 11:59pm EST.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the impact of algorithmic mediation on:

• Networks, webs, infrastructures, and their expansions
• Time consciousness in relation to globalization
• Continuity and discontinuity, flows, and streams
• Temporal aesthetics
• Authorship, memory, and narrative
• Human/machine agency in creative practice
• Archives and artifacts
• Live, recorded, and mediated presence
• Instrumentality and technologies of performance
• Technics of representation and perception
• Sensory substitution
• Emerging sense theories, esp. in relation to time
• Sonic materiality
• Listening and embodied cognition
• Ontological politics
• Transcorporeality and posthumanism
• Improvisation and distributed creativity
• The ‘work-concept’
• Emergence in the creative process
• Popular conceptions of time in film, media, art, and literature

This one-day symposium will offer a unique symbiotic opportunity for researchers, scientists, and artists to gather, exchange, bond, and cross-fertilize future landscapes for research that is currently materializing across disciplinary boundaries.

Presentation formats:

Papers, poster, workshops, round tables, performances, presentations- traditional and experimental- and other emerging forms will all be considered. We encourage cross-disciplinary interpretations, variations and unforeseen mutations of our working themes.

Submissions – send the following to sensoriumsymposium@gmail.com:

1. 300-word abstract with working title
2. short biography
3. specify the format of your presentation, keeping in mind it should be no more than 20 minutes in length (90 minutes for panels and/or roundtables)
4. contact information
5. For Joint Proposals: send only one application that includes collective biographical and contact information.

Keynote Speaker: David Rokeby is an installation artist based in Toronto, Canada. He has been creating and exhibiting since 1982. For the first part of his career he focused on interactive pieces that directly engage the human body, or that involve artificial perception systems. In the last decade, his practice has expanded to included video, kinetic and static sculpture. His work has been performed / exhibited in shows across Canada, the United States, Europe and Asia.