Queering Digital Cultures, Friday 28th October 2022

Zeena Feldman and Jamie Hakim from the Department of Digital Humanities are co-organising an international symposium, “Queering Digital Cultures“, exploring how queer users and tech workers challenge the inequalities and exclusions of today’s internet. The hybrid event will be held on Friday, 28th October 2022 (11.30am to 6pm (BST)) at both King’s College London’s Strand campus and online.

The event is open to the public and free of charge, but registration is required.

The internet is increasingly regarded by users, regulators and NGOs as a public utility. The UN has gone so far as to call internet access a universal right. But the internet is simultaneously seen as a technological infrastructure linked to – and leveraged for – capital production and accumulation. The Queering Digital Cultures symposium aims to explore what this tension between universal access and platform capitalism means for the sex and gender-based assumptions and exclusions generated by today’s internet. We will focus on how homophobia, sexism and transphobia are reproduced in contemporary digital culture and unpack how this intersects with existing inequalities and ‘digital divides’ around race, class and (dis)ability. We train our analytical lens on the ways that mainstream data production, consumption and circulation practices impact sex and gender minorities. We also consider how queer users, activists and tech workers challenge the inequalities and exclusions (re)produced in today’s internet.

Working to understand these issues is crucial for the future of internet studies. Across its thirty-year history, the discipline has critiqued the ways in which digital technologies impact the social register of everyday life. Yet this intellectual project has failed to substantively consider the experiences of sex and gender minorities, and the resulting intersectional exclusions generated by and in today’s internet. Queering Digital Cultures brings together esteemed scholars who have made important contributions to addressing these blindspots.

Speakers:

Kath Albury (Swinburne University of Technology)

Kevin Guyan (University of Glasgow)

Chloé Locatelli (King’s College London)

Shaka McGlotten (Purchase College-SUNY)

Alexander Monea (George Mason University)

Gaspard Pelurson (King’s College London)

Roundtable on studying Global Digital Cultures, Wednesday 19 October 2022

Please join us in discussing “Going Global”, a roundtable about studying Global Digital Cultures in non-Western contexts.

Over the last academic year, the members of the Department of Digital Humanities have held a series of talks doing research on Global Digital Cultures in non-Western contexts. This emerging Research Cluster covers a wide array of geographies – India, Japan, Malaysia, Morocco, Somalia and South Africa – and an equally wide range of topics – virtual idols, memes, museums, infrastructures, and more.

We want to warmly invite you to this roundtable discussion, in which we bring together the speakers from last year’s Going Global talk series to reflect on what it means to study Global Digital Cultures. By drawing connections and comparisons between our different topics and geographies of study, the participants will offer insights into politics and problematics of studying digital technologies across the world.

Date: Wednesday, 19 October 2022
Time: 5-6.30pm 
Location: Strand Campus, Anatomy Lecture Theatre, room  K6.29
Participants: Elisa Oreglia, Peter Chonka, Ashwin Mathew, Laura Gibson, Niki Cheong, Rafal Zaborowski, Cristina Moreno Almeida

Registration required: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-digital-humanities-lectures-going-global-roundtable-tickets-429796873017

This roundtable is part of the Digital Humanities Lecture Series. In this lecture series, the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London presents research in progress critically inquiring the implications of digital technologies on our global digital cultures, digital heritage and culture, exploring opportunities for computation in the Arts and Humanities, and enriching the role of these fields in the domain of Computer Science. 

Save the dates for future lectures: 
16 November, 5pm – DH research on Artificial Intelligence 
30 November, 5pm – DH research on Surveillance 

New publication: “Personal Science and the Quantified Self Guru”

DDH professor, Btihaj Ajana, recently published a new chapter, “Personal Science and the Quantified Self Guru”, in book, Digital Wellness, Health and Fitness Influencers, edited by Stefan Lawrence.

