We're looking for participants who will use Big Sister for two weeks and allow us to interview them about the experience. We want to explore how people feel about their data being collected and used to make algorithmic recommendations and predictions.

Click here, to find out more about the new chapter by Pablo Velasco González and Nathaniel Tkacz in the Handbook of Peer Production

Click here to find out more about the recent publication by David Stark and Ivana Pais on the topic of Algorithmic Management in the Platform Economy.

Sound of Care roundtable Sunday 24 January 6 pm CET Naomi Waltham-Smith is speaking at a roundtable on Sound of Care with participants including Bernie Krause, Holger Schulze, and Leah Barclay as part of the #LearningPlanet Festival 2021 organised in partnership with UNESCO.

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa awarded the Article of the Year Prize of the Finnish Society for Aesthetics for "Re-animating soils: Transforming human–soil affections through science, culture and community" The Sociological Review, 2019.

Naomi Waltham-Smith has written the chapter on “Deconstruction” and translated an essay by Jean-Luc Nancy on “Galant Music” for the new Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy, edited by Tomás McAuley, Nanette Nielsen, and Jerrold Levinson.

A new volume co-edited by Michael Castelle, The Cultural Life of Machine Learning: An Incursion into Critical AI Studies, has been published by Palgrave Macmillan. Inspired by a conference organized by Dr. Castelle with co-editor Dr. Jonathan Roberge of the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS) in Montreal, Canada, the book brings together the work of historians and sociologists with perspectives from media studies, communication studies, cultural studies, and information studies to address the origins, practices, and possible futures of contemporary machine learning.

A chapter by Aaron Mendon-Plasek, "Mechanized Significance and Machine Learning", has been released open-access, and the entire book can be accessed by university libraries with a SpringerLink subscription.

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa is presenting at the Serpentine Gallery’s free online art & ecology festival on soil, earth, land and ground: The Understory of the Understory 5-6 December 2020 https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/the-shape-of-a-circle-in-the-mind-of-a-fish-the-understory-of-the-understory/

How can thinking with contemporary transformations in human-soil relations nurture the imagination of caring earthly futures amidst ongoing eco-social catastrophes? Rewording Ursula Le Guin’s title, The Word for World is Forest, is an invitation to immerse in the material, aesthetic and ethico-political evocativeness of soil-centred worlds, without losing sight of the multi-layered, conflictive, and ambivalent significances that mark human-soil ecological belonging on this troubled Earth, while exploring possibilities for insurgent and hopeful ecological futures.

Naomi Waltham-Smith has published an article entitled “Turning Ears; Or, Ec(h)otechnics” in a special double issue of Diacritics devoted to “The Turn” edited by Andrea Bachner and Carlos Rojas, alongside contributions from Emily Apter and Jonathan Culler.

The vestigial auricular muscles are a trace of an earlier evolutionary capacity to turn the ears. While they are still functional in other mammal species, they are scarcely responsive in humans, who compensate by turning the head instead. This transformation was part of adaptations in the cervical spine that made possible the becoming-technological of the upright stance and humanity’s front-facing posture. Unable to sense what comes from behind, human ears are oriented toward what lies ahead within the field of vision—toward the foreseeable—and yet in listening, as in walking, the human is thereby compelled to turn back. From this angle, the sonic turn—often figured as a return to sound—instead names multiple moments of turning back: an originary nonhuman turning of the ears, humanity’s turning its back on this turn, and the unavoidable detours from this precipitous path. This essay argues not only for an originary technicity and prostheticity of aurality, but also that the nonhuman turn takes place via a sonorous detour. Analyzing the metaphoricity and tropological of language, it compares two figures—apostrophe and interjection—to show how the sonic and nonhuman turns continually address and animate one another.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/774745

For a situational analytics: An interpretative methodology for the study of situations in computational settings.

authoring a new research article:

https://buff.ly/2JHr4EA #STS #platformstudies #AutonomousVehicles #ComputationalSocialScience