EVENT | Humanities Laboratories: Critical Infrastructures and Knowledge Experiments 23.05.19

Whether physical or digital, or a combination of both, modern laboratories have become places, infrastructures, and frameworks for the Humanities to forge ideas, visions, experiments, and collaborations. The event will revolve around the critical and epistemological roles of humanities labs in supporting and extending academic research and learning beyond traditional classrooms.

The event will be hosted by the Department of Digital Humanities (DDH) with King’s Digital Lab (KDL), in conjunction with the Critical Infrastructure Studies (https://cistudies.org/) initiative. It will be chaired by Arianna Ciula (Deputy Director & Senior Research Software Analyst, KDL), and introduced by James Smithies (Director, KDL | Deputy Director, KCL eResearch) and Jonathan Gray (Co-founder of the Public Data Lab, and Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies, DDH, KCL). At the centre of this event is the talk of 2018-19 Willard McCarty’s Fellowship holder Urszula Pawlicka-Deger (Postdoc Researcher, Department of Media, Aalto University, Finland) who will share her extensive experience of building, theorizing about, and working within humanities labs.

JAMES SMITHIES (https://www.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/who-we-are/dr-james-smithies/)

“The Epistemology of the Machine: Natural Philosophy, Digital Laboratories, and the Humanities” (20 min)

Digital Humanities laboratories, where teams of software engineers collaborate with researchers on work ranging from large funded projects to sundry experiments, provide unexpected insights into the current state and future potential of the humanities. King’s Digital Lab (KDL) at King’s College London – a large team by contemporary standards – demonstrates how these facilities contribute to theory, method, and the wider knowledge environment. This talk describes KDL from methodological, epistemological, technological, and business perspectives in an attempt to align the lab to the longue durée of history. The ‘collision’ of these elements in the physical space of a central London laboratory offers a complex interpretative domain, as rich in potential meaning and implication as scientific laboratories studied in earlier decades. The various methodologies used in the lab present a complex entanglement of humans and machines with the economics of contemporary academia, but also an experimental space where the future of the humanities is – for better or worse – being influenced.

JONATHAN GRAY (https://jonathangray.org/)

“Experiments in Re-assembly? Reflections from the Public Data Lab” (20 min)

This talk will provide reflections on the development of the Public Data Lab (PDL), a network of researchers and research centres from across Europe established with the aim of facilitating collective inquiry and democratic engagement around the future of the data society. Positioning the lab in relation to the research upon which it draws upon – including science and technology studies (STS), media studies and digital methods research – the talk will explore some of the different approaches and formats to participatory research in the data society that have emerged in the course of its projects and activities, including around “fake news”, air pollution, data infrastructures, public facts, networks, visualisations and algorithms.

URSZULA PAWLICKA-DEGER (http://pawlickadeger.com/)

“A Laboratory as Critical Infrastructure in the Humanities” (60 min)

Laboratories have entered the humanities as a new infrastructure aimed at transforming the humanities into an experimental, collaborative, and technology-driven discipline. With the spread of the idea of the laboratory into academic spaces, city spaces, and cultural institutions, the definition of lab has been extended significantly. A laboratory goes beyond the notion of a physical place involving specialized instruments and hands-on scientific exploration, becoming, instead, a widely understood project. A laboratory is thus more than infrastructure; it is a “conceptual vehicle” (Critical Media Lab at the Academy of Art and Design FHNW) and it involves “new ways of engaging with public audiences” (the Humanities Laboratories at Duke University). In short, a laboratory can be conceptualized as a way of thinking that entails new social practices and new research modes. Thus, a lab can be established anywhere. The only condition for creating a lab is community: a lab is constituted by and for the people gathered together to address particular challenges.

My goal is to present the impact of the laboratory through two different perspectives: infrastructural changes in the humanities and structural changes through the humanities. I attempt to go beyond the discussion of a laboratory as a research infrastructure to investigate it as the infrastructure of engagement in social and global challenges. Hence, I pose the following questions: How does a laboratory grow from a physical workspace into actions taken around challenges? How does a laboratory become the driving force of the engaged humanities? How can changes be made through the (digital) humanities infrastructure? Drawing on the sociology of scientific knowledge, laboratory studies, and critical infrastructure studies, I will address these questions and explore the laboratory as a platform for systemic changes.

