Digital Cultures & Societies - 2023 Event Calendar

Today’s already record-high numbers of forcefully displaced peoples are expected to rise exponentially to over 1 billion by 2040. At the same time, new sets of digital technologies (from Artificial Intelligence, data collection, predictive analytics, surveillance capabilities, to biometric and digital identities) are growing rapidly and are becoming broadly available to perform a variety of functions, including foresight, strategic direction, recommendations and decision-making. The confluence of these two trends have started opening up a new ‘digital humanitarian space’.

For the UNHCR, the world’s lead organization for the protection refugees and Internally Displaced Peoples (IDPs), this rapidly evolving ‘digital humanitarian space’ offers new opportunities, challenges, risks, and dilemmas all at once.

This event, open to the public, explores how these new sets of technologies are transforming not just the world within which UNHCR is currently operating but UNHCR’s own work. Our guest is Mr Volker Schimmel, the Director of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) ‘Global Data Service’. The format is a moderated discussion followed by Q&A (and based on Chatham House rules).

Informants, Interviewees, Interlocutors: Working with Human Participants in Research About Digital Media & Cultures

This workshop will be facilitated by researchers in Digital Cultures & Societies who work with human participants to investigate and explore digital media and cultures. 

In the workshop researchers will explain how they do their work and navigate methodological, conceptual and ethical questions and challenges. Across the workshop we’ll explore approaches to fieldwork, interviews, and informant-led approaches like data donation, scrollback and go-along interviews. The workshop will also give participants the opportunity to pose their own ideas, projects and questions for discussion. 

We welcome any HASS PhD students (or other emerging HASS researchers) to participate in the workshop - from researchers using these research approaches in their own work to those who are just curious in finding out more about digital research practices and approaches. The workshop is also an opportunity to meet and hang out with other PhD students interested in digital cultures and societies across disciplines. 

As part of registering for the workshop we ask you to submit questions for an Ask Us Anything session. In this session you can ask us any questions you may have about digital research methods that involve participants. Answers to these questions will be prepared ahead of time and presented/answered anonymously on the day.

We’ll also send out a runsheet so you can reflect and prepare for the discussion beforehand.

This workshop is part of a series of digital research training facilitated by Digital Cultures & Societies. 

Introduction to Creative Futurism: Using Speculative Fiction Techniques to Express and Extend Research

In this one-day workshop run by award-winning speculative fiction writers, you will use storytelling techniques to imagine possibilities for your research over multiple timeframes and from several perspectives. No prior creative writing expertise is necessary. These easy-to-pick-up exercises will help you come to a deeper understanding of the uses and contexts of your research as well as imagining potential future threads and stress-testing your ideas. You will come away with a selection of tools and techniques for expanding an idea, a draft of a proto-story, potential ‘hooks’ to tell others about your research, and a list of questions that make you think about your research in new ways.

This event has been organised by Dr Helen Marshall — senior lecturer at UQ and acclaimed writer, editor and book historian. It will be facilitated by award-winning speculative fiction writers from UQ's WhatIF Lab, Joanne Anderton and Kathleen Jennings.

Lunch will be provided for attendees. Please register for this event by the 20th of November so we can cater to dietary requirements. 

Presenters:

Joanne Anderton is an award-winning writer of science fiction, fantasy and horror, children’s books and creative nonfiction. Her most recent collections of speculative fiction short stories are Inanimates: Tales of Everyday Fear and The Art of Broken Things. She's currently undertaking a creative writing PhD at the University of Queensland for which she’s writing a ‘speculative fiction memoir’, a collection of short stories and essays which interrogates the line between fact and fiction, real and imagined. You can find her at joanneanderton.com.

Kathleen Jennings is an award-winning writer and illustrator of Australian Gothic and fantasy fiction. Her novella Flyaway (2020) won a British Fantasy Award (the Sydney J Bounds Award) and was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award and the Courier-Mail People's Choice Book of the Year Award, among others. She has completed an MPhil in creative writing at the University of Queensland, focussing on Australian Gothic literature, and is currently a PhD candidate there, researching methods of creative observation and writing a novel. You can find her at tanaudel.wordpress.com.

