[Air-L] CFP: Research Infrastructures, Digital Tools and New Directions in STS Research

[Lindsay Poirier]

Brad Fidler and I are organizing a panel at next year's 4S meetings (August
29 - September 1, 2018) that discusses new digital research infrastructures
for STS and conceptualizes possibilities for new collaborations between STS
researchers and computer scientists. Please consider submitting an abstract
by February 1, 2018 here
<https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/ssss/4s18/>.

4S 2018
Sydney, Australia
August 29 – September 1, 2018
*Theme*: TRANSnational STS

*Panel: Research Infrastructures, Digital Tools and New Directions in STS
Research*

*Organizers*:
Lindsay Poirier, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute;
Bradley Fidler, Stevens Institute of Technology

Increasingly, oral histories, field notes, and other qualitative materials
produced in the humanities are being understood as humanities “data.” Rapid
advances in data science are driving much of this change, provoking
humanists to think through how to critically and ethically approach data
management and to explore experimental possibilities for sharing, mining,
and interpreting humanities data. This panel will explore possibilities for
initiating new conversations with computer and data scientists regarding
opportunities and challenges for producing information infrastructures and
digital tools to support humanistic research. This task is not without
precedent. On a prosaic level, Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and the
eXtensible Markup Language (XML) both originated in efforts by computer
science to answer questions that long challenged humanistic scholars. On
the level of tools, humanists rely on Optical Character Recognition (OCR),
databases, and other information technologies that originated in STEM.
However, collaborative efforts between computer scientists and humanists to
produce digital infrastructures and tools sensitive to the assumptions and
commitments that guide humanistic research have only emerged recently
(through domains such as the digital humanities and critical code studies).
Having long assessed the epistemic assumptions designed into systems of
knowledge production, STS is uniquely well positioned within the humanities
to contribute critical insight to such conversations. This panel seeks to
bring together transnational STS scholars interested in:


   - assessing, critiquing, and advancing research infrastructures and
   digital tools for humanistic data management and analysis and;
   - identifying and evaluating possibilities for new collaborations
   between humanists and STEM researchers in this area.


Open panel paper submissions should be in the form of abstracts of up to
250 words. They should include the paper’s main arguments, methods, and
contributions to STS. When submitting papers to open panels on the abstract
submission platform, you will select the Open Panel you are submitting to.
Papers submitted to an open session will be reviewed by the open session
organizers and will be given first consideration for that session. Papers
not included in the session to which they were submitted will be considered
for other sessions.  Abstracts can be submitted here
<https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/ssss/4s18/>.

--
Lindsay Poirier
PhD Candidate, HASS Fellow
Lead Platform Architect, PECE
RDA Data Share Fellow
Science and Technology Studies | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
poiril at rpi.edu | lindsaypoirier.com