Eine Veranstaltung in Kooperation mit dem SFB 1472 "Transformationen des Populären" und dem Gleichstellungsbüro der Universität Siegen

Can You Hear Me Now? Sanity Tests and Screening Difference in Machine Listening for Mental Health Care

In the United States, growing numbers of psychiatric and engineering professionals collaborate in attempts to build automated systems that conduct mental health screening based on the sounds of the voice alone. These “vocal biomarker” detection technologies propose to turn any utterance into clinically significant data, regardless of a speaker’s knowledge or interpretations of their psychological status. Dominant discourses surrounding these efforts frame the auditory superiority of artificial intelligence (AI) as key to unlocking a more efficient and equitable future for psychiatric medicine. They often describe AI as a “stethoscope” or “thermometer” for mental illness, implying a straightforwardly biological and quantitative measure detached from the sociocultural and political dimensions of the clinical encounter.

This talk explores the “sanity test”—a computer science term for assessing the desired functionality, i.e. “rationality,” of a model—as an alternative analogy for vocal biomarker systems that more aptly conveys the normative logics, social effects, and matrices of domination embedded within them. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork with technologists and human test subjects whose sensory practices and voices shape how various vocal biomarker technologies will listen, I show that the boundary between “ill” and “well” bodies and subjects is in constant, contested flux throughout the design process.

Dr. Beth Semel is an incoming Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. Her ethnographic research combines linguistic anthropology, science and technology studies, disability studies, and sound studies to explore the sociopolitical life of automated voice analysis, focusing on efforts to integrate these AI-enabled technologies into the U.S. mental health care system. She is currently a postdoctoral associate in Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she received her PhD in History, Anthropology Science, Technology and Society (HASTS). She is also the co-founder and associate director of the Language and Technology Lab.

On the lecture series: "Testing Infrastructures"

From QR codes used to verify COVID-19 vaccination status’ to cloud software used to train machine learning models, infrastructures of testing are proliferating. Whilst the infrastructures themselves come in different forms - from ‘off the shelf’ systems to tailor-made technologies - they all have a capacity to generate specific ‘test situations’ involving an array of different actors from ‘ghost’ workers to python scripts. An increasing reliance on digital platforms, protocols, tools, and procedures has led to a redistribution of testing itself: not just where testing takes place, and who performs the testing, but who has access to, and control over, mechanisms for testing, test protocols and of course, test results. In this lecture series, we focus on the practices making up the test infrastructures and explore different perspectives to make sense of the realities enacted by testing.

We invite our lecture guests to ask: how do testing infrastructures engender the construction of specific testing routines and practices? What kinds of affective experiences, reactions, and responses are generated through testing? Here we invite reflection on how testing infrastructures oft fade into the background, pointing to a tapestry of maintenance and repair practices. Lastly, what are the ways in which we can evaluate the role of digital infrastructures more broadly? This includes the challenge of what novel test methods can be developed and actually ‘tested’ to gain a better understanding of how infrastructures work. Our exploration of test practices in this context is interwoven with the search for test media that bind actors together or create barriers; that enable cooperation or declare it impossible.

Possible questions include (but are not limited to):

• What are the implications of testing in different social situations and in what moments do they come to the fore? 
• When and where are tests conducted—for whom and what, through whom and what, and by whom and what actors?
• What are digital practices for/of testing and with what types of data do testing infrastructures support?
• What other practices spawn from distributed testing? Think of practices of passing and obfuscation within nested situations of testing and the outsourcing of ‘validation work’ as constructions that govern.
• What methodological strategies are there to make test procedures and their foundations transparent?
• Can different politics of testing be distinguished? If so, where and under what conditions?
• Can we demarcate between embodied testing and disembodied testing?

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This event is prompted by the publication of A New History of Modern Computing by Thomas Haigh and Paul Ceruzzi (MIT Press, 2021), a book that was planned and largely written under the auspices of Siegen University. As the most ambitious scholarly overview history of computing published this century, this book updates the grand narrative of computing history by drawing on new generations of scholarship. Topics such as digital media devices, videogames, home computing, computer networking, smartphones, cloud computing, and the evolution of the IBM PC standard are integrated into the overall story for the first time.