During these sessions, a researcher presents a piece they are currently working on, another researcher offers a response, and this is followed by an open discussion among attendees.

These sessions are designed to facilitate connections within our research community and across faculties, for researchers to receive early feedback during the writing process, and/or for researchers to gain experience presenting in a supportive environment.

Email digitalcultures@hass.uq.edu.au to find out more and participate in these sessions. 

This event included several talks from researchers exploring digital platforms and the politics of labour, health, and regulation in the context of Asia followed by an open discussion chaired by DCS post-doctoral researcher Dr Andrew Dougall. 

Speakers: 
 

• A/Prof Pradip Thomas (UQ) – Introducing his new book Digital Platform Regulation: Exemplars, Approaches, and Solutions. 

• Dr Giang Nguyen (UQ) – Talk on her recent fieldwork that explores delivery drivers in Vietnam as a part of a broader project that looks at digital transactions in Asia. 

• Doctoral Candidate Nishtha Bharti (Indian Institute of Technology Delhi) – Digital Health Futures in India: Transformative Promises and Critical Realities 

• Dr Andrew Dougall (UQ) – Chair  

At this talk, visiting Professor Martin Volk explored some current uses of large language models in the Digital Humanities and speculated about future opportunities in this space. 

Respondents: 

• Dr Luke Munn (UQ)  

• Dr Christina Gowlett (UQ) 

• (Chair) Associate Professor Nicholas Carah (UQ) 

This two-day event brought together scholars from media and communication studies, migrant studies, business and management studies, and other disciplines to develop a rich portrait of our changing work conditions. Day 1 presented a series of interdisciplinary papers and provocations from the speakers listed below. Day 2 involved workshopping projects-in-progress through informal presentations and discussions. 

Speakers: 

• Assistant Professor Sun Ha-Hong (Simon Fraser University) – Predictions Without Futures: Labour Automation and the Extraction of Discretion 

• Dr. Lutfun Nahar Lata (University of Melbourne) – Good gig, bad gig: Gig economy, algorithmic control and migrant labour 

• Senior Lecturer Dr. Penny Williams (QUT) – The Rise of the Algorithmic Supervisor 

• Dr. Thao Phan and Dr. Jathan Sadowski (Monash) – Amazon Exceptionalism as a Theme in Techno-Political Thought 

• Dr. Andrea Alarcón (UQ) – Always Already Precarious: On-Demand Work in the Majority World 

• Associate Professor Elizabeth Stephens (UQ) – From Fatigue Studies to Burnout 

Co-badged by the Australian Death Studies Society, these talks focussed on the implications of combining technology with death and grief studies, and how this changes our death related practices as a society. These talks approached the issue from three different perspectives. Firstly, the practices of grieving on social media, and speculation about the future of digital grief. Secondly, the implications for death and succession law in the face of ever-evolving thanatechnology. And lastly, the digitisation of human specimens and the ethics at play as these human stories enter the digital world through 3D scanning, digital education, and more. 

Speakers: 

• PhD Candidate Katy McHugh (UQ) – Grieving in the Social Platform Machine 

• Dr Kate Falconer (UQ) – New Death Technologies and the Private Law of Death 

• Rebecca Lush – Digitising the Pathology Museum  

This event brought together researchers exploring participatory, critical, and qualitative approaches for research at the intersection of digital cultures, intimacies and our daily lives.  

Researchers asked: Which methodologies can be used to study digital cultures, intimacies and daily lives? And how might digital platforms or tools be employed in qualitative research to prompt rich insights? This seminar included discussions between researchers who have experience developing and using participatory and critical approaches to investigate lived experiences of digital cultures as well as those interested in experimenting with and developing new approaches to the digital. Researchers Dr Giselle Newton and Dr Amy Dobson presented research studies where they used interviews to explore our lived experiences and the questions of justice and politics that arise in our digital cultures.

