Title: Pics, Dicks, Tits, and Tats
Date: 25th November 2020
Organiser: AI Ethics and society
Format: Webinar
Link: Pics, Dicks, Tits, and Tats Tickets, Wed 25 Nov 2020 at 15:00 | Eventbrite
Summary:
Researchers have long explored why people take, keep, send and resend images of bodies in social media. Studies on aspects of privacy, psychology and gender-based violence have outlined different reasons for this behaviour. This reading group session – led by Yazmin Morlet Corti (University of Edinburgh) – explores what constitutes images of bodies in social media research and discuss how researchers aim to utilise these images ethically.
We will discuss together Katie Warfield , Jamie Hoholuk, Blythe Vincent and Aline Dias Camargo’s “Pics, Dicks, Tits, and Tats: negotiating ethics working with images of bodies in social media research”.
Our online reading groups revolve around active participation as we encourage you to share your feedback and give your input to the conversation.
You can access the paper here.
Abstract:
With the rise of camera-enabled cell phones and social media platforms that focus on vernacular images (e.g. Instagram™ and Snapchat™), researchers and intuitional ethics boards increasingly seek guidelines for research using digital images of bodies shared on social media. This article presents the findings of in-depth interviews with 16 researchers who have received institutional ethics approval to study images of bodies shared on social media platforms. The interviews explored the researchers’ (a) processes of selecting their methodologies, (b) experiences getting institutional ethics approval, and (c) personal research ethics that emerged through their research programs. The findings indicate that researchers and review boards generally lack resources. Researchers often adhered to contextual integrity, were protective while not patronising, and adopted a feminist materialist ethics of care, which included consideration of the manifold human and nonhuman forces at play in the lifespan of images in digital research. Researchers also practiced strategies like ongoing consent, “ethics-on-the-go,” ethical visual fabrication, and conscious omission.
Title: Twitter & Demos: data, research and information operations
Date: 26th November 2020
Organiser: Demos
Format: Webinar
Summary:
Join Demos and Twitter for a panel discussion on data, research and information operations. Speakers will include:
Katy Minshall, Head of UK Public Policy, Twitter
Carl Miller, Research Director, Demos
Alexander Martin, Technology Correspondent, Sky News
Nahema Marchal, Researcher, Oxford Internet Institute
We’ll be discussing new trends in state-backed information operations, and the future of platform manipulation. We’ll also be talking about the role of tech companies in making data available for researchers, as well as challenges and opportunities for the research and media community in monitoring information operations.
In 2018, Twitter first published a comprehensive archive of tweets and media associated with known state-backed information operations. This archive of information operations (IO) has expanded to include activity originating from more than 15 countries, and is now the largest of its kind in the industry. Totalling more than 54,000 accounts, 160 million tweets, and over 8 TB of images, GIFs, videos, and Periscope broadcasts, the dataset is extensive and offers researchers unique insight into how IO unfolds on the service. For more on the datasets, visit Twitter’s public archive.
Demos’ Centre for the Analysis of Social Media (CASM) is a dedicated digital research hub, delivering unique insights and expertise across tech policy and its impact on our society, economy and democracy. CASM, in a joint venture with the University of Sussex, has pioneered the use of machine learning to interpret ‘natural language’ big data. Demos also runs the Good Web Project to empower the UK and international governments to ensure the future of the internet is compatible with liberal democracy.
Title: Shaping future research environments: digital challenges and opportunities
Date: Tuesday 15th December 2020
Organiser: JISC
Format: Webinar
Link: Shaping future research environments: digital challenges and opportunities | Jisc
Summary:
This webinar will introduce a new digital research community group and preview Jisc’s updated research strategy.
In this webinar you will:
Gain an overview of Jisc’s new research strategy
Hear about findings from focus groups with funders and national academies
Discuss current needs and priorities around digital research with others
Find out how you can help shape solutions as part of a new digital research community
Title: Hello World: or, how we learned to stop worrying, and love the computer
Date: Tuesday 15th December 2020
Organiser: Data, Culture and Society. The University of Edinburgh
Format: Annual Lecture
Link: CDCS ANNUAL LECTURE 2020: Aimée Morrison | Data, Culture & Society (ed.ac.uk)
Summary:
In this lecture, Prof Aimée Morrison will explore the cultural landscape of personal computing and how it became embedded in our lives and homes in the late 20th century.
As useful in everyday life as “atomic pastrami slicers,” in Douglas Gelertner’s phrase, it is hard to understand how everyday people came to desire to have small computers in their homes during the 1980s. As the 1970s waned, it seemed, not even science fiction could imagine much of future in which Computers made life better rather than worse—and yet, by the end of the 1980s, smaller, more personal computing was largely understood to herald leaps in productivity, education, personal freedom, and even the potential for world peace. At least, that’s what pop culture treatments of the “microcomputer” argued. “Your own personal computer: Imagine that,” implored a mid-decade magazine ad, and we did, over and over in a huge variety of genres and media.
This talk whizzes across the cultural landscape for emerging new representations of individualized computing practices and machines that rehabilitated computing’s popular reputation by imagining it in new guises and new roles, from Carl Sagan’s pitches for scientific calculators to Richard Pryor’s everyman computer hacker in Superman III, and a lot in between. It was through these more imaginary engagements that personal.
Title: Covid-19 When species and data meet.
Date: 18th January 2021
Organiser: British Sociology Association
Format: Webinar
Link: BSA Yorkshire MedSoc Study Group Webinar: Covid-19: When Species and Data Meet (britsoc.co.uk)
Summary:
This paper explores how species meet, in particular humans and the Covid-19 virus. It also draws attention to the digital world through the lens of contact-tracing apps. Here, I examine human-virus-data relations, with humans, Covid-19, and data meeting and intra-acting. This paper examines what has led us to this situation with Covid-19 and the role data is currently playing.
The paper offers an answer to two questions. How do humans, Covid-19, and Covid-19 contact-tracing apps meet and intra-act? What are the social justice issues and problems associated with contact-tracing apps? This paper examines how species meet and intra-act, as well as how the Anthropocene has contributed to the current situation. The paper also discusses contact-tracing apps and what these apps mean for society.
Finally, the paper shows how entanglements are not only constrained to those which are multispecies but also stretch out to the digital. These postdigital hybrid assemblages enable the coming together of humans, biological-more-than-human-worlds, and the digital. Postdigital hybrid assemblages enable us to push beyond boundaries, helping us understand Covid-19 and its impacts on society.
Hopefully, this discussion about the postdigital hybrid assemblage will contribute to discussions in the future, and long after Covid-19, about how we are living our lives, and who and what we are living our lives with.