This workshop will be held in a hybrid format in English. It starts 11:00 on September 21 and ends 17:50 on Sept 22. On both days, the earlier session is a workshop, which will be run for a small group in an interactive format by Thomas Haigh, an historian of computing and experienced oral history interviewer who has conducted interviews sponsored by the ACM, SIAM, and the Software History Center. Attendance in person is preferred if possible, to allow for easy discussion and informal chats over lunch. The events after lunch will be talks and a roundtable discussion featuring other experts on historical interviewing, most of whom are participating remotely. 

Speakers: Thomas Haigh (organizer, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee & Siegen University); Valérie Schafer (organizer, University of Luxembourg); Sebastian Giessmann (organizer, Siegen University); David Brock (Computer History Museum) & Milica Popovic (Global Observatory on Academic Freedom, Central European University).

Full details, including registration, are at https://www.socialstudiesof.info/interviewworkshop/. There is no charge for participation.

Interdisziplinäre Online-Tagung am Internationalen Graduiertenkolleg 1956 Kulturtransfer (Freiburg/Moskau) in Zusammenarbeit mit dem SFB 1187 Medien der Kooperation (Siegen) und dem Institut für Medienkultur und Theater (Köln)

Veranstaltet von Dr. Sebastian Gießmann und Prof. Dr. Stephan Packard
Konzeption: Friederike Ahrens, MA., Dr. Sebastian Gießmann und Prof. Dr. Stephan Packard

Kulturkontakte und Kulturtransfer finden stets in Netzwerken statt: Sie sind von Beziehungen zwischen einzelnen Vermittler:innenfiguren und vermittelnden Institutionen, von materiellen und konventionellen Handels-, Verkehrs- und Kommunikationswegen, von den transportierten Gegenständen und nomadischen Medien, und von den impliziten Protokollen für jede der einzelnen involvierten Kommunikationen und Kooperationen abhängig. Der in den letzten beiden Jahrzehnten rasante und innovative Fortschritt der Forschung zu Netzwerken in etlichen Disziplinen bietet den Geisteswissenschaften deshalb auch in diesem Bereich neue Herausforderungen und Chancen. Die zweitägige interdisziplinäre Tagung Netzwerke im Kulturtransfer untersucht Prozesse der kulturellen Vermittlung dezidiert mit dem Blick auf jene Netzwerke, die sie ermöglichen und die von ihnen performiert werden. Es gilt, neue Verfahren und Begriffe zu entwickeln, die dem Fortschritt der Netzwerkforschung Rechnung tragen und zugleich grundlegend zum Verständnis gerade grenzüberschreitender kultureller Netzwerke beitragen – von der qualitativen und quantitativen Netzwerkforschung über Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie und Akteur-Medien-Theorie bis zu Profilierungen zwischen system- und netzwerkorientierten Ansätzen.

Die Tagung findet vollständig online statt. Bitte melden Sie sich hier kostenlos zur Teilnahme an:

kontakt@igk1956.uni-freiburg.de

Programm download

The lecture series takes place as a hybrid event with on-site participation and online access. The zoom link for the lecture will be made available in good time via the SFB's mailing list. Guests can register with Damaris Lehmann by email. Send an email

Artificial intelligence (AI), especially machine learning, structurally dependends on human participation. Technologies such as Deep Learning (DL) leverage networked media infrastructures and human-machine interaction designs to harness users to provide training and verification data. The current success of machine learning is based on a fundamental socio-technological transformation of the relationship between humans and machines. This transformation is driven by current trends in Human-Computer interaction design and perpetuated through digital media culture.

In the 1960s, the relationship between humans and AI was shaped by the idea of aspired resemblance between humans and machines. Machine intelligence referred to a machine imitating human cognitive skills such as chess playing or language comprehension. As I will argue in the talk, today, AI does not imitate human intelligence, neither does it replace human work. Rather, AI captures human cognitive, social and affective skills in hybrid human-machine apparatuses, which perform, as a whole, the resulting artificial intelligence. Contemporary machine learning systems thus rely on hidden forms of human participation orchestrated by digital media. This human participation is mostly unpaid and often not recognized as labor.