Yet our purpose here is less to celebrate the new book as to ask what it, and its silences, tell us about the potential to tell other stories on a similar scale about computers and their history. The workshop gathers scholars from fields such as media studies, the history of science and mathematics, and the history of AI to ask what a grand narrative of the history of computing might look like if told from other perspectives. What do Haigh and Ceruzzi get right, and what opportunities did they neglect? What topics and chapters would appear if the story was told in a different way? What would be the protagonists and the plots?

Organizers:
Thomas Haigh (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee & Siegen University)
Sebastian Giessmann (Siegen University)

12:00 – 13:00

Präsentation: Yarden Skop

(Dissertation Project: Studying the relationships between platform companies and publishers through the development and deployment of computational tools for content moderation and fact checking)

Discussant: Vesna  Schierbaum

13:00 – 14:00

Präsentation: Clara Fernández de Bobadilla Munoz

(Dissertation Project: Data in crisis: An ethnography of technical practices of/with data during the Covid-19 pandemic)

Discussant: Pip Hare

14:15 - 15:15 Uhr

A02: The Culture of Telecommunication Standardisation in the Tensions of the Digital and Neoliberal ‘Double Revolution

15:15 – 16:15 Uhr

Julia Bee (Universität Siegen)

Bycicle Media and Cooperation

Gender & Diversity Lunch mit Dr. Simone Pfeifer

Dr. Simone Pfeifer arbeitet derzeit als Postdoktorandin im DFG-Gradiertenkolleg 2661: „anschließen-ausschließen - Kulturelle Dynamiken jenseits globaler Vernetzung“ an der Universität zu Köln. Gleichzeitig ist sie Associate Senior Research Fellow im Projekt „Dschihadismus im Internet: Die Gestaltung von Bildern und Videos, ihre Aneignung und Verbreitung“ am Institut für Ethnologie und Afrikastudien der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. Sie promovierte an der Universität zu Köln zu sozialen Beziehungen und Medienpraktiken im transnationalen Alltag von Senegales*innen in Berlin und Dakar. Als wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin war sie Teil des Graduiertenkollegs "Locating Media.

Zur Reihe:
Die Reihe „Gender & Diversity Lunch“ lädt alle Mitglieder der SFBs „Medien der Kooperation“ und „Transformationen des Populären“ zu einem Austausch zu aktuellen Themen und Fragestellungen aus den Bereichen Gleichstellung, Diversity und Vereinbarkeit von Familie und Wissenschaft ein. Ziel der Reihe ist es, ein Networking zwischen SFB-Mitgliedern und Personen aus verschiedenen Bereichen und mit unterschiedlichen biografischen Erfahrungen zu ermöglichen. Zu jeder Veranstaltung wird eine Person zu einem bestimmten Thema eingeladen. Die Reihe findet in regelmäßigen Abständen zur Mittagszeit inklusive eines Imbisses statt. Vorschläge und Anregungen für Wunschthemen/-referent*innen sind jederzeit herzlich willkommen.

Ein Kooperationsformat der SFBs 1187 & 1472 zur Chancengleichheit

Anmeldung über Juliane Biewald (juliane.biewald@student.uni-siegen.de)

Lecture: "Reappropriating Visual Network Analysis"

If the noema of big data visualization is “there is an order to that chaos”, then the study of digital traces calls to unveil the hidden structures of digitized society. Visual network analysis seems to promise such powers: complexity unfolding under your eyes! This begs two different kinds of questions. How does it work? But also: is this what we want to do?
Visual network analysis is already reappropriated in various places, like the teaching class and newsroom. As techniques circulate across fields and cultures, network practices change and get shaped in new ways. It is worth discussing different sides to this circulation. Some regrettable, like reusing network maps as marketing assets without containing their narrative powers, and some admirable, like reinventing the methodological commitments of algorithmic techniques inherited from distant fields. We will deconstruct what we see when we look at networks by exposing the gist of visual network analysis and questioning the notion of “community structure”, too often taken for granted. And finally, we will discuss the purpose and design of the apparatus we use to inquire into the complexity of digital traces.