This talk will consist of two parts. In the first part, I will present three discourses that gave rise to the laboratory in the humanities: the transformation of the humanities infrastructure within the university, the paradigm shifts in the social sciences, and the expansion of particular cultural categories. Further, based on an interactive map of laboratories (humanities labs, digital humanities labs, and media labs) established around the world, I will sketch the history of the lab in the humanities within a global context from the 1980s to 2018. Next, I will determine models for humanities labs based on laboratories’ statements and operations, including the techno-science, workstation, and virtual models. The second part of the lecture aims to examine the lab structure critically and reflect on its potential for the engaged humanities. Referring to social lab theorists, I will seek to answer questions as to how humanities research can be translated into action and how a laboratory drives this process. The analysis will be based on different forms of laboratories seen as sites of interventions: the lab as a challenge-centric space, coalition, and community platform.

Tea, coffee, and pastries provided.

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Register

Register on the Eventbrite: https://bit.ly/2TRnwnw.

Date and time

Thursday 23rd May 2019
14:00-16:00 GMT

Location

Bush House, Room: South-East Wing (SE) 2.10
King’s College London, Strand, Bush House, 30 Aldwych, WC2B 4BG

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EVENT | Intersections of Race, Gender and Class in Vegan Vlogging 19.03.19

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As the sixth talk in the Early Career Research Talks series, Ella Fegitz will give a presentation entitled ‘Intersections of Race, Gender and Class in Vegan Vlogging’.

In this talk, I explore the intersection of gender, class and race in the construction of the vegan self in Western culture, and the inequalities that it engenders. An analysis of contemporary vegan vlogging shows how the subject that emerges is white, middle-class and gendered, both explicitly and implicitly ways. Explicitly, because the most visible vegan subject in vegan vlogging is almost always a white, cis-woman. Implicitly, because it reproduces gender discourses of food practices conventionally associated with white middle-class femininity, in terms of moral elevation through physical deprivation and constraint, which are very different from discourses about black femininity and their relationship with food. Ultimately, this talk will explore how veganism is not neutral, but is gendered, raced and classed.

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Date and time

Tue 19th March 2019
13:00-13:45 GMT

Location

Bush House S 2.02
Strand Campus, King’s College London
Strand
London
WC2R 2LS

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EVENT | Digital ANT: The Agency of Replications 27.03.19

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How can studies of digital societies account not just for digital objects, but also signals and replications? Join us for a public talk with Dominique Boullier (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne).

Digital ANT: The Agency of Replications – Dominique Boullier (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)

Digital platforms (from social networks to IoT) generate, analyze and sell more and more traces. The social sciences, under certain conditions, can finally benefit from a quasi-experimental field to study the processes of propagation, contagion and influence and to account in particular for the power to act of the entities that circulate, which I propose to think of as replications. This makes it possible to complement the powers of structures on the one hand and individual preferences on the other, which have been formalised by previous periods of social quantification. Actor Network Theory was born to contest the hegemony of these frameworks and to distribute agency to “non humans”. A digital ANT should not only focus on objects but on signals and memes that find their way through our minds and make us act, as Tarde proposed.

Bio: Dominique Boullier is professor of sociology at EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Digital Humanities Institute). He was the scientific coordinator of the medialab (Sciences Po Paris) from 2009 to 2015 together with Bruno Latour. He created and managed many labs (Lutin User Lab, Cité des Sciences, Paris, Costech in Compiègne) and a company in the 90s. His main research topics focus on digital sociology, replications and propagation, events and urban climates, technical architectures on Internet.

This event is part of an ongoing seminar series on “critical inquiry with and about the digital” hosted by the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. If you tweet about the event you can use the #kingsdhhashtag or mention @kingsdh. If you’d like to get notifications of future events you can sign up to this mailing list.

