[Air-L] Upcoming public talks in London: data journalism (20 Apr); selfies (23 Apr); feminist AI (26 Apr); family as machine (2 May); data feminism (24 May); smartphone users in global south (30 May); Gephi field notes (19 June)

Wed Apr 18 05:23:51 PDT 2018

For those of you in London, you might be interested in some of our upcoming events at King’s College London. A full and current list can be found here: http://kingsdh.eventbrite.com/<https://emea01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fkingsdh.eventbrite.com%2F&data=01%7C01%7Cjonathan.gray%40kcl.ac.uk%7C97029cede4fd4828f74808d5a479177d%7C8370cf1416f34c16b83c724071654356%7C0&sdata=SR3St98Mww6jtamhVcI%2BVo2dw0kCHI5aA6vGSIs03lc%3D&reserved=0>

  *   “Apostles of Certainty: Data Journalism and the Politics of Doubt” (Chris Anderson, University of Leeds), Fri 20th April, 4pm: https://apostles-of-certainty.eventbrite.co.uk<https://emea01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fapostles-of-certainty.eventbrite.co.uk&data=01%7C01%7Cjonathan.gray%40kcl.ac.uk%7C97029cede4fd4828f74808d5a479177d%7C8370cf1416f34c16b83c724071654356%7C0&sdata=0PRcuHztRbCbejDPJqo2iGDCIsxHZC7ZIzv6NT3aNbY%3D&reserved=0>
  *   “‘It’s not you, it’s me’: moral discourses and affective power of selfies” (Kat Tiidenberg, Tallinn University), Mon 23rd April, 5pm: https://selfies-book.eventbrite.co.uk<https://emea01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fselfies-book.eventbrite.co.uk&data=01%7C01%7Cjonathan.gray%40kcl.ac.uk%7C97029cede4fd4828f74808d5a479177d%7C8370cf1416f34c16b83c724071654356%7C0&sdata=KpCOpiCup%2Bl6rGRqqEUtT3gMfVJeoQ9igjgU6CdbZdc%3D&reserved=0>
  *   “Can a Data Set be Art? Creating Critical Design, new Data, and Feminist AI” (Caroline Sinders, Artist), Thu 26th April, 4pm: https://feminist-ai.eventbrite.co.uk<https://emea01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffeminist-ai.eventbrite.co.uk&data=01%7C01%7Cjonathan.gray%40kcl.ac.uk%7C97029cede4fd4828f74808d5a479177d%7C8370cf1416f34c16b83c724071654356%7C0&sdata=jCblIEmQNVAbX%2Beu2wwzinNCFlK44eqARuZN1BYD24A%3D&reserved=0>
  *    “The Family as Machine: Cybernetic Kinship in Postwar America” (Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, King's College London), Wed 2nd May, 4pm: http://family-as-machine.eventbrite.com/<https://emea01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffamily-as-machine.eventbrite.com%2F&data=01%7C01%7Cjonathan.gray%40kcl.ac.uk%7C97029cede4fd4828f74808d5a479177d%7C8370cf1416f34c16b83c724071654356%7C0&sdata=HvcY%2Bliu7Q71Mv9OpdD87fjzUaRd1zVJbMGVTjz2i%2Bs%3D&reserved=0>
  *    “Data Feminism” (Lauren Klein, Georgia Tech), Thu 24 May, 4pm: https://data-feminism.eventbrite.co.uk<https://emea01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdata-feminism.eventbrite.co.uk&data=01%7C01%7Cjonathan.gray%40kcl.ac.uk%7C97029cede4fd4828f74808d5a479177d%7C8370cf1416f34c16b83c724071654356%7C0&sdata=Za%2Bo7%2F5eHoEBUA95ZC78wq3V1h5aP%2FxRKECdjvnn4gk%3D&reserved=0>
  *   “The World (Wide Web) through an App: The Challenges of Smartphone Users in the Global South” (Elisa Oreglia ), Wed 30th May, 4.30pm: https://smartphone-global-south.eventbrite.co.uk<https://emea01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsmartphone-global-south.eventbrite.co.uk&data=01%7C01%7Cjonathan.gray%40kcl.ac.uk%7C97029cede4fd4828f74808d5a479177d%7C8370cf1416f34c16b83c724071654356%7C0&sdata=0DglW4slaSpJeOKrtuSZjhXDvaZZWpyfOWjZmorTGYc%3D&reserved=0>
  *    “The Field Notes Plugin: Making Network Visualization in Gephi Accountable” (Karin van Es, Daniela van Geenen and Maranke Wieringa (Utrecht Data School, Utrecht University), Tue 19th June, 4pm: https://gephi-field-notes.eventbrite.co.uk<https://emea01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgephi-field-notes.eventbrite.co.uk&data=01%7C01%7Cjonathan.gray%40kcl.ac.uk%7C97029cede4fd4828f74808d5a479177d%7C8370cf1416f34c16b83c724071654356%7C0&sdata=rhtcrADIEPsc5mWjOGj572UgWsS8VUqAJXuJcBkPLbM%3D&reserved=0>

