What features of AI have triggered controversy among experts during the last 10 years? Academics in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (University of Warwick) have published a report outlining provisional results of the ESRC-funded research project Shaping AI which investigates recent controversies and public discussions around AI in four countries (the UK, Germany, France and Canada).

Anders Koed Madsen (Aalborg University)

A seminar hosted by the Centre for interdisciplinary Methodologies (University of Warwick)

• Tuesday May 9, 15:00-17:00,
• Room: OC1.07 (and online)

Digitalisation and computation presents us with a vague empirical world that unsettles established links between measurements and values. As more and more actors use digital media to produce data about aspects of the world they deem important, new possibilities for inscribing their lives emerge. The practical work with digital methods thus often involves the production of social visibilities that are misfits in the context of established data practices. In this talk Anders Koed Madsen will argue that this friction carries the distinct critical potential to design data experiments that (a) uses the act of operationalisation as an engine for creating intersubjective situations around the meaning of existing concepts and (b) takes advantage of algorithmic techniques to provoke a reassessment of some of the core assumptions that shape the way we normally frame empirical problems. Drawing on the work of Kant, Peirce, Dewey and C.I. Lewis, Anders propose to think of this critical potential as the possibility to practice what he terms ’experimental a priori’.

In the second part of the talk, Anders uses qualitative vignettes from two years of data experiments with GEHL architects to illustrate what this entails in practice. His collaboration with the architects was sparked by a shared concern that cities are becoming political filter bubbles and the experiment consisted in using traces from Facebook to design an interactive datascape that enabled the architects to explore this issue in new ways. This datascapeended up as a troubling cartography that reconfigured existing problematizations. Faced with the task of using traces from Facebook as an empirical source, the architects found themselves in a need to revisit inherited assumptions about the ontology of urban space and the way it can even be formulated as a problem of diversity. The decision to work with digital methods thus created a form of productive friction that stimulated new problem spaces. Anders will end his talk by outlining five design principles that can potentially steer data sprints towards such situations in the future.

Anders Koed Madsen is associate professor at Aalborg University in Copenhagen, head of experimental practice at TANTLab and co-founder of The Public Data Lab. Both are institutional homes for researchers crossing STS and computational humanities. During the last five years he has developed ‘Soft City Sensing’ as a distinct framework for mapping and conceptualizing the social infrastructure of urban publics through the digital traces they leave of their urban life. This work draws on his distinct interdisciplinary background in pragmatist philosophy, computational humanities, internet studies and organizational analysis. Anders serves at editorial boards of - and have published extensively in - leading journals within computational humanities and urban cartography. He has authored books on valuation and cultural studies and is currently co-editing an international handbook of computational humanities. Anders directs the executive education in 'data-driven organizational development' and frequently gives presentations, also public ones, on topics relating to computational humanities, smart cities and digital citizen engagement.

The two papers that Anders will talk across can be found here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1o7BJuqizp1OoO5ng4tPacgo-HWl-zUE7?usp=sharing

If you are not affiliated with the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies but would like to attend this seminar online, please email Kanisha Mathiarasan at Kanishka.Mathiarasan@warwick.ac.uk by Friday May 4 2023, and she will email you the seminar link.

PhD in Visualisation in Citizen Science -- Facilitating wider participation and community building in citizen science through visualisation

We are looking for a PhD candidate who will join us to conduct research in the topic of visualisation in/for citizen science and how visualisation could broaden participation and support community building in citizen science projects. The position is funded by the Leverhulme TRANSFORM Doctoral training programme based at the University of Warwick and the successful candidate will work with an interdisciplinary mix of supervisors interested in visualisation, participation and methodologies. Candidates will join the vibrant PhD cohort at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies and the Institute for Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick, UK.

The project will also involve a close collaboration with researchers form the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UKCEH) who work on biodiversity modelling in the UK. Together with this interdisciplinary team, there is potential for real-world impact and contribute to the global sustainable development goals of the TRANSFORM programme.

Further details of the project and expected profile can be found here:

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/schoolforcross-facultystudies/igsd/transform/themes/2023topics/citizenscience/

This is a fully funded position within the TRANSFORM programme and application details can be found here:

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/schoolforcross-facultystudies/igsd/transform/apply/guidance/

The deadline for applications is 11.59pm on 20 March 2023.

Get in touch with Cagatay Turkay at cagatay.turkay@warwick.ac.uk for questions. Please feel free to share with anyone who you think might be interested.

ABSTRACT

This article considers how the pursuit of problematization advocated by Agre’s concept of critical technical practice has been articulated in relation to the increasing proliferation of interfaces across everyday life. While the ethos of Agre’s work to bridge the split identity of critique and craft can readily be found in reflexive design or software art, these cases are not always situated within broader ecologies of practice that also grapple with the asymmetries and exploitative aspects of interface design. Drawing from software studies and media theoretical accounts of the interface as a fluid milieu, I provide a navigational matrix to contextualize modes of interface critique at large, namely specifying traps and enclosures, surfacing asymmetries and augmenting alternatives. I argue, finally, that these modes provide an invitation to develop new metacritical theories and common capacities, particularly through the possibilities of grappling with systems of domination otherwise built to prefigure our experiences of them.