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Date and time

Wed 27th March 2019 15:30-17:00 GMT

Location

Bush House, Lecture Theatre 1 BH(S)1.01 Strand Campus, King’s College London Strand London WC2R 2LS [button open_new_tab=”true” color=”accent-color” hover_text_color_override=”#fff” size=”medium” url=”https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/digital-ant-the-agency-of-replications-tickets-53902719485″ text=”Register” color_override=””] [/one_fourth_last]

2018-2019 WM Fellows

LEIF WEATHERBY is Associate Professor of German at NYU, co-founder of the Digital Theory Lab. His research focuses on philosophies of technology – especially the digital – Romanticism and Idealism, and political economy. His book, Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx, tracks an early techno-philosophy in the doctrine he calls “Romantic organology.” His ongoing work on the relationship between cybernetics and German Idealism has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Alexander von Humboldt association. His writing has appeared in venues like SubStance, Grey Room, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. His other awards include Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers (ongoing); National Endowment for the Humanities, Summer Stipend; Fulbright Research Grant, Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science; DAAD Re-Invitation Grant.

URSZULA PAWLICKA-DEGER is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Media at Aalto University and a member of Research Data Management Working Group at Aalto. She was a Fulbright scholar in the Creative Media and Digital Culture at Washington State University Vancouver and a visiting researcher in the English Department at Stony Brook University. Her postdoctoral research lies at the intersection of digital humanities and infrastructure studies. Her last publications include “Data, Collaboration, Laboratory: Bringing Concepts from Science into Humanities Practice” released in English Studies (2017) and the forthcoming article “Laboratory: A New Space in Digital Humanities” in Debates in the Digital Humanities: Institutions, Infrastructures at the Interstices (University of Minnesota Press). Currently, she is co-editing a special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly on the topic of situated research practices in digital humanities. She has presented her research outcomes at various universities, including Harvard University, the University of Oxford, and the University of Helsinki. Over the years, she has published peer-reviewed scholarly articles and monographs. Personal website: http://pawlickadeger.com/

ANTONINA is an Associate Professor at ITMO University (Saint-Petersburg, Russia) where she teaches Digital Humanities and Digital Culture courses. She is a director of the International DH Research Lab co-directed by Professor Keramidas from NYU. As a PI, she manages two interdisciplinary projects funded by Russian Humanities Foundation. She is also a head of a newly launched MS “Data, Culture and Visualization”, which aims at educating well-rounded data professionals who have strong statistical and technical skills combined with strengths in research, communication, and design. She regularly participates in various international conferences in the USA, Canada, UK, Malta, Finland, Estonia, giving workshops and presentations on different aspects of Digital Humanities. She is an author of more than 18 publications, and is currently working on a book “Generation Z on Digital Culture”.

ANGUELINA is Associate Professor, and Director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Anguelina holds a PhD in educational technology from the Open University of the Netherlands, and has Masters degrees in Sociology, European politics, and Educational technology from the University of Nice- Sophia Antipolis, and the University of Liege. She is involved with, and heavily promotes teacher professional development, quality assurance educational technology, educational research, and digital humanities at the university. She is also part of SIG in Faculty Development and Information and Digital Literacies within the AMICAL consortium.

EVENT | Talking Trees: Four Perspectives on Ecological Media and Media Ecologies 20.03.19

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Join us for a public talk on ecological media and media ecologies with Birgit Schneider (University of Potsdam), hosted by the Department for Digital Humanities, King’s College London.

Talking Trees: Four Perspectives on Ecological Media and Media Ecologies – Birgit Schneider (University of Potsdam)

Media not only shape our view of the environment, they are our environment. In my talk, I will relate media studies perspectives to current questions of media perception of environments by showing four perspectives on media ecology.

The perspectives use at least three concepts of media to grasp the ontological multiplicity of media and ecology. First, nature as a medium in the historical sense of elementary media. This approach makes it possible, for example, to look at the climate, the atmosphere or even the earth itself as a medium. Secondly, as media of nature – technical media that help to fabricate knowledge from nature by means of measuring and sensing. And finally, in an expanded sense of the term media, which encompasses media as infrastructures.

The four perspectives on media ecology, which then open up different fields, are 1) the ecology of the media as cybernetic networking; 2) the geology of the media, which brings into view the materiality of the media; 3) Media environments, which in their entirety shape the perceived environment, 4.) Media of nature, i.e. media that transfer nature into images, language or measurements perceivable by humans.