Author’s summary of the chapter:

“In this chapter, I examine the ways in which Quantified Self practices can be considered as “personal science,” a term first introduced by Martin and Brouwer in early 1990s and recently adopted by the Quantified Self community to describe its self-tracking activities and objectives. In doing so, I revisit some relevant arguments put forward by the philosopher, Hans-Georg Gadamer, vis-à-vis the value of the personal and hermeneutic dimension to understanding aspects of health and appreciating the limits of traditional medical methods and their generalising approach. After laying down the basis of the Quantified Self as personal science, the chapter proceeds to examine the example of the Danish self-tracker, Thomas Blomseth Christiansen, who is famous for curing himself of his severe allergies thanks to tracking his sneezes since 2011 and monitoring various other bodily and environmental variables. By drawing on interviews I conducted with Thomas and weaving them into relevant philosophical debates, I provide a critical discussion on the way self-tracking can be seen, at once, as a way of reclaiming autonomy and control over one’s health as well as a form of outsourcing decision-making to technology itself. This discussion leads me to differentiate between active and passive self-tracking, and between members of the Quantified Self circle who build their own tools and the general users who rely on the commercial tech solutions available on the market. Ultimately, I suggest that the Quantified Self community can act as a “guru” for mainstream self-trackers by nurturing a critical and inclusive approach to technological development and use, which can enable users to be involved in the means of production and become experts rather than just users. “

Wikipedia Editathon on “East and Southeast Asians in the UK”, 15th September 2022

How are East and Southeast Asians (ESEA) in the UK represented on Wikipedia? As part of ESEA Heritage Month 2022 the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London’s is co-organising a Wikipedia Editathon on “East and Southeast Asians in the UK” on 15th September 2022, together with friends and colleagues at City University London, ESEA Hub and the Public Data Lab.

The event arose through an ongoing Public Data Lab project on “East and Southeast Asians: Documenting a Category in the Making”. It is inspired by both editathons as formats for involving marginalized knowledge communities, as well as research on Wikipedia grounded in media studies and science and technology studies (e.g. on controversies, gaps, underrepresentation, politics, and socio-technical dynamics).

The event will review ESEA related pages and explore how people who identify with or are associated with the ESEA term can be involved in shaping Wikipedia pages about their communities, histories and cultures.

Further details can be found below and at the following links:

Wikipedia Editathon on “East and Southeast Asians in the UK”, 15th September 2022

Wikipedia is one of the largest and most popular websites in the world. Its pages make their way into the top of search engine results, the answers of smart devices and are widely linked, shared and translated around the world. However, its content has been shown to be heavily skewed by gender and geography.

How are East and Southeast Asians (ESEA) in the UK represented on Wikipedia? While there are pages for various ESEA groups, a proposal to make an “East and Southeast Asians in the United Kingdom” page was rejected in 2015. Amongst those opposing the page were comments that the ESEA term “is simply not used in Britain”, along with suggestions for the page to be renamed with “British Orientals”, a term which is considered problematic and offensive.

Since the pandemic the term ESEA has been gaining traction. There are now several groups and organisations with ESEA in their name. In 2021 East and Southeast Asian Heritage Month received attention and engagement from media organisations, cultural organisations and public institutions. Has status and societal recognition of the ESEA term changed during the pandemic? Should an ESEA page be created? If so, what should it contain?

Inspired by edit-a-thons organised by and for marginalised groups, this event will explore how people who identify with or are associated with the ESEA term can be involved in shaping Wikipedia pages about their communities, histories and cultures. At the event we will review, discuss and edit Wikipedia pages together. Participants will learn how to set up an account and edit Wikipedia. To close we will reflect on the role of Wikipedia, and the web more generally, in ESEA organising during and after the pandemic.

Co-organised by City University London, ESEA Hub, King’s College London and the Public Data Lab.

Cross-posted from jonathangray.org.

Keynote with Lauren Klein, “What Data Visualization Reveals: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and the Work of Knowledge Production”, 13th September 2022

Lauren Klein will be giving a keynote talk on her research on data visualization as a feminist method at King’s on 13th September 2022, introduced by Stuart Dunn, head of the Department of Digital Humanities. Further details on her talk are copied below and you can register here (free for both online and on campus attendance).

The keynote is part of a Turing Visualization Group Symposium hosted by CUSP London and the Turing Network Development Award – at King’s College London

Abstract:

Data visualization is not a recent innovation. Even in the nineteenth century, economists and educators, as well as artists and illustrators, were fully aware of the inherent subjectivity of visual perception, the culturally-situated position of the viewer, and the power of images in general—and of visualization in particular—to produce the insights that lead to new knowledge. In this talk, I will examine the history of data visualization in relation to feminist theory, which has also long attended to the situated nature of knowledge and its production Exploring the visualization work of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804-1894), I will show how we might recover her contributions to the development of modern data visualization. I will demonstrate, moreover, that by conceiving of data visualization as a feminist method, we might question the universality of the goals of clarity and efficiency when designing data visualizations, and better value visual forms that encourage sustained reflection and imaginative response. Confirming how visual knowledge is informed by the social, cultural, and political contexts that surround it, this talk will reveal how an awareness of those contexts can lead to more intentional, more effective, and more ethical visualization design.