Relating to interface theory and critical media studies, I differentiate five types of “media technologies of capture” in AI apparatuses and analyze them as forms of power relations between humans and machines. Clickwork (e.g. Amazon Mechanical Turk) or Commercial Content Moderation are only two common forms of this kind of labor. Less well known forms include "social labor" on platforms such as Facebook, and "tracking and trapping" techniques of capture e.g. by Google Search. This talk is organized around examples to debunk the current hype of machine learning and discuss related forms of social control and discrimination of users.

Rainer Mühlhoff is a philosopher and mathematician and Professor of Ethics of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Osnabrück. His work focuses on ethics, social philosophy, and data protection in the context of digital media. In interdisciplinary collaborations, he brings together philosophy, media studies, and computer science to analyze the interplay of technology, power, and social change. More information: https://rainermuehlhoff.de/en/

The lecture series takes place as a hybrid event with on-site participation and online access. The zoom link for the lecture will be made available in good time via the SFB's mailing list. Guests can register with Damaris Lehmann by email. Send an email

What is driving a recent surge of interest in explainable AI (XAI) are technological advancements in machine learning affecting humans’ lives on the one hand but also  regulatory initiatives fostering transparency in algorithmic  decision-making on the other hand. Explainability is discussed as a solution to socio-technical challenges such as intelligent software providing incomprehensible decisions or big data enabling fast learning but becoming too complex to fully comprehend and judge its achievements. The vision is that with explainable AI, more insights  into the function, decisions, and usefulness of algorithms are expected.
  
  Yet, if an explanation is successful, it results in an understanding. Current XAI research is centering around solutions of how to explain and what could be a successful explanation leading to understanding. In the presentation, I will elaborate on a new approach that draws on two concepts known from learning and education: scaffolding and monitoring. Both are important resources for the social design of explainable AI systems: Whereas in current XAI research,  the addressee/explainee is mostly seen as a passive receiver, these concepts lead to a particular form of interaction to which both partners actively contribute. The assumption is that it will result in the explanation being tailored to a particular form  of understanding thus gaining on relevance.

Katharina J. Rohlfing received her Master’s in Linguistics, Philosophy, and Media Studies from Paderborn University, Germany, in 1997. As a member of the interdisciplinary Graduate Program “Task-Oriented Communication,”  she received her PhD in  Linguistics from Bielefeld University in 2002. In 2006, she became a  Dilthey Fellow (Volkswagen Foundation) and Head of the Emergentist Semantics Group at Bielefeld University’s Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC). Currently, she is professor of psycholinguistics at Paderborn University and speaker of the Transregional Research Center „Constructing explainability“, funded by the DFG. Her work is on multimodal dialogical coordination and learning with a strong interest in cognitive  modeling, developmental robotics, and HRI.

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3:00pm–4:00pm

Presentation: Tim Moritz Hector

(Dissertation Project: Voice Assistants in Talk-in-Interaction: Transformation and emergence of linguistic and cultural everyday-practices through acquisition of media with voice-user-interfaces)

Discussant: Tanja Ertl

4:00pm–5:00pm

Presentation: Max Kanderske

(Dissertation Project: Navigating the Noise: A praxeological examination of self-localizing interfaces)

Discussant: Sarah Rüller

The annual conference will focus on the connection between learning and digital media. The observability and practice of learning in diverse fields of research and the concepts of learning in different disciplines will be examined. The aim of the conference is to look at the cooperative production of “learning” as a media practice and data practice in its various aspects: from learning subjects and organizations to self-learning systems and artificial intelligence.

Responsible subprojects:
A03, A05, B04, B05, B08

Contact: karina.kirsten@uni-siegen.de

The lecture series takes place as a hybrid event with on-site participation and online access. The zoom link for the lecture will be made available in good time via the SFB's mailing list. Guests can register with Damaris Lehmann by email. Send an email

In our talk we unfold a theoretical framework behind algorithms of various forms of mobility that are technologically spoken based on geodata. From a technical perspective, algorithms can be seen as a sequence of codes that contain precise operations or procedures to solve a problem. Apart from simple queries such as navigation or movement patterns, due to an enormous increase in processing power in mobile, networked end user devices and a datafication of everyday behaviour, a multitude of other parameters can be considered . In our model we approach the massive social implications that come along with algorithms in everyday and educational settings, we outline a conception of the human being that comes along with that, which is mainly objectivating people and making them predictable, while, at the same time, places algorithms as seemingly deification or fetish. Thus, in algorithms, data and basic geographic data on physical positioning and movement is closely linked to a broader term of social mobility and consequent social implications.

