News Archive

Announcing the launch of pauseforthought.net, the project website for Pause for Thought: Media Literacy in an Age of Incessant Change.

The world seems to change so rapidly, it often feels hard to keep up - especially in the realm of media technology. Platforms, devices, apps, and other media forms all seem to emerge and then obsolesce with dizzying rapidity. Should we see the inability of practice to keep up with technological change as some kind of failure? Should we leave the question of how we live with technology to those who impose it upon us? Or can we view our experience and our practices as points of departure for a more constructive critique of the high-speed society? Those of us who work with media frequently devise and use strategies for adapting to and managing the pressures of this high-speed society. We see this as a form of ‘media literacy’ that isn’t confined to institutional settings, like university classrooms. pauseforthought.net is a platform for sharing critical, reflective, and creative literacies and strategies developed through academic and non-academic media practices, broadly defined.

The aim of the Pause for Thought is to create an interdisciplinary network of scholars, writers, artists, and media practitioners who are invested in the future of media literacy in our high-speed society. With pauseforthought.net, we will be collating a rolling series of creative and reflective contributions, developed primarily through two online workshops including academic and non-academic participants, that outline methods and strategies for dealing with rapid media change.

Current contributions include a report on our first workshop and contributions by Emma Cocker, Paula Morison, and Pause for Thought’s investigators, Thomas Sutherland and Scott Wark. Forthcoming contributions include reflections or responses by Sam Meech, Niall Docherty and Zara Dinnen, JR Carpenter, Jess Henderson, and Erica Scourti, with more to be announced. The Pause for Thought project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of their Research Networking Scheme grant, and is supported by the University of Lincoln and the University of Warwick. pauseforthought.net was designed and created by rectangle.design.

Racial minorities bring novel perspectives to the organizations in which they work. But what if White Americans are not paying attention to their Black colleagues? In an experiment involving more than 2,500 White working-age Americans, we show that Whites are less likely to follow the choices and learn from their Black peers. We further propose and test several measures to mitigate this racial attention deficit.

The British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship is a 36-month award made to an annual cohort of outstanding early career researchers in the humanities or social sciences.

The purpose of this award is to enable the award holder to pursue an independent research project, towards the completion of a significant piece of publishable research.

Please note that eligibility criteria have been updated for 2021, to take into account the potential impact of the pandemic.

CIM invites applications from suitably qualified candidates to support in the latest round of the scheme. Please contact Dr Nate Tkacz (n.tkacz@warwick.ac.uk) for further information.

Walking has numerous benefits for the mental and physical health. It is a sustainable mode of mobility that modern cities should incentivise. Walkability, a notion of how friendly a street is for walking, entails different aspects like the perception of safety, beauty and social vibrancy. The perception of walkability is also influenced by the physical structure and spatial configuration of streets and their features.

Most studies on walkability are conducted based on interviews collecting valuable and detailed data. However, this data collection procedure is time- and resource-intensive and difficult to upscale to large areas. This project will leverage on street view imagery, deep learning image interpretation, crowdsourcing technologies, and geospatial datasets to develop a data-driven account of how the perception of walkability relates to physical, social and visual attributes of streets across different social groups, thus providing city administrators and planners a concrete and transferable methodology that helps them evaluate and enhance the liveability of their cities. Besides a transferable methodology to estimate city-wide walkability, we will propose data visualisations that surface the diversified perception of the urban space across different groups and that may support data-based theoretical developments on this multi-dimensional concept.

Decisions on how to encode and model information in a geographical database are theory- laden and contingent upon the social and cultural contexts in which they are made. Hence, the very meaning and structure of geoinformation and geodata intrinsically embed these contexts. Furthermore, representations of the world via geoinformation may emphasize certain perceptions of the world or promote new ones, hence facilitating social processes of digital transformation and marking a complete cycle of influences from culture/society to geoinformation and back again. With this in mind, the Geographical and Cultural Aspects of Geoinformation: Issues and Solutions (GeoCultGIS) workshop was organized in 2019 as part of the AGILE conference in Limassol, Cyprus. The workshop offered researchers dealing with any of the three relations the opportunity to present their work and participate in open discussions on related topics. This issue of Transactions in GIS includes four articles stemming from this workshop and the call for papers that followed it.

Description

Role

The Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick is looking for a Research Assistant to support researchers investigating the relation between human perception of urban spaces and attributes extracted from street view images (i.e. from Google Street View)

New paper! In 'Creative Malfunction: Finding Fault with Rowhammer, CIM's Matt Spencer examines one of the most significant hardware vulnerabilities of recent years for what it tells us about the nature of repair and transformation in computational systems. http://computationalculture.net/creative-malfunction-finding-fault-with-rowhammer

Want to learn more about how online recommendations and classifications work? @PersonalisePLY has designed an app to help you find out. Read about their project – and how you can participate in their research – here: https://algorithmicidentities.net/big-sister/open-call/

Workshop: Life and Death in the Cemetery

As part of our More-than-Human: data interactions in the smart city project, we are organizing a workshop at the Tower Hamlets Cemetry Park in East London on Monday 19th July from 11am-2pm.

How might we use data and technology for thriving multispecies interactions in the city?

About the event

In this workshop we will explore More-than-Human relations in the urban cemetery together.

What microscopic communities live around us? How are the lives and deaths of humans entwined with other species? How might urban data be used for making the invisible visible? And how might we design new technologies for more equitable living spaces for all of London's inhabitants - human and non-human, big and small – and not just an elite few?

The workshop is part of a research project exploring new roles for data and technology to support more sustainable, inclusive, just and diverse cities.

When: Monday 19th July from 11am-2pm

Where: Soanes Centre, Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, Southern Grove, London E3 4PX

Who: Interested people including urban planners, designers, researchers, growers, citizen scientists, parks users, biodiversity experts, local councillors.

Who is involved ?

The project is a collaboration between researchers at City, University of London, Goldsmiths University, Warwick University, Newcastle University, and the London School of Economics, and project partners the Roving Microscope and Cordwainers Grow. It is funded through an EPSRC Human Data Interactions Network Plus grant.

Further details and sign-up:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/life-and-death-in-the-cemetery-tickets-160179837205

Dr Naomi Waltham-Smith, Associate Professor in CIM, has received the Warwick Award for Teaching Excellence 2020/21 in recognition of how her practice has made a real difference to student learning this year.

This year WATE celebrates 'everyday excellence' and recognises the contributions to learning and teaching at Warwick that have really made a difference in unprecedented times. You can read more about the award and Naomi’s contributions here.