Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

« Older Entries

The technology and politics of evaluation

25 May 2011

Another exciting event from the laboratory of inSIS at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford:

How’s my feedback? The technology and politics of evaluation

Tuesday, 28 June 2011, 9:00-17:00

Saïd Business School, University of Oxford

There is hardly anything that is not being evaluated on the web these days. Books, dishwashers, lawyers, teachers, health services, ex-boyfriends, haircuts, prostitutes and websites are just some examples targeted by novel review, rating and ranking schemes.

Used in an increasing number of areas, these schemes facilitate public assessment by soliciting and aggregating feedback and distributing it as comments, ranks, scales and stories. So how are we to judge the effectiveness of these schemes? What modes of governance are implicated in their operation? What is it to evaluate the evaluators – and will this business ever end?

Speakers include: Malcolm Ashmore (Colombia/ Loughborough University), Andrew Balmer (University of Sheffield), Stefan Schwarzkopf (Copenhagen Business School), Ian Stronach (Liverpool John Moores University), Alex Wilkie (Goldsmiths, University of London), Steve Woolgar and Malte Ziewitz (University of Oxford).

For more information visit their website.

Tags:, ,
Posted in Conferences, Sociology, STS, Technology | Leave a Comment »

Phenomenological Approaches to Ethics and IT

26 April 2011

Lucas Introna (who was one of the panellists at our February 2008 Harman Review event) has just updated his entry on “Phenomenological Approaches to Ethics and Information Technology” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In it he also makes the point that there are some linkages between phenomenology and Latour:

Before proceeding it should be noted that the most recent work of Bruno Latour (2002, 2005) suggests that he has taken up many of the insights of phenomenology in his ongoing work. Thus, the later Latour (2002, 2005) can be seen as a bridging figure between the constructivist tradition and the phenomenological tradition (for more detailed arguments in this regard refer to Graham Harman’s (2009) book on Latour’s metaphysical ground).

Tags:
Posted in Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, Phenomenology, philosophy, Technology | Leave a Comment »

Digital Methods Summer School 2011

1 April 2011

See the following announcement:

Digital Methods Summer School 2011

Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, 27 June – 8 July 2011

After Cyberspace: Data-rich Media

The Digital Methods Summer School, now in its fifth edition, trains post-graduates, PhD candidates and motivated students and scholars in how to undertake Web research after cyberspace. The idea of “after cyberspace” is an invitation to think through and study the web without resort to the traditions informing “virtual” and “cyber” corporality, politics and identity. Rather the web, first with locative technology, later with language and national webs, and more recently with college and corporate networking software (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) continues to be grounded.

The application deadline is 8 April 2011. Candidates will be informed on 15 April 2011.

Tags:
Posted in Actor-network-theory, Conferences, STS, Technology | Leave a Comment »

Installing (Social) Order

17 March 2011

An interesting new blog focusing on the social studies of infrastructure, with a penchant for STS and ANT.

No doubt that computer science is the formative mode of building the models of contemporary social life. Interactional settings, inter- and transorganizational networks as well as the internal structures of macro-social phenomena like science, politics, economy, art and the media are ‘nerved’ with heterogenous, overlapping and sometimes antidromic tendencies to be formed by extremely distributed but nonetheless large scaled information infrastructure.

Posted in Actor-network-theory, information systems, STS, Technology | Leave a Comment »

Technology and the financial crisis

8 March 2011

The Information Systems and Innovation Group (ISIG) in the Department of Management at the London School of Economics will be hosting the 11th Social Study of ICT (SSIT) Workshop on 28 March 2011. Here is the detailed programme and you can register here.

This year’s SSIT workshop has invited leading academics and practitioners to open the discussion on the way information systems development has coped with the continuous innovation in the financial sector in the past decade; the resulting information infrastructures; and the pressures for new enterprise architectures and IS development practice at the aftermath of the crisis.