The Digital Cultures and Societies Winter School is three days of workshops about digital research for humanities and social sciences. The Winter School is an opportunity to meet fellow HASS HDR students and form a cohort dedicated to the intersection of our research with digital research concepts and methods. There is no need to be an expert in digital methods, this is an introductory program that will teach you these methods, techniques, and digital project considerations and possibilities. In collaborative workshops you will have the opportunity to engage with researchers across humanities and social sciences whose work engages with the intersection between digital technologies and our personal and professional lives, our private and public selves. The Digital Cultures and Societies team will lead discussions about digital research approaches and workshops on developing your own research practices. You will be introduced to digital storytelling, digital project management and problem solving, text analysis and data considerations, and machine vision and image classification. This is a cohort-based event, with the same group attending every session and leading to long lasting relationships and collaboration opportunities.  Digital Cultures and Societies are relevant to all areas of Humanities and Social Sciences, so students from every school are strongly encouraged to express their interest in attending.

In today’s world, data hold extreme power, this issue is central to our understanding of how technologies impact society. Technological innovations mean that data now have many forms, from streaming to scraping to text-based to AI-generated; yet we don’t arm citizens with tools and dispositions to address the messy problems that impact their lives and rely on complex, non-traditional forms of data. Rather than limit access by first requiring a conventional mathematical background, we see new opportunities to empower young people and citizens to use and create data to advocate for their lives, while grappling with the ethical, equity and accessibility issues at play in an era of data science. In this symposium, we draw on recent international research to explore how data science education is seeking ways to promote an equitable society. 

This half-day symposium offers a series of presentations followed by a panel discussion. Session 1 will explore data science education in the context of promoting agentic citizenry. Session 2 will examine a collection of data science education case studies. The concluding panel will consider data science education with the aim to promote an equitable society. Morning tea and lunch will be provided.  
 
Speakers: 

• Professor Dani Ben-Zvi (University of Haifa, Israel) – Statistics and Science Education in the “Sleep - One Third of Life” School-Based Citizen Science Project 

• Professor Lucia Zapata-Cardona (Universidad de Antioquia, Colombia) – Statistical thinking for global citizenship 

• Professor Vince Geiger (ACU) – Discussant 

• Dr Kym Fry (Griffith) – Data-science in the primary classroom 

• Dr Carl Sherwood (UQ) – Contextualised storytelling: broadening the notion of data 

• Dr Tim Erickson (EEPS Media, USA) – Discussant 

• Professor Katie Makar (UQ) – Symposium Moderator 

The hyper-targeted advertising that emerged on digital platforms over the past two decades is now more productively understood as tuned advertising, a dynamic and unfolding process where ads are continuously algorithmically ‘optimised’ to users in real time. Following Rieder and Hofmann (2020), we aim to develop a framework for the ‘conditions for the practice of observing’ algorithmically-tuned digital advertising. We draw on our research across the Australian Ad Observatory and a multi-year research project on digital alcohol advertising. Across these projects we build customised tools to collect ads from platform ad libraries and through data donation from citizen scientists. We argue that the power of digital advertising is increasingly located in its capacity to tune. Platforms’ ad transparency tools draw our attention to ads, but we need to develop the capacity to observe the dynamic socio-technical process of tuning. We conceptualise and present visualisations of ‘tuned sequences’ of ads, as an alternative to ‘libraries’ of ads. We argue that developing the capacity to observe these tuned sequences better articulates the mode of observation required to develop the forms of public understanding accountability both civil society organisations and researchers are looking for.