Inga Gryl is professor for Primary Social and Science Education at the Institute for Geography, Universität Duisburg-Essen. Her research areas are digitalization in education, societal participation with geomedia, critical approaches in geography education, and innovativeness in schools.

Helena Atteneder is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Media Studies, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen. Her research focuses on geomedia as socio-technological and dialectical phenomena at the interface between spatial and media theory.

3:00pm–4:00pm

Presentation: Quejdane Sabbah

(Dissertation Project: When the telecommunication industry meets platform companies: Facebook Network Analytics and the new infrastructural dimension of platforms.)

Discussant: Yarden Skop

4:00pm–5:00pm

Presentation: Pip Hare

(Dissertation Project: Moving moving images: affective viewing across contexts and continents (WT))

Discussant: Regina Wuzella

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The lecture series takes place as a hybrid event with on-site participation and online access. The zoom link for the lecture will be made available in good time via the SFB's mailing list. Guests can register with Damaris Lehmann by email. Send an email

In the past, one could speak of a ‘world education market’, which consisted strongly of potential estimates and forecasts, but now we can see that a ‘global education industry’ has developed. The global tech industry like IBM, Google, Apple, Microsoft etc. are successful in the educational technology businesses proposing that the solution of a problematic educational system should obviously be in the hands of private sector technology companies with their entrepreneurial experience and business success. In this lecture we will discuss how commercial organizations are engaging in education, even if it means that they must change business models and practices. Ultimately, these education industries offer high expansion potential for investors. We will investigate what it means when these players re-invent education. 

Ben Williamson Ben (2017): Big Data in Education. The digital future of learning, policy and practice

Marcelo Parreira do Amaral et al. (ed.) (2019): Researching the Global Education Industry

Niesyto, Horst (2021): ‚Digitale Bildung‘ wird zu einer Einflugschneise für die IT-Wirtschaft.

Langfassung/Onlineversion: https://horst-niesyto.de/gesamtuebersicht-publikationen/ [Kurzfassung/Printversion: medien+erziehung, Heft 1/2021, S. 23-28].

Petra Missomelius, Assoc. Prof. PD Dr. is a Media Scholar in the Department of Media, Society and Communication at Innsbruck University. Dissertation at Marburg University, Habilitation thesis on Education and media culture. Her Research is focused on audio-visual online cultures (current: mourning and commemoration during the pandemic) and digital infrastructures in the context of work process innovation.

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3:00pm–4:00pm

Presentation: Sarah Rüller

(Dissertation Project: Being public under increasing and diminishing Infrastructures: Understanding Media Practices and Sense-Making of Technology in non-urban Areas in Palestine and Morocco)

Discussant: Niklas Strüver

4:00pm–5:00pm

Presentation: Julia Kurz

(Dissertation Project: tba)

Discussant: Benedikt Merkle

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This event is in english

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This event is in english

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The lecture series takes place as a hybrid event with on-site participation and online access. The zoom link for the lecture will be made available in good time via the SFB's mailing list. Guests can register with Damaris Lehmann by email. Send an email

When one documents the manufacture of algorithms using the analytical genre of laboratory ethnography – among other possible ones – one notices that many of them rely upon referential databases called “ground truths” that gather sets of input-data and their manually designed output-targets counterparts. One also quickly realizes that the collective processes leading to the definition of these ground-truth databases heavily impact on the nature of the algorithms they help to constitute, evaluate, and compare. In this talk, I will first discuss some of the whys and wherefores of these ground-truthing processes, with an emphasis on supervised and unsupervised learning for computer vision. Then, building upon the presented elements and the concept of "genuine option" developed by pragmatist philosopher William James, I will critically discuss the notion of bias and propose an alternative way to consider the morality of machine learning algorithms.

