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.

Project | Technologically Fabricated Intimacy

Blending research-­focused and performance-­driven critique, the project addresses the implications of hyper-­connectivity in intimate relations by looking at the mechanics of blockchain technologies applied to dating cultures.

Dr Alessandro Gandini  – academic lead

Marija Bozinovska Jones  – artistic lead

Technologically Fabricated Intimacy – dating apps, gamification and blockchain technologies is a collaboration between King’s College London’s Department of Digital Humanities and artist Marjia Bozinovska Jones, brokered and supported by the Cultural Institute at King’s in partnership with Somerset House Studios.

Technologically Fabricated Intimacy – dating apps, gamification and blockchain technologies addresses how dating apps influence the forming of technologically-mediated intimate relationships. The project will explore what decentralised organisational models bring into online dating cultures. As social relations are mostly reduced to gamified versions of romantic exchanges, a grammar of aesthetical evaluation is applied onto representations of the self and put into play with digital technologies. Investigating new modes of sociality, the project will involve the sensory beyond visual, through movement, haptics, the olfactory and the audible. Staged as a Live Action Role Play connected via digital wallets, a group of gamers will delve into exploration of the issue of trust as a formalised concept, echoing the value system of the fintech industry.

Project team

Dr Alessandro Gandini  – academic lead

Dr Alessandro Gandini is a sociologist and a senior researcher working in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Milan. Prior to that, he was a lecturer in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s. His research focuses on the transformations of work and social relations in the digital society. He is the author of The Reputation Economy (Palgrave, 2016), a co-author of Qualitative Research in Digital Environments (with A. Caliandro, Routledge, 2017) and a co-editor of Unboxing The Sharing Economy, part of The Sociological Review Monograph Series (with I. Pais and D. Arcidiacono, Sage, 2018). His research has been published on journals such as Human Relations, Convergence, Marketing Theory and Ephemera. His current research work includes the study of the ‘gig economy’ and the social implications of the blockchain technology.

Marija Bozinovska Jones  – artistic lead

Marija Bozinovska Jones explores links between social, computational and neural architectures. Her work revolves around formation of identity in an era of technocapitalist amplification and perpetual online presence; she probes the self as a datafied and distributed identity through MBJ Wetware manifesting as a virtual voice assistant. Unpacking cryptic ways of forging subjectivity, MBJ contemplates intelligence within artificial, auto-regulation and coping mechanisms: from trends in self improvement to decentralized technologies.

Marija’s recent activities activities include Transmediale in Berlin DE (upcoming), Sonic Acts Academy in Amsterdam NL, Furtherfield/ Serpentine Marathon in London UK, screening at D’EST online and Moscow Museum Of Modern Art in Moscow RU and panel presentations for Moneylab: Tokenizing Culture with the Blockchain and Self Optimization/ Hyper Functional Ultra Healthy at Somerset House in London UK.

Marija graduated MA in Computational Arts at Goldsmiths and is a current studio resident artist at Somerset House Studios in London.

EVENT | DIGITAL MODERN LANGUAGES TUTORIAL SPRINT 2019

Colleagues working on the Language Acts & Worldmaking project have released a call for proposals for a ‘Digital Modern Languages tutorial writing sprint’, which aims to bring together language teachers, modern languages researchers and digital practitioners to create a collaborative Open Educational Resource. The event takes place over two days in July 2019 and will demonstrate the critical use of digital tools and methods for learners and researchers interested in modern languages and cultures. It will consist of a dual physical and virtual event.

This initiative will lead to the production of a series of self-learning online tutorials on how to use digital tools & methods critically in researching or learning about modern languages and cultures. The outcome will be an edited collection of tutorials, providing a snapshot of digital methods for modern languages.