Mathieu Jacomy is post-doc at the TANT Lab in Copenhagen, and previously was research engineer at the Sciences Po médialab in Paris. Jacomy tweets at @jacomyma

This workshop about visual network analysis is open to all publics, with or without experience with the discipline. We will focus on the mechanics of reading a network map, and from there understand how to build them so that they are useful in practice. The workshop is mostly tool-agnostic, but we will use Gephi, a free network visualization tool, as our tool of choice, for those comfortable with it. We will also address the issue of building a narrative about a network, and how to mobilize the multiple layers of mediation involved, and notably the layout algorithm. Finally, we will engage with (and discuss) Gephisto, an experimental tool designed to produce network maps in one click (but with a catch!). This workshop will make it clear what to expect and not to expect of network maps, how to make them well, how to interpret them properly, and how to approach visual network analysis as an operational practice.

Mathieu Jacomy is post-doc at the TANT Lab in Copenhagen, and previously was research engineer at the Sciences Po médialab in Paris. Jacomy tweets at @jacomyma

"Prototyping For More Than Human Futures"

In this lecture, I will share some empirical and theoretical reflections on the notion of prototyping, proposing elements for a more-than-human and decolonial agenda on urban datafication processes. One of the main sources of pride of the promoters of the Smart initiatives that I have studied, is that their technologies are always humans oriented, promoting more human futures. The idea of human centred design is not only the bar used to measure “good design”. It is also the driver of various typologies of smart products, solutions, and innovations. I will propose the challenge of thinking about the digital beyond the anthropocentric notion of human-centred design, and repositioning the digital in the debates around more-than-human futures is an ethical responsibility. If Smart projects point to how to achieve more human futures, preferring white men and seriously impacting the nature of the planet, a challenge for decolonial design would be to prototype new urban experiences, assuming that futures are not exclusively designed by humans or for humans.

Martín Tironi is Associate Professor, School of Design at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. He is sociologist, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 2006. Master in Sociology, Sorbonne V, 2010. PhD, Center de Sociologie de l’Innovation, École des Mines de Paris, 2013. Post-doctorate, Center de Sociologie de l’Innovation, École des Mines de Paris, 2014. Visiting Fellow, Center for Invention and Social Process, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2018. Martin Tironi's research concerns digital sociology, design anthropology, the production and the maintenance of sociotechnical devices, and critical approach of smart cities and datafication. He is currently developing a research project (Fondecyt, 2021-2024) titled “Design Futures in the era of artificial intelligence and algorithmic prediction: problematizing the construction of technological futures in the Chilean context”. Before that, Martin developed another Fondecyt project titled “Datafication of urban environments and individuals: analyzing the designs, practices and discourses around the generation of digital data in Chile” (2018-2021) and Fondecyt project (2015-2018) on the circulation of the Smart City concept. His work has been published in The British Journal of Sociology (2020), Journal of Cultural Economy (2018), Environment and Planning D (2018), among others. Tironi was part of the curatorial team that won the gold medal in the London Design Biennale (2021) with the Pavilion “Tectonic resonance: from user-centered design to planet-oriented design”

On the lecture series: "Testing Infrastructures"

From QR codes used to verify COVID-19 vaccination status’ to cloud software used to train machine learning models, infrastructures of testing are proliferating. Whilst the infrastructures themselves come in different forms - from ‘off the shelf’ systems to tailor-made technologies - they all have a capacity to generate specific ‘test situations’ involving an array of different actors from ‘ghost’ workers to python scripts. An increasing reliance on digital platforms, protocols, tools, and procedures has led to a redistribution of testing itself: not just where testing takes place, and who performs the testing, but who has access to, and control over, mechanisms for testing, test protocols and of course, test results. In this lecture series, we focus on the practices making up the test infrastructures and explore different perspectives to make sense of the realities enacted by testing.