Florian Jaton is Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Lausanne, STS Lab. He studied Philosophy, Mathematics, Literature, and Political Sciences before receiving his PhD in Social Sciences at the University of Lausanne. His research interests are the sociology of algorithms, the philosophy of mathematics, and the history of computing. He is the author of The Constitution of Algorithms: Ground-Truthing, Programming, Formulating, published by MIT Press.

3:00pm–4:00pm

Presentation: Niklas Strüver

(Dissertation Project: Voice Assistants as sociotechnical phenomena: About infrastructures and platforms)

Discussant: Jason Chao

4:00pm–5:00pm

Presentation: Regina Wuzella

(Dissertation Project: Maßlose Gesten – Agency in the field of Robotic Manipulation)

Discussant: Sheree May Saßmannshausen

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In this era of upheaval and uncertainty, data dashboards have proliferated, promising clarifying oversight of everything from COVID infections and vaccinations, to the removal of white supremacist and colonialist statuary, to energy expenditures and climate change mitigation efforts. Dashboards crystallize states’, municipalities’, activists’, and corporations’ approaches to epistemological and affective governance by parceling the knowledge required for decision-making and calibrating stakeholders’ panic and pride in “progress.” Yet for all their promises of omniscient command, dashboards also manifest doubt and disorientation. In this talk we’ll examine a variety of recent dashboard and “control center” projects – both functioning and speculative examples – and consider how they reveal, perhaps inadvertently, the uncertainty and ambiguity underlying the data that illuminate their screens, the intelligence they cultivate, and the modes of governance that intelligence ostensibly inspires.

Shannon Mattern is a Professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research. Her writing and teaching focus on archives, libraries, and other media spaces; media infrastructures; spatial epistemologies; and mediated sensation and exhibition. She is the author of The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities; Deep Mapping the Media City; Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: 5000 Years of Urban Media, all published by University of Minnesota Press; and A City Is Not a Computer, published by Princeton University Press. She also contributes a regular long-form column about urban data and mediated infrastructures to Places Journal. In addition, she serves as president of the board of the Metropolitan New York Library Council and regularly collaborates on public design and interactive projects and exhibitions. You can find her at wordsinspace.net. 

In this era of upheaval and uncertainty, data dashboards have proliferated, promising clarifying oversight of everything from COVID infections and vaccinations, to the removal of white supremacist and colonialist statuary, to energy expenditures and climate change mitigation efforts. Dashboards crystallize states’, municipalities’, activists’, and corporations’ approaches to epistemological and affective governance by parceling the knowledge required for decision-making and calibrating stakeholders’ panic and pride in “progress.” Yet for all their promises of omniscient command, dashboards also manifest doubt and disorientation. In this talk we’ll examine a variety of recent dashboard and “control center” projects – both functioning and speculative examples – and consider how they reveal, perhaps inadvertently, the uncertainty and ambiguity underlying the data that illuminate their screens, the intelligence they cultivate, and the modes of governance that intelligence ostensibly inspires.

Shannon Mattern is a Professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research. Her writing and teaching focus on archives, libraries, and other media spaces; media infrastructures; spatial epistemologies; and mediated sensation and exhibition. She is the author of The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities; Deep Mapping the Media City; Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: 5000 Years of Urban Media, all published by University of Minnesota Press; and A City Is Not a Computer, published by Princeton University Press. She also contributes a regular long-form column about urban data and mediated infrastructures to Places Journal. In addition, she serves as president of the board of the Metropolitan New York Library Council and regularly collaborates on public design and interactive projects and exhibitions. You can find her at wordsinspace.net. 

The lecture series takes place as a hybrid event with on-site participation and online access. The zoom link for the lecture will be made available in good time via the SFB's mailing list. Guests can register with Damaris Lehmann by email. Send an email

The Manifesto for Teaching Online argues that “online courses are prone to cultures of surveillance”, and points to the ethical and pedagogical dimensions of visibility. The upheavals of the Covid-19 crisis have increased the influence of edtech imaginaries based on logics of surveillance and extraction, and new ways of thinking about and working with the future are urgently needed. A speculative orientation to digital education offers methods for envisioning or crafting futures or conditions which may not yet currently exist, to provoke new ways of thinking and to bring particular ideas or issues into focus. In the talk I will share examples of how speculative methods have been used to critically explore and reimagine aspects of surveillance cultures in higher education.

