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Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 629. Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London Hosted by King's Digital Lab www.dhhumanist.org Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org [1] From: Anne KaunSubject: Machine Intelligences in Context: Beyond the Technological Sublime ***Special Issue of Culture Machine *** (86) [2] From: Jennifer Edmond Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.626: pubs: the science of stories (59) --[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: 2020-02-26 07:04:54+00:00 From: Anne Kaun Subject: Machine Intelligences in Context: Beyond the Technological Sublime ***Special Issue of Culture Machine *** Special Issue of Culture Machine Machine Intelligences in Context: Beyond the Technological Sublime Edited by Peter Jakobsson, Anne Kaun & Fredrik Stiernstedt We are seeking contributions for a special issue of Culture Machine (https://culturemachine.net/about/) – an international open-access journal of culture and theory – exploring Machine Intelligences in Context. Culture Machine is a series of experiments in culture and theory. Its aim is to seek out and promote scholarly work that engages provocatively with contemporary technical objects, processes and imaginaries from the North and South. Building on its open ended, non-instrumental, and exploratory approach to critical theory, Culture Machine calls for creative scholarship and research that contests globalizing technical narratives and their environmental logics of extraction. This special issue is a long overdue confrontation with the hype surrounding artificial intelligence. The supposed blessings that AI will bestow upon datafied societies, as well as the associated dangers, are now well-known both to the academic specialist and to the general public. Representatives from the tech sector and the world of politics claim that the fourth industrial revolution will be powered by AI and that AI will eventually become ubiquitous within politics, industry, culture and in everyday life. The impulse behind this special issue is to interrogate these prophesies a bit closer and to get a look behind the shiny surfaces of these new, often unseen technologies. Because it does seem that what AI actually promises, and most of all, what it actually delivers, is neither found in the realm of the fantastic nor the uncanny, and a lot of it is not even particularly new, intelligent or artificial. The task of this special issue is thus to provide a counter-narrative to the dominant accounts of AI. It is not a matter of debunking AI, of unmasking the ideological interests behind it or revealing its dirty algorithmic secrets, but of putting AI in its critical contexts beyond the technological sublime – ie. the myths surrounding current technological developments that are meant to inspire both awe and fantasies of control and mastery. By combining phenomena that do not normally go together, such as AI and intersectionality, this special issue seeks to un-familiarize the familiar and to make unexpected connections, while also exploring potential critical and more just futures. One question that seems particularly pertinent to ask is of the relations, substitutions and combinations of different forms of intelligence, both human and more than human, and to explore how these come together in different contexts. Contributions that employ critical perspectives from either the social sciences or the humanities are welcome, but we also invite and encourage experimental and transdisciplinary approaches, including contributions from the information sciences, software studies, and articles focused on case studies of AI with stakes for Latin America, Asia, and Africa. It is time to move past an understanding of AI that borders towards viewing it as a technological sublime. In order to do so we should analyse it as a broad phenomenon that questions the integration of machinic forms of intelligence in lived settings, particularly across the relations it is generating in the Global South. We welcome proposals that address, build upon and expand the following topics: * Critical interrogations of definitions and conceptualizations of intelligence(s) * Pluralities of machine intelligences * Sensory capacities and AI * The biopolitics and geopolitics of AI * Sex, gender and AI * Race and AI * Critical interrogations of AI narratives * Critical perspectives on AI sited in the Global South * Progressive regulation of AI Please submit a 500-word abstract and 2 page CV to peter.jakobsson@sh.se by 1 March 2020 Timeline: Submission of abstracts: 1 March 2020 Notification of acceptance: 20 March 2020 Submission of full papers: 1 September 2020 Peer Review: 15 November 2020 Revision: 15 December 2020 Publication: January 2021 --[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: 2020-02-25 11:43:50+00:00 From: Jennifer Edmond Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.626: pubs: the science of stories Dear Willard, PLOS ONE editorial policy dictates that only papers based on new empirical research can be accepted, for any collection, on any theme. To my mind, this means that an interesting idea for a themed collection was more or less designed to exclude or at least marginalise humanities perspectives. Given the centrality of many humanities disciplines (which do not have a strong empirical tradition) to the understanding of stories, this was, at best, predestined to be a missed opportunity. I think the work in the collection may be of good quality, but within somewhat narrow confines, and hardly the most we can say about the science of stories. To my mind, a sad example of how concrete barriers to interdisciplinarity can limit research and skew perspectives. Best, Jennifer Edmond Trinity College Dublin On 24/02/2020, 10:04, "Humanist" wrote: Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 626. Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London Hosted by King's Digital Lab www.dhhumanist.org Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org Date: 2020-02-23 21:27:20+00:00 From: Willard McCarty Subject: the science of stories Public Library of Science (PLOS) PLOS ONE Collection: Science of Stories https://collections.plos.org/science-of-stories Stories have the power to shape our identities and worldviews. They can be factual or fictional, text-based or visual and can take many forms—from novels and non-fiction to conspiracy theories, rumors and disinformation. This Collection includes primary research papers that propose innovative, data-driven approaches to understanding stories and their impact, on such topics as the nature of narrative and narrative thinking, methods to extract stories from datasets and datasets from stories, the role of narrative in science communication, and the transformative power of stories. [Critical commentary on this collection most welcome, at least on Humanist. --WM] -- Willard McCarty (www.mccarty.org.uk/), Professor emeritus, Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London; Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (www.tandfonline.com/loi/yisr20) and Humanist (www.dhhumanist.org) _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted List posts to: humanist@dhhumanist.org List info and archives at at: http://dhhumanist.org Listmember interface at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted/ Subscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/membership_form.php
Editor: Willard McCarty (King's College London, U.K.; Western Sydney University, Australia)
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