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 Kaun 
           Subject: 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)



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