Dr Jen Ross is co-director of the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. She publishes and teaches on topics including education and learning futures, speculative methods, museum and gallery learning and engagement, surveillance cultures in education, the impact and pedagogy of MOOCs and open education, and student and teacher experiences of online distance learning.

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3:00pm–4:00pm

Presentation: Dmitri Presnov

(Dissertation Project: Anatomically integrated visualization of patient data)

Discussant: Quejdane Sabbah

4:00pm–5:00pm

Presentation: Sheree May Saßmannshausen

(Dissertation Project: Intermediary, multimodal and immersive infrastructures for digital citizen participation in urban and regional planning)

Discussant: Susanne Förster

This event is in English

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In this paper I draw from the practice theory and media anthropology literature, as well as from a range of empirical studies, including my own anthropological research in Malaysia and Spain, to discuss the effects of media-related practices in people’s social worlds. I argue that these social effects come in two main varieties – mediatising effects and worlding effects – and that this area is ripe for further media ethnographic work, so long as we overcome our customary aversion to the notion of media effects.

Keywords: media practices, media effects, social effects, practice theory, social change, media anthropology, media ethnography

John Postill gained a PhD in Anthropology from University College London in 2000. He specialises in the study of political communication, media practices and sociocultural change and to date has conducted fieldwork in Malaysia, Indonesia and Spain. He currently lectures at the School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne. His publications include The Rise of Nerd Politics (2018), Digital Ethnography (2016), Localizing the Internet (2011), Theorising Media and Practice (2010) and Media and Nation Building (2006). He is presently researching ‘woke’ politics and writing his first novel – a work of social science fiction titled Life of Piñas. He is also planning a book on political culture and historical agency in the digital era

3:00pm–4:00pm

Presentation: Daniela van Geenen

(Dissertation Project: Making sense of sensors as knowledge technologies: Critical data practice(s) in everyday sensor-enabled settings and situations)

Discussant: Dmitri Presnov

4:00pm–5:00pm

Presentation: Aynalem Misganaw

(Dissertation Project: tba)

Discussant: Daniela van Geenen

In this paper I draw from the practice theory and media anthropology literature, as well as from a range of empirical studies, including my own anthropological research in Malaysia and Spain, to discuss the effects of media-related practices in people’s social worlds. I argue that these social effects come in two main varieties – mediatising effects and worlding effects – and that this area is ripe for further media ethnographic work, so long as we overcome our customary aversion to the notion of media effects.

Keywords: media practices, media effects, social effects, practice theory, social change, media anthropology, media ethnography

John Postill gained a PhD in Anthropology from University College London in 2000. He specialises in the study of political communication, media practices and sociocultural change and to date has conducted fieldwork in Malaysia, Indonesia and Spain. He currently lectures at the School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne. His publications include The Rise of Nerd Politics (2018), Digital Ethnography (2016), Localizing the Internet (2011), Theorising Media and Practice (2010) and Media and Nation Building (2006). He is presently researching ‘woke’ politics and writing his first novel – a work of social science fiction titled Life of Piñas. He is also planning a book on political culture and historical agency in the digital era

The lecture series takes place as a hybrid event with on-site participation and online access. The zoom link for the lecture will be made available in good time via the SFB's mailing list. Guests can register with Damaris Lehmann by email. Send an email

What is feminist data inside of social networks, algorithms, and big data? How can we queer data, the archive, and the internet? How can a data set act as a form of protest, of a creation of bias mitigation? This talk looks at ways of intervention, from art, design, and technology that combat and challenge bias. How can we create data to be an act of protest against algorithms? Part of this talk will focus on Caroline's research and current art project, Feminist Data Set.

Feminist Data Set acts as a means to combat bias and introduce the possibility of data collection as a feminist practice, aiming to produce a slice of data to intervene in larger civic and private networks. Exploring its potential to disrupt larger systems by generating new forms of agency, her work asks: can data collection itself function as an artwork?