(authors:  Nicholas Carah, Lauren Hayden, Maria-Gemma Brown, Daniel Angus, Aimee Brownbill, Kiah Hawker, Jane Tan, Amy Dobson, Brady Robards)

Works in Progress Session - Dr Giang Nguyen

Memory as reciprocal commensuration:  Searching for the socialist “bad life” in aspirational Vietnam

How does one remember a past that is fundamentally contradictory to the present? This article addresses the question by demonstrating the work of memory as reciprocal commensuration—the intensive social labour required to make the past and the present comparable, and the condition of bittersweetness that is inherent to this process. Drawing from twenty-eight life stories of Hanoi’s residents who claim that “life today is better than before,” this article traces the ways Hanoi people turn the “badness” of the socialist life into a ground of comparison against which “life today” was graded as “better.” This paper then unpacks how the materialistic quality of the “better life” was historically formed along the greater intensities of “Western” comfort, convenience, and abundance experienced and remembered by the extensive network of Vietnamese who travelled to Eastern Europe in the 1980s. Despite the confirmation of the “better life” as an escape from socialism, memory of Hanoi residents about life quality evinces a state of bittersweetness, in which laments about past miseries become folded in with nostalgia stories of progress, and stories of progress are entangled with lamentations of dissatisfaction. Thinking in terms of commensuration makes visible the ways Vietnamese people (dis)orient themselves out of socialism, thus demonstrates the navigational dimension of memory thanks to its inherent comparative nature, which has been largely overlooked in memory studies. 

Algorithmic technologies promise predictive certainty through the combination of quantification and statistical analysis, wrapped in a veneer of technical superiority (Hong 2022). Yet research has shown that forms of error, doubt, and unreason (Amoore 2020) are inseparable from algorithmic technologies and can be found at the very root of the emergence of the modern concept of the algorithm (Daston 2022), as well as cybernetics and other projects of data-driven rationalisation throughout the 20th century (Halpern 2015, Erickson et al. 2013). Unreason and irrationality thus need to be carefully excavated and understood within the concrete social impact of algorithmic and computational technologies (Dhaliwal 2022).

This workshop takes up those themes via the work of Sun-ha Hong on algorithmic prediction and techno futures. Sun-ha will open with an overview of recent research, followed by short “lightning talks” of work-in-progress by digital cultures researchers at UQ to kick-start discussions. Readings for this in-person workshop will be provided in advance.

Hello AI: An Introductory Workshop on Creative & Critical AI(HASS Research)

Unveiling Rural Women's Voices on Short-Video Platforms

Over the past two months, I conducted immersive fieldwork within rural regions surrounding my hometown in China. This fieldwork included in-depth interviews with ten rural women who actively participate as content creators on short-video platforms. Through these interviews, I endeavoured to gain insight into the intricacies of their engagement with short-video platforms, their everyday lives, and their unique perspectives on the world around them. To provide a more comprehensive view of these personal stories, I also made observations encompassing the broader contextual landscape involved, which covered the natural environment as well as the socio-political and economic milieu. In this WIP session, I would like to share some interesting stories and findings from my fieldwork trip and discuss my understandings of them. At this stage, there is no fully crystallised argument yet. Instead, I would like to engage in a substantive discussion with all of you, inviting diverse perspectives and insights that will be instrumental in shaping the trajectory of my research. 

Unique two-day 'Scenario Lab' 

Today’s already record-high numbers of forcefully displaced peoples are expected to rise exponentially to over 1 billion by 2040. At the same time, new sets of digital technologies (from Artificial Intelligence, data collection, predictive analytics, surveillance capabilities, to biometric and digital identities) are growing rapidly and are becoming broadly available to perform a variety of functions, including foresight, strategic direction, recommendations and decision-making. The confluence of these two trends have started opening up a new ‘digital humanitarian space’.

For the UNHCR, the world’s lead organization for the protection refugees and Internally Displaced Peoples (IDPs), this rapidly evolving ‘digital humanitarian space’ offers new opportunities, challenges, risks, and dilemmas all at once.

This event, open to the public, explores how these new sets of technologies are transforming not just the world within which UNHCR is currently operating but UNHCR’s own work. Our guest is Mr Volker Schimmel, the Director of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) ‘Global Data Service’. The format is a moderated discussion followed by Q&A (and based on Chatham House rules).