Abstracts copied below in chronological order. Please feel free to invite friends, colleagues and others. All events are public. ☺

All the best,

Jonathan

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Jonathan Gray | jonathangray.org<https://emea01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fjonathangray.org%2F&data=01%7C01%7Cjonathan.gray%40kcl.ac.uk%7C97029cede4fd4828f74808d5a479177d%7C8370cf1416f34c16b83c724071654356%7C0&sdata=AsjNq92s9G2qqw%2B5S1mLuKaisg7wOK4PMkEZYFEpIEE%3D&reserved=0> | @jwyg<https://emea01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fjwyg&data=01%7C01%7Cjonathan.gray%40kcl.ac.uk%7C97029cede4fd4828f74808d5a479177d%7C8370cf1416f34c16b83c724071654356%7C0&sdata=ZI%2FYwjj0c2eN7sihzO9PRxn1aIpTdt45xfg9f5bPLUI%3D&reserved=0>
Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies
Department of Digital Humanities
King’s College London

## Apostles of Certainty: Data Journalism and the Politics of Doubt
## C.W. Anderson (University of Leeds)
## Fri 20 April 2018, 16:00 – 18:00
## Register: https://apostles-of-certainty.eventbrite.co.uk<https://emea01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fapostles-of-certainty.eventbrite.co.uk&data=01%7C01%7Cjonathan.gray%40kcl.ac.uk%7C5a11317a607b47d12aa908d57955fadd%7C8370cf1416f34c16b83c724071654356%7C0&sdata=5oLkWlC2Q6a7PTrnX3%2BU78VsfSg2TOSAPDQ2Ozmi6PE%3D&reserved=0>

This talk will trace the long history of quantified journalism in the United States, beginning in the early 20th century and taking us up to the present day. From this history, an argument is made that the general trend in journalism has been the increased comfort in asserting professional certainty when reporting the news. These trends are especially pronounced in today’s data-driven, digital media environment. The talk argues that journalism has learned the wrong lessons from science and that it needs, in an era of hyper-partisanship, to embrace a provisional uncertainty as both a normative and political strategy.

C.W. Anderson is a Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds, and the author or co-editor of four books: “Rebuilding the News” (Temple), “Remaking the News” (MIT), “The Sage Handbook of Digital Journalism” (Sage) and “Journalism: What Everyone Needs to Know” (Oxford). “Apostles of Certainty: Data Joutnalism and the Politics of Doubt” is forthcoming in 2018 from Oxford University Press.

**

## "It’s not you, it’s me": moral discourses and affective power of selfies
## Kat Tiidenberg (Tallinn University)
## Mon 23 April 2018, 17:00 – 19:00
## Register: https://selfies-book.eventbrite.co.uk<https://emea01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fselfies-book.eventbrite.co.uk&data=01%7C01%7Cjonathan.gray%40kcl.ac.uk%7C5a11317a607b47d12aa908d57955fadd%7C8370cf1416f34c16b83c724071654356%7C0&sdata=IrQkxUinVvNNIujHW8BHo0SxPCcSAOO6fPYOc8%2FtUwc%3D&reserved=0>

Every day we share hundreds of millions of photos on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. Many of these are selfies. Selfies are continually talked about, yet persistently attacked as unworthy of all of this attention. They generate far more engagement than most other social media content, but are claimed to lack artistic merit; indicate narcissism;
 and lead to dangerously stupid behavior. This talk focuses on how selfies make us feel, and why they have the power to make us feel anything. It answers the question of “why selfies matter?” by unpacking the different cultural stories and social norms attached to selfies. It dismantles the exaggerated claims that all selfies are narcissistic, inauthentic, or low quality photography, or on the flipside, that all selfies are empowering. By analyzing how, why and when selfies make us feel “good” or “bad” a story of judgment and control emerges.

Kat Tiidenberg, PhD is an Associate Professor of Social Media and Visual Culture at the Baltic Film, Media, Arts and Communication School of Tallinn University, Estonia and a post-doctoral researcher at Aarhus University, Denmark. She is the author of the forthcoming "Selfies, why we love (and hate) them", as well as "Body and Soul on the Internet - making sense of social media" (in Estonian) published in 2017. Tiidenberg is a a long time member of the Association of Internet Researcher's Ethics Committee, a founding member of the Estonian Young Academy of Sciences, second time board member of the Estonian Sociology Association. She is currently writing and publishing on selfie culture, digital research ethics and visual research methods. Her research interests include visual self-presentation, sexuality, and normative ideologies as mediated through social media practices. More info at: kkatot.tumblr.com.