Biography

Lauren Klein is Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor in the departments of English and Quantitative Theory & Methods at Emory University, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab. She is the author of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and, with Catherine D’Ignazio, Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020). With Matthew K. Gold, she edits Debates in the Digital Humanities, a hybrid print-digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge.

New article: ‘Perceptions and attitudes towards Covid-19 vaccines: Narratives from the UK public’

A new article on public perceptions of Covid-19 vaccines co-authored by DDH professor, Btihaj Ajana, and Elena Engstler, Anas Ismail & Marina Kousta.

The article can be accessed on: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10389-022-01728-w

Abstract:

Aim

The aim of the paper is to enhance understanding of how members of the public make sense of the Covid-19 vaccines and to understand the factors influencing their attitudes towards such artefacts of pandemic governance.

Methods

The paper draws on 23 online in-depth interviews with members of the UK public and builds on relevant literature to examine participants’ perceptions of the benefits and risks of Covid-19 vaccines, the sources that have shaped their attitudes, and the level of trust they have towards the government’s handling of the pandemic through vaccines.

Results

The findings indicate that participants generally felt that the benefits of having the vaccine outweigh the risks and that Covid-19 vaccines are a crucial mechanism for enabling society to return to normal. Vaccine acceptance was, for some, strongly linked to a sense of social responsibility and the duty to protect others. However, some participants expressed concerns with regard to the side-effects of Covid-19 vaccines and their perceived potential impact on fertility and DNA makeup. Participants used various sources of information to learn about Covid-19 vaccines and understand their function, benefits, and risks. The majority of participants criticised the government’s response during the early stages of the pandemic yet felt positive about the vaccine rollout.

Conclusion

Just as with any other vaccination programme, the success of the Covid-19 immunisation campaigns does not only depend on the efficacy of the vaccines themselves or the ability to secure access to them, but also on a myriad of other factors which include public compliance and trust in governments and health authorities. To support an effective immunisation campaign that is capable of bringing the pandemic to an end, governments need to understand public concerns, garner trust, and devise adequate strategies for engaging the public and building more resilient societies.

Barbara McGillivray wins Inter Circle U. Prize

Congratulations to Barbara McGillivray, Lecturer at the Department of Digital Humanities who was a winner of the Inter Circle U. Prize, which aims to “showcase and highlight some of our best examples of inter- and transdisciplinary research”.

More details here and brief summary and video about her project may be found below.

Dr. Barbara McGillivray, lecturer in digital humanities and cultural computation at King’s College London, for the team project “The Language of mechanisation”. 

Her research focusses on computational models of meaning and conceptual change in historical and contemporary texts and she is Co-Investigator of the Living with Machines project.

Her ICUP-winning project, “The Language of Mechanisation” realises an experiment in radically interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration at the intersection between history, computational linguistics, data science, library science and research software engineering. The project aims to leverage the potential of historical digitised records at scale, particularly the British Newspapers Archive, to analyse the impact of mechanisation on the lives of ordinary people during Britain’s rapid transformation into an industrial society.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E71ubTGr-m8

Representing and (re)Imagining Digital Crowds Beyond Data Reduction

The following post is from Nicola Bozzi, Lecturer in Digital Innovation Management at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London.

I am happy to finally share the recording of the online workshop I organised as part of the Online Crowds series, which was supported and funded by the Centre for Digital Culture at King’s College. The event happened on Teams on 20 June 2022 and it featured four invited speakers: Midgray (Kris Blackmore and Simon Boas), Valentina Tanni, Ksenia Fedorova and Max Dovey. The meeting started with four 15-minute presentations and ended after a final moderated discussion on new media/social media aesthetics and collective identities.

Scroll for a brief description of the event and presentations, and further for the recording.

In the age of social media and big data, collective identities are often discussed in terms of networks, publics, or “neighborhoods of likeness” (Chun, 2018), while theories on “digital subjects” (Goriunova, 2019), “algorithmic imagination” (Finn, 2017) or “phantasmal media” (Harrell, 2013) help us think about the ways these techno-social infrastructures also shape new imaginaries and formats for collective subjectivation.
With the widespread everyday adoption of more and more visually sophisticated technologies based on AI, VR and AR, what critical approaches can help us conceptualise the convergence of the social – with its categories, figures, and movements – and the aesthetic – intended both in terms of increasingly haptic and immersive modes of identification, but also in terms of the poietic modes of political subjectivation called for by theorists like Franco “Bifo” Berardi? How do emerging cultural formats like Instagram face filters, GAN imagery, or blockchain-enabled communities contribute to spread out our increasingly distributed, digitally augmented identities?
With this premise, this online event featured presentations by both critics and artists who work on new media, art, and identity in critical ways.