The examples that the lecture will discuss are current media formats such as the remains of the first submarine cables, twittering pines, Thoreau’s Walden pond as a computer game, satellite monitoring of global forests and the media experience of animal perceptions in the forest.

Bio: Birgit Schneider studied art and media studies as well as media art and philosophy in Karlsruhe, London and Berlin. After initially working as a graphic designer, she worked from 2000 to 2007 at the research department “Das technische Bild” at the Humboldt University in Berlin, where she received her doctorate with a thesis on the media archeology of punch card weaving under the supervision of Friedrich Kittler. Since 2009, she has been researching in the context of fellowships at the European Media Studies Department of the University of Potsdam as well as in Munich and Weimar. Since 2016 she has been Professor of Media Ecology in the Department of European Media Studies at the University of Potsdam. Her current research focuses on images and perceptions of nature, ecology and climate change, diagrams, data graphics and maps as well as images of ecology. She is head of the mixed-methods project “analysing networked climate images” and a member of the research group “Sensing. On the knowledge of sensitive media”. Since 2017 she is co-speaker of the “Network Digital Humanities” of the University of Potsdam.

This event is part of an ongoing seminar series on “critical inquiry with and about the digital” hosted by the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. If you tweet about the event you can use the #kingsdhhashtag or mention @kingsdh. If you’d like to get notifications of future events you can sign up to this mailing list.

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Date and time

Wed 20th March 2019
16:00-17:30 GMT

Location

K3.11, King’s Building
Strand Campus, King’s College London
Strand
London
WC2R 2LS

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EVENT | Datafied, Data-Driven, Data-Critical: Data Journalism Within Broader Processes of Datafication 14.03.19

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How can data journalism be understood and studied in the context of broader processes of datafication in society? Join us for a public talk with Wiebke Loosen (Hans Bredow Institute), hosted by the Department for Digital Humanities, King’s College London.

Datafied, Data-Driven, Data-Critical: Data Journalism Within Broader Processes of Datafication – Wiebke Loosen (Hans Bredow Institute)

Today’s journalism is contextually situated in many different forms of data- and technology-driven practices. What is generally referred to as “data journalism” is, therefore, only one occurrence in journalism’s overall transformation towards an increasingly datafied, algorithmicized, metrics-driven, and automated practice. This includes how and by what means journalism observes and covers (the datafied) society, how it self-monitors its performance, how it controls its reach and audience participation, and how it (automatically) produces and distributes content. In my talk, I will place particular emphasis on data journalism while at the same time situating it within these much broader processes of journalism’s datafication. To this end, I will present selected results from (my own) empirical research, critically discuss the idea of data as “raw material” and synthesize it all into a typology of seven ‘Cs’ – seven challenges and underutilized capacities of data journalism that may also be useful for suggesting alternative practices in the field.

Bio: Prof. Dr. Wiebke Loosen is a senior journalism researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans Bredow Institute in Hamburg (Germany) as well as a professor at the University of Hamburg. She studied communication science, psychology, and German studies at the University of Münster (Germany) where she also received her doctorate. Wiebke habilitated in communication studies at the University of Hamburg with her work on “The Transformation of Journalism and of Journalism Research”. She has held visiting professorships at the University of Münster and the University of Munich. Her major areas of expertise include the transformation of journalism within a changing media environment, journalism theory, and methodology. Wiebke’s current research focuses on the changing journalism-audience relationship, the datafication of journalism, forms of ‘pioneer journalism’, and the emerging start-up culture surrounding journalism as well as how algorithms’ build ‘journalism-like’ constructions of public spheres and reality. She is also working as part of several interdisciplinary projects situated at the intersection of journalism research and computer science.

This event is part of an ongoing seminar series on “critical inquiry with and about the digital” hosted by the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. If you tweet about the event you can use the #kingsdhhashtag or mention @kingsdh. If you’d like to get notifications of future events you can sign up to this mailing list.