Suggested image, attribution here: https://twitter.com/ShitUserStory

Naomi Waltham-Smith has been awarded a BA/Leverhulme Research Grant for her project exploring how recent French philosophy has conceptualized the imbrication of listening in the idea and practice of democracy and of nationalism. Over the next two years, she will be spending time at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris and the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine conducting research on unpublished and largely unstudied seminars, texts, and correspondence of Derrida, Foucault, Cixous, and the Groupe d’information sur les prisons.

Abstract:

It is widely claimed that we live in an age of political distrust and disaffection ripe for the resurgence of right populisms. This project proposes a novel analysis by developing a vernacular diagnosis moulded by the commentariat: rich democracies today are undergoing a crisis of listening. While the term is frequently used in contemporary discourse, there is no recognizable concept of listening in the history of political philosophy. Contributing to a larger project that unearths more or less subterranean concepts of listening in European philosophy and its interlocutors, the proposed archival research examines unpublished texts from an especially resonant seam of late twentieth-century French thought that address listening in relation to democracy and nationalism. The chief outputs of this archival research will be two journal articles and it will contribute substantially to a larger monograph project for a major university press, in addition to dissemination across disciplines and beyond academia.

Matt Spencer, University of Warwick

Journal of Cultural Economy 2022

Link to paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17530350.2022.2098515

Gaining confidence in the security of technical products is a persistent challenge for cyber security practitioners, and a domain in which government assurance schemes have traditionally played a key role. But the idea that security can be treated as a kind of measurable quality, and assessed and certified, has attracted considerable scepticism in recent years. Driven by this scepticism, assurance thinking has shifted towards the anticipation of products in their contexts of deployment.

This paper examines cyber security assurance discourse in the UK. It develops an analysis of the stories told by practitioners about what is wrong with traditional assurance, and asks what these stories ‘do’, how they enact mistrust and create the conditions for change. The paper focuses on the characters that populate these stories, the deceivers and dopes, box tickers and enlightened critical thinkers, and argues that it is around the characterisation of assurance that future debates in the field are likely to coalesce.

Abstract: This article proposes a rethinking of the operations of surfaces, using the concept of ‘recursion’ to explore surfaces as not only spatial, but also temporal objects engaged in the production of continuity and rupture through time. The text engages with the transformation of a specific high relief at the Monument to the Soviet Army in Sofia, which in the past decade has been subjected to a series of material and semiotic modifications. The analysis of interventions on the relief created between 2011-2018 stimulates an engagement with a set of questions pertaining to the way in which surfaces are engaged in the production of temporal continuity and rupture. To achieve a theoretical intervention in monument, visual and urban studies, the article mobilises cultural topology and media theory, alongside scholarship dealing with Bulgarian post-communist urban space and politics.

Genova, Neda. "Temporal Politics of the Surface: Keeping Pace with the Monument to the Soviet Army in Sofia." new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics, vol. 106, 2022, p. 25-42. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/863660.

CIM teaching fellow Janna Joceli Omena is a contributor to SAGE Research Methods: Doing Research Online. The how-to-guides entries are about application programming interfaces (APIs) and how to make meme collections. The two-part series of guides on Collecting Data Using APIs presents a technicity perspective to understand APIs and navigate API documentation. And learn in practice how to communicate with and access APIs. These guides help us "understand the attitude they need to adopt to become conceptually, technically, and empirically acquainted with APIs and the tools needed to communicate with and request data from them". Part 1 introduces the main characteristics and types of Web APIs, and presents ways of understanding and navigating API documentation, including using data retrieval software and verifying outputs. Part 2 highlights the main requirements to communicate with and access APIs. Moreover, it presents aspects to consider before, during, and after data collection while illustrating key ethical considerations that may arise.

The entry on making meme collections is a piece written in collaboration with Giulia Giorge and Richard Rogers. This how-to-guide teaches the making of meme collections. It provides guidance to query and extract memes from memes database (Know Your Meme) and generator (Imgur), social media and Google Image search engine. Finally, the guide empirically explains how the online environment affects the conceptualisation and composition of a meme collection.

What are the barriers to cycling amongst ethnic minority groups? What are the policy challenges in achieving cycling equity? The newest CIM research project “Ethnic inequalities in cycling – advocacy and policy in London” aims to answer these questions using a mixed methods design. The project is funded by the Institute of Advanced Study research grant, secured by Dr Zofia Bednarowska-Michaiel (CIM).

May was a particularly busy time at CIM with regular academic events, such as a Research Away Day or Grant Sprint. This year we also organised a Writing Retreat for Early Career Researchers (ECRs).

The retreat was a three-day log event where junior members of academic staff gathered to work simultaneously on their writing projects. On top of the packed agenda of writing sessions, the retreat was an opportunity to meet in person for the first time since Covid-19.

The group of ECRs at CIM includes Research and Teaching Fellows. The group was established to create a space for peer collaboration and interdisciplinary exchange, on top of daily research projects and teaching duties that ECRs are engaged within. The Writing Retreat was designed collaboratively, and the organisation was led by Dr Chiara Poletti and Dr Zofia Bednarowska-Michaiel, with a great support of professional staff at CIM. We implemented an open-ended form of collaboration for writing, peer-led discussion, and exchange so that the retreat can take place in an iterative way and in a collegial environment.

Image description/Alt-text:

CIM Early Career Researchers working on their writing projects. Author: Dr Daniele Pizio