We invite our lecture guests to ask: how do testing infrastructures engender the construction of specific testing routines and practices? What kinds of affective experiences, reactions, and responses are generated through testing? Here we invite reflection on how testing infrastructures oft fade into the background, pointing to a tapestry of maintenance and repair practices. Lastly, what are the ways in which we can evaluate the role of digital infrastructures more broadly? This includes the challenge of what novel test methods can be developed and actually ‘tested’ to gain a better understanding of how infrastructures work. Our exploration of test practices in this context is interwoven with the search for test media that bind actors together or create barriers; that enable cooperation or declare it impossible.

Possible questions include (but are not limited to):

• What are the implications of testing in different social situations and in what moments do they come to the fore? 
• When and where are tests conducted—for whom and what, through whom and what, and by whom and what actors?
• What are digital practices for/of testing and with what types of data do testing infrastructures support?
• What other practices spawn from distributed testing? Think of practices of passing and obfuscation within nested situations of testing and the outsourcing of ‘validation work’ as constructions that govern.
• What methodological strategies are there to make test procedures and their foundations transparent?
• Can different politics of testing be distinguished? If so, where and under what conditions?
• Can we demarcate between embodied testing and disembodied testing?

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More information on the talk will follow.

On the lecture series: "Testing Infrastructures"

From QR codes used to verify COVID-19 vaccination status’ to cloud software used to train machine learning models, infrastructures of testing are proliferating. Whilst the infrastructures themselves come in different forms - from ‘off the shelf’ systems to tailor-made technologies - they all have a capacity to generate specific ‘test situations’ involving an array of different actors from ‘ghost’ workers to python scripts. An increasing reliance on digital platforms, protocols, tools, and procedures has led to a redistribution of testing itself: not just where testing takes place, and who performs the testing, but who has access to, and control over, mechanisms for testing, test protocols and of course, test results. In this lecture series, we focus on the practices making up the test infrastructures and explore different perspectives to make sense of the realities enacted by testing.

We invite our lecture guests to ask: how do testing infrastructures engender the construction of specific testing routines and practices? What kinds of affective experiences, reactions, and responses are generated through testing? Here we invite reflection on how testing infrastructures oft fade into the background, pointing to a tapestry of maintenance and repair practices. Lastly, what are the ways in which we can evaluate the role of digital infrastructures more broadly? This includes the challenge of what novel test methods can be developed and actually ‘tested’ to gain a better understanding of how infrastructures work. Our exploration of test practices in this context is interwoven with the search for test media that bind actors together or create barriers; that enable cooperation or declare it impossible.

Possible questions include (but are not limited to):

• What are the implications of testing in different social situations and in what moments do they come to the fore? 
• When and where are tests conducted—for whom and what, through whom and what, and by whom and what actors?
• What are digital practices for/of testing and with what types of data do testing infrastructures support?
• What other practices spawn from distributed testing? Think of practices of passing and obfuscation within nested situations of testing and the outsourcing of ‘validation work’ as constructions that govern.
• What methodological strategies are there to make test procedures and their foundations transparent?
• Can different politics of testing be distinguished? If so, where and under what conditions?
• Can we demarcate between embodied testing and disembodied testing?

Gäste können sich per Mail anmelden 'Sende eine E-Mail'

It is hard to imagine digital culture without the work of Philip E. Agre. His description of the mutual dynamics of digital technology and ideology, so-called ‘grammars of action’ (Agre 1994), and the appeal for a critical technical practice (Agre 1997) have inspired scholars across media studies, HCI, and digital art and design for over 30 years. This workshop, ‘Agre After Techno-Utopianism’, seeks to evaluate his contribution to the study of technology, ideology, critique, and practice since the ‘techno-utopia’ of the early internet era ended, and more dystopic energies emerged.