Identity Layers. On the Creative Use of AR Filters
Taking her Instagram filters exhibition project “Art Layers” (2021) as a starting point, Valentina Tanni analyzed the different roles that AR filters can play in the context of today’s social media – from light, playful approaches to complex artistic experimentations on the topic of self-identity and reality perception.

A Yes is Sometimes a No in Disguise
Midgray (Kris Blackmore and Simon Boas) discussed their layered work on internet dating platforms, privacy, and masculinity. Involving algorithmically identifying misogyny in dating app user profiles on OkCupid, the projects result in thoughtful and nuanced conversations about consent and masculinity that aren’t typically seen in mainstream media.

Imaginaries of the Fluid Identities in the Data Worlds
Ksenia Fedorova addressed the ways the social imaginary is affected by the capabilities of digital technologies and the creative response to this state of affairs, registered in practices ranging from political activism to interactive art and mixed reality performance.

Playing the Other: Confronting More-Than-Human Intelligence Through Performance
Max Dovey discussed projects that involve performance, improvisation and live action role play to confront emergent techno-social configurations within live, embodied and situated contexts.

You can find the video recording below:

New article: “Engaged research-led teaching: composing collective inquiry with digital methods and data”

A new article on “Engaged research-led teaching: composing collective inquiry with digital methods and data” co-authored by our department’s Jonathan Gray and Liliana Bounegru, together with Richard Rogers, Tommaso Venturini, Donato Ricci, Axel Meunier, Michele Mauri, Sabine Niederer, Natalia Sánchez-Querubín, Marc Tuters, Lucy Kimbell and Anders Kristian Munk has just been published in Digital Culture & Education.

It builds on work that Jonathan and Liliana have been doing on “engaged research-led teaching” at King’s, supported by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities.

The article is available here, and the abstract is as follows:

This article examines the organisation of collaborative digital methods and data projects in the context of engaged research-led teaching in the humanities. Drawing on interviews, field notes, projects and practices from across eight research groups associated with the Public Data Lab (publicdatalab.org), it provides considerations for those interested in undertaking such projects, organised around four areas: composing (1) problems and questions; (2) collectives of inquiry; (3) learning devices and infrastructures; and (4) vernacular, boundary and experimental outputs. Informed by constructivist approaches to learning and pragmatist approaches to collective inquiry, these considerations aim to support teaching and learning through digital projects which surface and reflect on the questions, problems, formats, data, methods, materials and means through which they are produced.

King’s College London supports Programming Historian

We are delighted to announce that King’s College London’s Departments of Digital Humanities and History have joined forces to become the newest member of Programming Historian’s Institutional Partnership Programme.  

This cross-departmental sponsorship represents the increasingly close links between these two fields of scholarship, and signals an emerging need for digital skills that bridge humanities and social research.  

Institutional Partnerships are essential to sustain Programming Historian’s core work of publishing rigorously peer-reviewed, multilingual tutorials, and to ensuring that they remain Diamond Open Access for its global readership.

With the support of its sponsors in 2022, Programming Historian will be developing an enriched programme of community-facing activities to support educators, learners, and project partners in their use of Programming Historian and as such, this collaboration with King’s College London comes at a key moment.  

Digital Humanities, in one form or another, has been researched, studied and taught at King’s College London since the 1970s. With over 600 postgraduate and undergraduate students currently enrolled in courses in the Department, many seek the skills to acquire, analyse, interpret and present computational data. One of the Department of Digital Humanities’ most popular new initiatives at King’s has been a “coding lab” for our students which supports their computational learning.  The History Department has more than 1000 postgraduate and undergraduate students currently enrolled. Several of its academic staff members have used advanced digital methods in their research projects, and many others are keen to explore these methods for their research and teaching as well as making available opportunities for students to acquire these skills. 

Programming Historian offers lessons on a range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows facilitating research involving mapping, network analysis, and web scraping among other topics, which have great potential to enrich our pedagogy and teaching offering in the classroom.