This was not actually a TED talk, but otherwise it was genre conforming. It was one of 10 "Breakthrough Presentations" at the Falling Walls | Science Summit 2022 in Berlin in November. Recently posted on YouTube.

Link to the YouTube video: Power Asymmetries: Breaking the Wall of an Algorithm-Based Society | David Stark - YouTube

This autumn has seen the publication of two chapters on sound in literary and philosophical thought by Naomi Waltham-Smith: “Unexceptional Events; Or, Cixous’s Scarcely Audible Literature,” in Literature and Event: Twenty-First Century Reformulations, ed. Manta Mukim and Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 2022) and “Deconstruction and Timbre,” in The Oxford Handbook of Timbre, ed. Emily I. Dolan and Alexander Rehding (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

CIM is excited to offer a brand new Data Visualisation Masters degree starting in the 2022/23 academic year!

This new interdisciplinary degree builds on CIM’s specialist research and teaching expertise, exploring visualisations as key interfaces for communication, decision-making and engagement across media, science, industry, policy and advocacy. This unique combination will allow students to connect technical and scientific aspects of data visualisation creation with socio-cultural and critical understanding. Students will learn how to design, develop, deploy and interpret data visualisations through methodological, conceptual and practice-based learning.  

 MASc Data Visualisation is also CIM’s first MASc degree, a flexible Masters where students can customise their learning trajectories through interdisciplinary topics and modules, and align the emphasis to their interests and strengths. Through the core modules “Visualisation Foundations”, “Data Visualisation in Science, Culture and Public Policy” and “Advanced Visualisation Design Labs”, along with a selection of a diversity of electives, students will be able to build their unique, interdisciplinary perspective into designing, developing, deploying and interpreting data visualisations. The students will gain expertise through interactions between Data, Code, Design and Theory, developed through learning to code as a basis for creating visualisations. The degree is open to students from all disciplinary backgrounds and no previous coding experience is needed. 

Further information on the degree and application details could be found here

Academic freedom and free speech are hotly debated topics at this time, with the UK government seeking to pass legislation to impose new duties on universities to protect and promote free speech. This short article considers the political and epistemic effects of certain positions within this contested field, focusing in particular on whether dogmatism ought not enjoy the protection of academic freedom insofar as it is inimical to free inquiry.

Link to the paper: : https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/essay-waltham-smith

Nate Tkacz shares his thoughts in The Conversation on the proposed plans for a new GOV.UK app, which aims to provide a one stop shop for many government services.

Link to paper: https://theconversation.com/new-government-app-will-provide-access-to-public-services-but-questions-around-privacy-and-design-remain-169899

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.