**

## Can a Data Set be Art? Creating Critical Design, new Data, and Feminist AI
## Caroline Sinders
## Thu 26 April 2018, 16:00-18:00
## Register: https://feminist-ai.eventbrite.co.uk<https://emea01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffeminist-ai.eventbrite.co.uk&data=01%7C01%7Cjonathan.gray%40kcl.ac.uk%7C97029cede4fd4828f74808d5a479177d%7C8370cf1416f34c16b83c724071654356%7C0&sdata=jCblIEmQNVAbX%2Beu2wwzinNCFlK44eqARuZN1BYD24A%3D&reserved=0>

Caroline Sinders is an artist and researcher exploring how new kinds of data sets, be it emotional data, traumatic data, or political data can then affect algorithms. How can these outputs be actualized as an art piece? Can the creation of a data set help create equity in digital spaces? Her work explores the intersections of critical design, data, and AI as art.

Bio: Caroline Sinders (@carolinesinders) is a machine learning design researcher and artist. For the past few years, she has been focusing on the intersections of natural language processing, artificial intelligence, abuse, online harassment and politics in digital, conversational spaces.Caroline is a designer and researcher at the Wikimedia Foundation for the Anti-Harassment Tools Team, and a Creative Dissent fellow with YBCA. She has held fellowships with Eyebeam, the Studio for Creative Inquiry and the International Center of Photography. Her work has been featured at MoMA PS1, the Houston Center for Contemporary Art, Slate, Quartz, the Channels Biennale, as well as others. Caroline holds a masters from New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program.

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## The Family as Machine: Cybernetic Kinship in Postwar America
## Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan (King's College London)
## Wed 2 May, 1600-1800
## Register: http://family-as-machine.eventbrite.com/<https://emea01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffamily-as-machine.eventbrite.com%2F&data=01%7C01%7Cjonathan.gray%40kcl.ac.uk%7C97029cede4fd4828f74808d5a479177d%7C8370cf1416f34c16b83c724071654356%7C0&sdata=HvcY%2Bliu7Q71Mv9OpdD87fjzUaRd1zVJbMGVTjz2i%2Bs%3D&reserved=0>

How did the American family become a machine? Starting in the 1950s a community of progressive mental health therapists, ethnographers, and artists around the Bay Area put forth visions of the modern American family as a cybernetic machine. Researchers including anthropologist Gregory Bateson, filmmaker Weldon Kees, and psychiatrist Don Jackson proposed that family members encode and decode informational streams in feedback loops that promote the stability (or “homeostasis”) of the individual as well as the group. Mental illness, in this account, sprang from atypical coding patterns.

This talk examines how technical affordances of mid-twentieth century “new media” such as experimental film and information theory facilitated this production of cybernetic families. It retraces the changing fortunes of the cybernetic family as an inspiration for leftwing antipsychiatric reform (e.g. Félix Guattari) as well as neoliberal mental health policies implemented in the Reagan era. These changes fit within a longer history of “media aesthetics” as a tool for managing aberrant selves from hysterics of the nineteenth-century to the quantified self of today.

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a media theorist and historian of technology. He holds an appointment as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of King’s College London and as a co-curator for the Technosphere Project at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin). His essays appear in journals including Critical Inquiry, Grey Room, and Theory, Culture & Society. He be found online at www.bernardg.com and on Twitter at @bernardionysius.

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## Data Feminism
## Lauren Klein (Georgia Tech)
## Thu 24 May 2018, 16:00 – 18:00
## URL: https://data-feminism.eventbrite.co.uk<https://emea01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdata-feminism.eventbrite.co.uk&data=01%7C01%7Cjonathan.gray%40kcl.ac.uk%7C5a11317a607b47d12aa908d57955fadd%7C8370cf1416f34c16b83c724071654356%7C0&sdata=aCSpUJnZ2jYXRIvu5O8PGNViRFjrGDoLMVZvPf1%2ByIk%3D&reserved=0>

With their ability to depict hundreds, thousands, and sometimes even millions of relationships at a single glance, visualizations of data can dazzle, inform, and persuade. It is precisely this power that makes it worth asking: "Visualization by whom? For whom? In whose interest? Informed by whose values?" These are some of the questions that emerge from what we call data feminism, a way of thinking about data and its visualization that is informed by the past several decades of feminist critical thought. Data feminism prompts questions about how, for instance, challenges to the male/female binary can also help challenge other binary and hierarchical classification systems. It encourages us to ask how the concept of invisible labor can help to expose the invisible forms of labor associated with data work. And it points to how an understanding of affective and embodied knowledge can help to expand the notion of what constitutes data and what does not. Using visualization as a starting point, this talk works backwards through the data-processing pipeline in order to show how a feminist approach to thinking about data not only exposes how power and privilege presently operate in visualization work, but also suggests how different design principles can help to mitigate inequality and work towards justice.