The organisers anticipate a wide range of proposals, and have given the following examples of the kinds of tutorials they hope to create:

  • Using a digital storytelling tool to facilitate secondary school language learning
  • Mapping colonial history in Brazil digitally
  • Exploring geospatial representations of a French novel
  • Game-based approaches to language learning at school
  • Applying network analysis to golden age Spanish texts
  • Digital publishing approaches to Chinese texts
  • Exploring linguistic and geographic markers for digital identity creation in social media
  • Exploring translation pedagogy in Open Translation platforms

The deadline for proposals is March 10th 2019. For more information see

https://languageacts.org/digital-mediations/event/writing-sprint/

Other information

This initiative is led by the ‘Digital Mediations’ strand on the Language Acts & Worldmaking project https://languageacts.org/digital-mediations/, which explores interactions and tensions between digital culture and Modern Languages (ML) research. The project is funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) under its Open World Research Initiative (OWRI).

EVENT | A Family Affair: Family, Love, and Emotioned Fannish Literacy 26.02.19

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As the second talk in the Early Career Research Talks series, Brittany Kelley will give a presentation entitled ‘A Family Affair: Family, Love, and Emotioned Fannish Literacy’.

In the 25 years since the publication of Jenkins’ and Bacon-Smith’s foundational studies on media fandoms and fanfiction, fandom has achieved a much more mainstream status. Fan conventions such as Comic Con hold global popular appeal, with the Comic Con website boasting recent yearly attendance of over 130,000. Even some popular TV shows such as Supernatural have come to acknowledge (if not fully embrace) fan activities including fanwriting (Larsen & Zubernis, 2013; Booth, 2015; Williams, 2015, 2018). In large part, this more widespread positive representation of fandom is thanks to its growing visibility via memes and fanart in social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, as well as the huge popularity of the personal blogging website, Tumblr. In addition, fan practices are now surrounded by a larger cultural practice of making and sharing. Within such a context, fan practices are uniquely positioned to help us to better understand the intersections of the digital, embodied-emotional experience, and literacies.

Early fan studies focused both on how fan groups were formed and how fans learned to be fans (Jenkins, 1992; Bacon-Smith, 1992, 2000; Penley, 1997). Only more recent studies have begun to theorise the roles emotions play in the development of fan identities (Larsen & Zubernis 2013; Williams 2015, 2018). However, as Shirley Brice Heath (1983; 2012) and Deborah Brandt (2001; 2009) have shown, family plays a crucial role in the development of literacy practices. Unfortunately, while there are frequent references to family in fan studies, these references are typically limited to the tensions between the family obligations of married women and mothers and their fannish desires (see especially Larsen & Zubernis 2013). Family has been critically under-theorised in fan studies. Furthermore, while literacy scholarship has often looked at the importance of family in developing literacy skills, much of this research has focused on the implications for school (Street, 1984, 2006, 2009; Williams, 2009; Williams & Zenger, 2012). And while James Paul Gee (2003; 2004) has looked extensively at the relationships between literacy, learning, and video games, which certainly brings together emotion, embodiment, learning and digital technologies, it does not address the longer-term relationships among family, learning, and identity. While Heath’s and Brandt’s key studies do not deal with the roles of the digital or of entertainment in the development of literacy practices, they do provide key guiding theories that can bring together the various fields of fan studies, literacy studies, and digital humanities.

In this talk, I bring together the fields of fan studies, literacy studies, and affect theory to better theorise the role of family within fan practices. In this talk, I will focus on how ‘family’ plays a role in the complex digital literacy practices we see in online fanfiction communities. In the course of the talk, I will address the following questions:

  1. First, what are the different ways that fans might view a concept like “family”?
  2. Second, what are the different experiences fans might have of family in relation to their development of fannish interests, particularly fanwriting?
  3. Third, how do fans write about ‘family’ in their stories?
  4. And, finally, how can these fans’ experiences help us to better understand the complex kinds of meaning-making and identity-formation that happen in fanwriting practices online, and perhaps online practices more generally?

Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/popculturegeek/4940418003

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Date and time

Tue 26th February 2019
17:00-18:30 GMT

Location

Bush House SE 2.09
Strand Campus, King’s College London
Strand
London
WC2R 2LS

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