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Date and time

Thur 14th March 2019
18:00-19:00 GMT

Location

S-2.28, Strand Building
Strand Campus, King’s College London
Strand
London
WC2R 2LS

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EVENT | Social media and state reconstruction in Somalia 13.03.19

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As the fifth talk in the Early Career Research Talks series, Peter Chonka will give a presentation entitled ‘Social media and state reconstruction in Somalia’.

If social media is affecting the ways in which ‘strong’ states communicate with citizens, what are the implications of such popular connectivity for states at the other end of the institutional capacity spectrum? This talk explores this question in relation to Somalia and an internationally-backed Federal Government that continues to struggle to exert its authority beyond the capital city of Mogadishu. Although some commentators point to tangible recent reconstructions of state institutions, the Federal Government lacks empirical sovereignty over the country, and is engaged in an ongoing conflict against a resilient militant Islamist state-project and insurgency (Al Shabaab). In this talk I will analyse the ways in which nascent state authorities have communicated with citizens through increasingly ubiquitous social media platforms. I examine particular state communication trends, as well as controversies and critiques related to these approaches expressed in Somali popular culture and through social media itself. I argue that the social media environment can be engaged with by state actors to harness popular optimism around state reconstruction, and by citizens to challenge external portrayals of developments in Somalia. However, the characteristics of this discursive space (combined with prior prolonged conditions of statelessness) facilitate the challenging of state legitimacy, and, at times, can undermine the communicative coherence of re-emerging structures of governance.

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Date and time

Wed 13th March 2019 17:00-18:30 GMT

Location

Bush House S 2.01 Strand Campus, King’s College London Strand London WC2R 2LS [/one_fourth_last]

 

EVENT | Digital geo-visualisations and the cultural politics of urban (re)development 06.03.19

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As the fourth talk in the Early Career Research Talks series, Mike Duggan will give a presentation entitled ‘Digital geo-visualisations and the cultural politics of urban (re)development’.

Urban (re)development in the UK and elsewhere is increasingly aided by various geo-visualisations including digital maps, 3D models, simulations and smart city dashboards. Though geographers and others have begun to examine the impact that these visual technologies are having, much of this work has approached the topic from a top-down and decidedly technical perspective. Few have explored how geo-visualisations might affect the social and cultural geographies of the city using qualitative approaches that engage with the various people, groups and organisations using them. This talk will examine what geo-visualisations are currently being used for, what their potential is and what varying impacts they have on the everyday lives of planners, policy makers, and citizens engaged in urban (re)development. Ultimately, the talk aims to outline a research project for exploring how digital geo-visualisations are encountered and experienced by everyday practitioners in order to guide the impact(s) they might have on future planning and governance.

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Date and time

Wed 6th March 2019 13:00-14:00 GMT

Location

Bush House NE 2.02 Strand Campus, King’s College London Strand London WC2R 2LS [/one_fourth_last]

EVENT | Depicting the bagne – re-imagining penal colony sites through photography and mapping 6.03.19

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As the third talk in the Early Career Research Talks series, Claire Reddleman will give a presentation entitled ‘Depicting the bagne – re-imagining penal colony sites through photography and mapping’.

I will be talking about work in progress, resulting from recent postdoctoral research. ‘Postcards from the Bagne’, is hosted at Nottingham Trent University and led by Dr Sophie Fuggle. The ‘bagne’ refers to the French penal colonies that existed from the mid-nineteenth century into the mid-twentieth century, at a number of locations but most famously French Guiana in South America. One of the aims of the project is to create a digital photographic archive of sites as they appeared in 2018, which I’ve been working on, as well as creating less documentary and more artistic cartographic and photographic collages. The purpose is to frame the complex material and social legacies of the penal colony as moments of decarceration, closure and ruination, with a view to reimagining prisons as ‘ruins of the future’.

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Date and time

Wed 6th March 2019
12:00-13:00 GMT

Location

Bush House NE 2.02
Strand Campus, King’s College London
Strand
London
WC2R 2LS

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EVENT | Early Career Research Talks 2019

Join us for a series of Early Career Research Talks given by colleagues from the Department of Digital Humanities. There are seven in total, running between January 2019 and May 2019. For more details, please see the poster below.

If you tweet about the event you can use the #kingsdhhashtag or mention @kingsdh.