Lauren Klein is an assistant professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab. With Matthew Gold, she edits Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press), a hybrid print/digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge. Her literary monograph, Matters of Taste: Eating, Aesthetics, and the Early American Archive, is forthcoming from Minnesota in Spring 2019. She is also at work on two new projects: Data Feminism, co-authored with Catherine D’Ignazio, and under contract with MIT Press, which distills key lessons from feminist theory into a set of principles for the design and interpretation of data visualizations, and Data by Design, which provides an interactive history of data visualization from the eighteenth century to the present.

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## The World (Wide Web) through an App: The Challenges of Smartphone Users in the Global South
## Elisa Oreglia )
## Wed 30th May, 1630-1800
## Register: https://smartphone-global-south.eventbrite.co.uk<https://emea01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsmartphone-global-south.eventbrite.co.uk&data=01%7C01%7Cjonathan.gray%40kcl.ac.uk%7C97029cede4fd4828f74808d5a479177d%7C8370cf1416f34c16b83c724071654356%7C0&sdata=0DglW4slaSpJeOKrtuSZjhXDvaZZWpyfOWjZmorTGYc%3D&reserved=0>

In recent years, small networks of traders have started to bring cheap, China-made smartphones to low- and middle-income consumers in the Global South. While this has made smartphones accessible to a population that would not be able to afford them otherwise, it has also brought a series of challenges due to the quality and features of the handsets, their language support, etc. Drawing from ethnographic research carried out in Myanmar since 2014, this talk will focus on the experiences of first-time Internet users in semi-urban and rural areas in Myanmar, and their challenges in accessing an internet that can look very different from the one we take for granted. I will discuss what it means to experience the Internet through apps, rather than through a browser; to use a mobile phone while constantly facing obstacles related to infrastructure, cost, connectivity, etc; and reflect on what lessons can be drawn for human-computer interaction and interface design for marginal populations.

Elisa Oreglia is a lecturer in Global Digital Cultures in the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. Her research is about the diffusion, appropriation, and use of digital technologies among marginal communities in East and Southeast Asia.

**

## The Field Notes Plugin: Making Network Visualization in Gephi Accountable
## Karin van Es, Daniela van Geenen and Maranke Wieringa (Utrecht Data School, Utrecht University)
## Tue 19th June, 1600-1800
## Register: https://gephi-field-notes.eventbrite.co.uk<https://emea01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgephi-field-notes.eventbrite.co.uk&data=01%7C01%7Cjonathan.gray%40kcl.ac.uk%7C97029cede4fd4828f74808d5a479177d%7C8370cf1416f34c16b83c724071654356%7C0&sdata=rhtcrADIEPsc5mWjOGj572UgWsS8VUqAJXuJcBkPLbM%3D&reserved=0>

The network visualizations humanities scholars and social scientists employ to communicate research findings are often imbrued with a sense of objectivity. The impression is that these visualizations show facts about, rather than interpretations of, data. Gephi is a popular network visualization package, and used widely within scholarly research. Problematically, it saves only the spatialized network graph, whilst the steps taken and parameters of the algorithms used to get to make the visualization go undocumented. To garner legitimacy for scholarship, it is important that the interpretative decisions involved in the construction of the visualization are documented and opened up for scrutiny. Presently, academic publications in the field of media studies offer limited transparency on the matter. In this talk we explore Gephi’s “epistemological affordances” and elaborate on how the interpretative acts of practitioners, knowingly and unknowingly, privilege certain viewpoints and perpetuate particular power relations. We subsequently present the 'field notes' plugin for Gephi developed in collaboration with the Digital Humanities Lab. It enables account-ability through the systematic documentation of the visualization and analysis process.

Karin van Es is Assistant Professor of Television and Digital Culture at Utrecht University (NL) and coordinator of the Datafied Society research platform. Recent publications include the edited volume The Datafied Society: Studying Culture through Data (Amsterdam University Press, 2017) with Mirko Tobias Schäfer and articles for various journals and essay collections. Karin’s current work focuses on how datafication enfolds within public service broadcasting.

Daniela van Geenen is a lecturer in data journalistic research and data visualization at the University of Applied Sciences Utrecht and a researcher at Utrecht Data School. Her work tackles the question of the scholarly conduct that the work with digital methods demands, challenged by the need to design accountable software tools. Daniela published on the role of social and technical actors on social media platforms, and their meaning for social and political practices such as public debate and cultural consumption.

Maranke Wieringa is a lecturer at Utrecht University and a researcher at Utrecht Data School. She has a background in Cultural Studies and Media Studies, and specialized in software and data analysis. Notable research to which she contributed focused on how politicians, and actors operating at the fringes of the public sphere frame, and use, news (media). Maranke’s current academic work focuses on (scholarly and municipal) accountability in data projects.