The relevance of his work today is substantial. In Surveillance and Capture (Agre 1994), Agre saw the threats new workplace technologies posed that would mutate into examples of surveillance capitalism. In Real-Time Politics (Agre 2002), he wrote extensively on the downsides of digital cultures when the web was still considered a techno-utopia. In Pengi (Agre and Chapman 1987), Agre and David Chapman explored critiques of dominant AI conceptualizations. Together, these strands can be considered precursors to work, now commonplace, in software studies and integrated into computational methods for the study of digital culture. In Toward a Critical Technical Practice (Agre 1997), Agre famously offered a synthetic approach to studying technology, straddling the ‘craft work of design’ and the ‘reflexive work of critique’. In High Tech to Human Tech (Agre 1995) the political economy of digital culture became an even greater interest, debunking the ideology of ‘empowerment’ in newly ‘computerized’ workplaces. Even lesser-known work on the Networked University (Agre 2000) offered a prescient insight into the ‘promise and danger’ of remote learning.

Agre’s contribution to, as well as critique of, digital culture was just as significant. He ran the monthly mailing list The Network Observer (TNO) (1994-96) before starting the Red Rock Eater News Service (RRE) (1996-2001), offering regular insights into the ‘social and political aspects of computing and networking’. Not only did Agre critique the emerging digital world, but contributed to the counterculture within it. Since this period, we have experienced the downsides of networks, social media, and platforms, with AI and sensory media accelerating capitalism further. Bringing the founders of the nettime (1995-present) mailing list into conversation with the history of REE we want to think about how list cultures equally manifest as cultures of resistance. In this, we want to re-discover ideas that resisted tech-utopian narratives, and practices that challenged these ideologies.

Collectively, we want to deepen our understanding of Agre’s thinking and the significance of his work. From revisiting well-known texts to rediscovering less-popular work, and exploring the exciting interconnections between various disciplines and forms of ‘net activism’ that engaged with Agre’s work from computational science to sociology, and from work in political economy to across the wider arts and humanities. Within the context of the contemporary platform condition we want to collectively reflect on the relevance, as well as limitations, of his work; continuing to debunk cyber utopias, whilst disassociating and rearticulating narratives of power.

CfP for the workshop "Agre After Techno-Utopianism"

For this purpose, we invite contributions to a two-day workshop, 1-2 September 2022 where workshop participants will dive into the work of Agre through different formats: conversations, exegese, and critiques. In this, we are equally interested in exploring his role in shaping digital culture as we are in his academic work.

We invite contributions that engage with Agre's work in a comprehensive manner. We want to develop a foundation for how to read and work with Agre. We especially welcome contributions that seek to apply, and develop, Agre’s key concepts. However, the workshop will also aim to make sense of how Agre's thought has itself developed, from his early experiments with Pengi to the political economy of the internet. How, for instance, did his work on Pengi shape the idea of critical technical practice? What kinds of critique does Interactionism offer for the digital?

While the written contributions are designed to support a thorough examination of Agre's thinking, we will provide ample space for discussion. Here Agre can be confronted with contemporary questions. How, for instance, to think about ‘data practices’, sensor media or automation along with Agre?

Our second concern is to discuss the possibilities and practical implications of a collective inventory or archive of Agre’s work, exploring methods of documenting the network that developed around the RRE in the US and Europe and consider how it might be preserved and/or re-presented. We believe his heterogenous interventions deserve to be organized in a way that is respectful to the media specificity and materiality of early net critique, as well as being made accessible to the broader public.

As the location of the Harold Garfinkel archive, and a pioneer in the study of media practice, ethnomethodology, early internet studies, and the study of infrastructure, SFB1187 Media of Cooperation at the University of Siegen is well suited to host this workshop.

Format: 2-day discussion workshop with conversation formats and interviews as well as dedicated discussions of contributions. Papers will be circulated in advance.

