Research

How can algorithmic decision-making systems be developed that are responsible, ethical and inclusive?

Automated decision-making systems transform social, economic and cultural life. They also transform how cultural archives are constructed, used and controlled. Automation raises significant questions for the organisation of industries and labour, policy approaches and regulatory frameworks, fairness and accountability. We work across disciplines and institutions to develop responsible, ethical, and inclusive approaches to automated decision-making across media, health, and social services.

Researchers

Nicholas Carah
Allison Fish
Nicole Gillespie
Paul Henman
Sebastian Kaempf
Greg Marston
Lyndal Sleep
Rose Stambe

Projects and Initiatives

UQ is home to a node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society.

Events

For all future and past events, please visit the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society Events page.

Digital platforms are rapidly transforming traditional media, reframing interpersonal mediated communication, and changing the rules of the game for everything from retail to politics, religion to regulation, and evaluation to advertising. How do these platforms, which include Facebook, Twitter, and eBay, revolutionise our interactions and filter our daily routines through technology? This theme interrogates urgent social, political, and economic issues raised by platforms, and their potential implications.

• Adrian Athique
• Katie Brennan
• Bernadette Cochrane
• Allison Fish
• Katharine Gelber
• Paul Henman
• Jonah Rimer
• Kirril Shields
• Pradip Thomas

Events

Working Group
The Platform Societies working group meets in the School of Communication and Arts. Contact (digitalcultures@hass.uq.edu.au) to join the group. 

From 2018 to 2020, the School of Communication and Arts led the Platform Media strategic research initiative. The initiative explored the centrality of digital platforms to media industries, cultures, and public life. View videos of talks held as part of the initiative here.

Digital Transactions in Asia IV - 2022 Conference
In 2022, the Digital Transactions in Asia IV Conference (10-11 February) will include panels of presenters from across Asia and Australia along with workshop sessions. Co-hosted by the School of Communication and Arts (UQ), the Conference will be livestreamed via Zoom from partner institutions Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and IIT Delhi, New Delhi. Following the format of previous events, presenters are invited to attend virtual workshop sessions on critical methodological, theoretical, and logistical issues for addressing the rise of Digital Transactions in Asia.

Digital Transactions in India: Platforms, Markets & Users
In 2021, members of the Digital Cultures & Societies along with the Centre for Policy Futures and the School of Communication and Arts brought together leading figures of India’s Fintech in conversation with Australian scholars focusing their research on digital transactions in India and the wider international significance of India’s digital agenda.

Computational Language and Media explores the use of digital methods to assemble, understand, critique, and expand collections of social and cultural data. What are the functions of these methods, and what are their possible uses? How can potential biases be mitigated? In this theme, we develop digital collections of cultural data that holds national significance, making these collections available to researchers, and create novel techniques for analysing and visualising them.

Researchers

• Katie Brennan
• Peter Crosthwaite
• Michael Haugh
• Erich Round
• Martin Schweinberger

Projects and Initiatives

Language Technology and Data Analysis Laboratory (LADAL)
LADAL (pronouced lah’dahl) is collaborative research support infrastructure for computational humanities established and maintained by the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Queensland. LADAL provides comprehensive resources for language data processing, visualisation, statistical modelling, and text analytics as well as offering guidance on language technology, language data science, and digital research tools.

The resources produced by LADAL range from introductory quantitative research to practical programming tutorials for humanities scholars, data visualisation and advanced statistical modelling guides. This includes machine learning and recently-introduced classification and prediction methods. LADAL also showcases studies on computational lexicography, acoustic analyses of speech, and literary stylistics.

LADAL is currently leading two national collaborative research infrastructure projects supported by funding from ARDC.

Australian Text Analytics Platform Project
The University of Queensland, in collaboration with AARNet and the University of Sydney, are leading the establishment of national research infrastructure to support text analytics in a project co-funded through the ARDC Platforms Program ($759,000). There is currently a significant bottleneck in disciplines that rely on text data (written, spoken, signed, multimodal), both with respect to the transformation of data into machine-readable forms, as much of the raw data is unstructured (i.e. text data processing), and the use of tools for text data analysis and visualisation (i.e. text data mining), including extracting and classifying important social and cultural information from those texts. The Australian Text Analytics Platform (ATAP) will bring together users and providers of text analytics in an integrated, collaborative cloud-based environment in which Australian researchers can work with either their own or existing text data collections and access resources for self-paced professional development in using text analytics.

Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA) Data Partnerships Project
The University of Queensland, in collaboration with AIATSIS, ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, ANU, Monash University, and University of Melbourne, are leading the establishment of national research infrastructure to support research on languages in Australia and its regions in a project co-funded through the ARDC Data Partnerships Program ($500,000). Large collections of language data have been amassed in Australia, but many remain underutilised or at-risk. These collections include intangible cultural heritage (the languages of some of the world's longest continuous cultures) in one of the world's most linguistically diverse regions. The Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA) will be a sustainable, long-term repository for ingesting and curating existing language data collections of national significance. This project will open up the social and economic possibilities of Australia's rich linguistic heritage and lay the foundation for the establishment of a broader HASS (Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences) Research Data Commons.

See ARDC spotlight on the Language Data Commons of Australia.

Case Studies

Analysing discourse around COVID-19 in the Australian Twittersphere: A real-time corpus-based analysis
Public discourse around COVID-19 on Twitter and other social media platforms provides useful insights into public concerns and responses to the pandemic. However, acknowledging that public discourse around COVID-19 is multi-faceted and evolves over time poses both analytical and ontological challenges. Studies that use text-mining approaches to analyse responses to major events commonly treat public discourse on social media as an undifferentiated whole, without systematically examining the extent to which that discourse consists of distinct sub-discourses or which phases characterise its development. They also confound structured behavioural data (i.e. tagging) with unstructured user-generated data (i.e. content of tweets) in their sampling methods. This project demonstrates how one might go about addressing these sets of challenges by combining corpus linguistic methods with a data-driven text-mining approach to gain a better understanding of how the public discourse around COVID-19 developed over time and what topics combine to form this discourse in the Australian Twittersphere over a period of nearly four months. By combining text-mining and corpus linguistics, this study exemplifies how both approaches can complement each other productively.