Caroline Sinders is a critical designer and artist. For the past few years, she has been examining the intersections of artificial intelligence, abuse, and politics in digital conversational spaces. 

She has worked with the United Nations, Amnesty International, IBM Watson, the Wikimedia Foundation and others. Sinders has held fellowships with the Harvard Kennedy School, Google's PAIR (People and Artificial Intelligence Research group), the Mozilla Foundation, the Weizenbaum Institute Pioneer Works, Eyebeam, Ars Electronica, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Sci Art Resonances program with the European Commission, and the International Center of Photography. 

Some of her research fellowships and funded research work has focused on dark patterns, community health, online harassment, AI inequity, and the labor and systems in AI and platforms. Currently, she is a fellow with Ars Electronica AI Lab with the Edinburgh Futures Institute.  Her work has been featured in the Tate Exchange in Tate Modern, Victoria and Albert Museum, MoMA PS1, LABoral, Wired, Slate, Quartz, the Channels Festival and others. Sinders holds a Masters from New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Wie unsicher Bestimmungen sind, was ein Medium ausmacht, ist spätestens seit den Anfängen der Digitalisierung offensichtlich geworden. Zuvor gesteckte Mediengrenzen, wie z. B. von Fotografie, Film und Fernsehen, scheinen im medialen Raum des Digitalen zu verschwimmen. Deswegen wird immer häufiger der Blick von den medialen Formen und ihrer Prägekraft hin zu den Medienpraktiken verschoben, also auf das, was Menschen mit Medien machen. Als methodisches Rezept wird dann eine Ethnographie verordnet, die vorschreibt, Akteure bei ihrem Tun zu beobachten oder über ihr Tun zu befragen. Die formanalytischen Bezugspunkte der Medienwissenschaft – ihre eigenen Kompetenzen und Praktiken – werden von solchen non-representational methodologies konsequent ausgeklammert. Dem möchten wir entgegenhalten, dass Medien – im Sinne einer praxeologisch gewandten Medienphilosophie – nicht weniger verlässlich über ihre Praktiken Auskunft geben als Akteure. Wenn wir uns das Ziel setzen, Medien darauf hin zu befragen, was sie von ihren eigenen Medienpraktiken wissen, dann gewinnt dadurch zugleich auch die Bestimmung des Medialen an Kontur und Konkretion.

Jens Ruchatz ist Professor für Medienwissenschaft mit dem Schwerpunkt Audiovisuelle Transferprozesse an der Philipps-Universität Marburg und stellvertretender Sprecher der DFG-Forschungsgruppe (FOR2288) „Journalliteratur: Formatbedingungen, visuelles Design, Rezeptionskulturen“ an den Universitäten Bochum, Marburg und Köln. Er leitet die Forschungsprojekte „Fragmentwanderungen im Medienvergleich: Fotografien in Zeitschrift und Buch im 20. Jahrhundert“ und „Bildförmige Bildkritik in Sozialen Medien. Explizites und implizites Theoretisieren des digitalen Bildes“. Er forscht unter anderem zu Fotografie in all ihren Materialitäten, zur Medialität der Zeitschrift, zu kulinarischen Medien und Fernsehserien.

Kevin Pauliks, M.A. ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter im DFG-Forschungsprojekt „Bildförmige Bildkritik in Sozialen Medien. Explizites und implizites Theoretisieren des digitalen Bildes“ im Rahmen des Schwerpunktprogramms „Das digitale Bild“ an der Philipps-Universität Marburg. Zuvor arbeitete er an der Bergischen Universität Wuppertal am Lehrstuhl für Allgemeine Soziologie. Von 2011 bis 2016 studierte er an der Philipps-Universität Marburg Medienwissenschaft und Soziologie. Er promoviert zu den Medienpraktiken von Internet-Memes in der Werbung.