Please submit an extended abstract (1000 words)

Deadline for submissions: 10 May 2022

Suggested (non-exhaustive) topics. How did Agre develop critiques around the following issues:

• Web communities and cultures (mailing lists, social media, tactics, resistance)
• Connectivity and networks (wired-ness, de/centralization, infrastructure)
• Capital-isms and technology (surveillance, networked, corporate, managerial)
• Work and the workplace (tasks, practices, organizational forms)
• Meaning of work (empowerment, the entrepreneurial self)
• Surveillance and privacy (grammars of action, capture model)
• Ethnomethods (accountability, activity, plans)
• Activity Theory (L. S. Vygotsky) and Interactionism as modes of critique
• Medium specificity (devices, platforms, AI)
• Critical Technical Practice (CTP), design and methodology (critique, tech ethics, APIs)
• Archives and histories (interactivity, accessibility, documentation)
• Other topics open to ‘Agre-ian’ analysis (e.g. environment, ecology, race)

We welcome contributions from former colleagues and contemporary witnesses. We also hope to hear various personal accounts of these early days of the internet: the ideas, visions, and hopes that shaped, and have been reshaped, by these early developments.

Please send submissions to Tatjana Seitz: tatjana.seitz@uni-siegen.de

Organizers: Tatjana Seitz, Sam Hind, Carolin Gerlitz, Sebastian Gießmann

Works:

Agre P.E. and Chapman D (1987) Pengi: An implementation of a theory of activity. AAAAI-87 Proceedings 268–272.

Agre P.E. (1994) Surveillance and capture: Two models of privacy. The Information Society: An International Journal 10 (2): 101–127.

Agre P.E. (1995) From high tech to human tech: Empowerment, measurement, and social studies of computing. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 3 (1): 167–195.

Agre P.E. (1997) Toward a critical technical practice: Lessons learned in trying to reform AI. In Bowker GC, Leigh Star S, Turner W and Gasser L (eds) Bridging the Great Divide: Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 131–158.

Agre P.E. (2000) Infrastructure and institutional change in the networked university. Information, Communication & Society 3 (4): 494–507.

Agre P.E. (2002) Real-Time Politics: The Internet and the Political Process, The Information Society, 18(5), pp. 311–331.

Web resources:

The Network Observer: https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/tno.html

Red Rock Eater News Service (RRE): https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/

Keynote Speaker, 8. Sept 2022, 11 Uhr: Deborah Lupton

Alle weiteren Informationen folgen.

Unter dem Motto „Spread Your Research“ thematisiert der Women’s Networking Day 2022 die Möglichkeiten digitaler Selbstpräsentation und Sichtbarkeit in der Wissenschaft.

Der diesjährige Women’s Networking Day ist eine Kooperation der beiden Sonderforschungsbereiche 1472 „Transformationen des Populären“ und 1187 „Medien der Kooperation“. Die Idee ist, Early Career Researchers aller Karrierestufen (Studentinnen, Doktorandinnen und Postdoktorandinnen) beider SFBs miteinander ins Gespräch zu bringen, Möglichkeiten der Vernetzung zu eröffnen und karriererelevante Themen und Skills zu vermitteln.

Das Programm des eintägigen Events bietet Vorträge und Workshops, die von geladenen Expert*innen aus unterschiedlichen Bereichen gestaltet werden, sowie Räume zum Networking und Erfahrungsaustausch. Der Women’s Networking Day findet einmal im Jahr statt und steht unter einem bestimmten Thema. Neben externen Expert*innen werden auch universitäre Partner und Kolleg*innen in für die Nachwuchswissenschaftlerinnen relevanten Positionen eingeladen, um insbesondere auch „In-House“-Informations- und Netzwerkmöglichkeiten zu eröffnen.

Referentinnen: Susanne Geu (Workshop zu Twitter), Katja Wolter (Workshop zu Research Gate & LinkedIn) u. a.

Zielgruppe: Mitarbeiter:innen aller Statusgruppen der SFBs 1187 & 1472

Mehr Informationen folgen

Eine Kooperation der SFBs 1187 & 1472

Anmeldung hier

Workshop mit Dr. Birgit Happel (geldbiografien.de)
Zielgruppe: Wissenschaftler*innen und Mitarbeiter*innen der SFBs 1187 & 1472 

Mehr Informationen folgen.

Eine Kooperation der SFBs 1187 & 1472

Anmeldung hier