3:00pm–4:00pm

Presentation: 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: Fernando van der Vlist

4:00pm–5:00pm

Presentation: Benedikt Merkle

(Dissertation Project: Regulation of the sensory. Flash-Animation as the aesthetics of object-oriented programming)

Discussant: Pip Hare

Wie unsicher Bestimmungen sind, was ein Medium ausmacht, ist spätestens seit den Anfängen der Digitalisierung offensichtlich geworden. Zuvor gesteckte Mediengrenzen, wie z. B. von Fotografie, Film und Fernsehen, scheinen im medialen Raum des Digitalen zu verschwimmen. Deswegen wird immer häufiger der Blick von den medialen Formen und ihrer Prägekraft hin zu den Medienpraktiken verschoben, also auf das, was Menschen mit Medien machen. Als methodisches Rezept wird dann eine Ethnographie verordnet, die vorschreibt, Akteure bei ihrem Tun zu beobachten oder über ihr Tun zu befragen. Die formanalytischen Bezugspunkte der Medienwissenschaft – ihre eigenen Kompetenzen und Praktiken – werden von solchen non-representational methodologies konsequent ausgeklammert. Dem möchten wir entgegenhalten, dass Medien – im Sinne einer praxeologisch gewandten Medienphilosophie – nicht weniger verlässlich über ihre Praktiken Auskunft geben als Akteure. Wenn wir uns das Ziel setzen, Medien darauf hin zu befragen, was sie von ihren eigenen Medienpraktiken wissen, dann gewinnt dadurch zugleich auch die Bestimmung des Medialen an Kontur und Konkretion.

Jens Ruchatz ist Professor für Medienwissenschaft mit dem Schwerpunkt Audiovisuelle Transferprozesse an der Philipps-Universität Marburg und stellvertretender Sprecher der DFG-Forschungsgruppe (FOR2288) „Journalliteratur: Formatbedingungen, visuelles Design, Rezeptionskulturen“ an den Universitäten Bochum, Marburg und Köln. Er leitet die Forschungsprojekte „Fragmentwanderungen im Medienvergleich: Fotografien in Zeitschrift und Buch im 20. Jahrhundert“ und „Bildförmige Bildkritik in Sozialen Medien. Explizites und implizites Theoretisieren des digitalen Bildes“. Er forscht unter anderem zu Fotografie in all ihren Materialitäten, zur Medialität der Zeitschrift, zu kulinarischen Medien und Fernsehserien.

Kevin Pauliks, M.A. ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter im DFG-Forschungsprojekt „Bildförmige Bildkritik in Sozialen Medien. Explizites und implizites Theoretisieren des digitalen Bildes“ im Rahmen des Schwerpunktprogramms „Das digitale Bild“ an der Philipps-Universität Marburg. Zuvor arbeitete er an der Bergischen Universität Wuppertal am Lehrstuhl für Allgemeine Soziologie. Von 2011 bis 2016 studierte er an der Philipps-Universität Marburg Medienwissenschaft und Soziologie. Er promoviert zu den Medienpraktiken von Internet-Memes in der Werbung.

The lecture series takes place as a hybrid event with on-site participation and online access. The zoom link for the lecture will be made available in good time via the SFB's mailing list. Guests can register with Damaris Lehmann by email. Send an email

This talk will offer a philosophical perspective on the future of deep learning. In the past decade, the successes of deep neural networks have brought the cognitive aspects of learning to the fore of artificial intelligence (AI) research. While the learning performance of artificial neural networks has been discussed in various ways, researchers tend to agree that this performance does not match that of human brains. The talk will consider how AI researchers are addressing the limitations and shortcomings of current state-of-the-art deep learning: it will focus on arguments claiming that more efficient, flexible and versatile deep learning can be achieved if and when these computational systems will learn to understand causal relations and cause-effect questions. The talk will address the issue of causality in AI and the concept of causation in philosophy to analyse how learning is linked to generalisation, reasoning, inference and to diverse modes of agency. 

M. Beatrice Fazi is Lecturer in Digital Humanities in the School of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex (United Kingdom). Her primary areas of expertise are the philosophy of computation, the philosophy of technology and the emerging field of media philosophy. Her research focuses on the ontologies and epistemologies produced by contemporary technoscience, particularly in relation to issues in artificial intelligence and computation. She has published extensively on the limits and potentialities of the computational method, on digital aesthetics and on the automation of thought. Her monograph Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics was published by Rowman & Littlefield International in 2018.

This event is in english

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