In this one-day conference, organized by the Information Systems and Innovation Group of the Department of Management, information system scholars, social scientists and CIOs from commercial and central banks, will present their views and lead a discussion on this topic.

SSIT11 will be followed by the 7th Social Study of IT Open Research Forum (SSIT-ORF7) on 29 and 30 March 2011, also at the LSE. SSIT-ORF is a unique venue for PhD students and junior researchers to present their work in progress on technology and information systems related topics in a constructive atmosphere.

Tags:, ,
Posted in Conferences, information systems, Sociology, STS, Technology | Leave a Comment »

Visualisation in the Age of Computerisation

25 February 2011

Visualisation in the Age of Computerisation

25-26 March 2011
Saïd Business School,
University of Oxford

The Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS) is organising a two-day conference on 25-26 March 2011 at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, with support from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), the Oxford e-Social Science project, Digital Social Research, eResearch South and C4D.

The theme of the conference is the permeation of science and research with computational seeing. How does computer mediated vision as a mode of engagement with information as well as with one another affect what we see (or think we see), and what we take ourselves to know?

Keynote speakers are:

*Peter Galison, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor and Director of Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University

*Michael Lynch, Professor, Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University

*Steve Woolgar, Professor of Marketing and Head of the the Science and Technology Studies research group with the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at Saïd Business School

Registration is free and now open. The programme and other details are available here.

Posted in Conferences, STS, Talks, Technology | Leave a Comment »

Philosophy and social computing

22 February 2011

Call for papers: abstract submission deadline extended to 28 February 2011 for the “Social Computing” track at the First International Conference of the International Association for Computing and Philosophy (IACAP) to take place at Aarhus University on 4-6 July 2011. Conference Theme: “The Computational Turn: Past, Presents, Futures?”

Up to six bursaries of $500.00 available. More info here.

The track addresses, but is not limited to, the following topics:

- Notions of the social used and/or enforced in social computing

- Notions of computing used in social computing

- Epistemological and ethical consequences of distributed modes of knowledge creation and distribution in social computing

- Philosophical implications of sociality in social networking sites (e.g. identity, privacy, social structures, etc.)

- How can trust in social computing be conceived? What are the differences and similarities between notions of trust e.g. in multi-agent systems, social networking sites, recommender systems, etc.? What are the differences and similarities between trust online and offline?

- Forming of individual existence in relation to social computing

- Epistemically and ethically responsible behavior with respect to social software and how it can be supported

- Computational models of social networks

- Consequences of social computing for extended social cognition

Posted in Call for papers, Conferences, information systems, philosophy, STS, Technology | Leave a Comment »

Philosophy & Technology first issue

1 February 2011

Table of contents of the first issue coming out in March (articles already available online):

Philosophy & Technology

  • Harmonising Physis and Techne: The Mediating Role of Philosophy
    • Luciano Floridi
  • Imaging Technology and the Philosophy of Causality
    • George Darby and Jon Williamson
  • Web of Data and Web of Entities: Identity and Reference in Interlinked Data in the Semantic Web
    • Paolo Bouquet, Heiko Stoermer and Massimiliano Vignolo
  • Dirty Hands, Speculative Minds, and Smart Machines
    • Diane P. Michelfelder
  • Bootstrapping Normativity
    • Graham White
  • Action Schemes: Questions and Suggestions
    • Evan Selinger, Jesús Aguilar and Kyle Powys Whyte
  • Why Theories of Causality Need Production: an Information Transmission Account
    • Phyllis McKay Illari
  • Husserl’s Galileo Needed a Telescope!
    • Don Ihde
  • Should Probabilistic Design Replace Safety Factors?
    • Neelke Doorn and Sven Ove Hansson
  • The Here and Now: Theory, Technology, and Actuality
    • Albert Borgmann
  • Acknowledging Substances: Looking at the Hidden Side of the Material World
    • Hans Peter Hahn and Jens Soentgen

Tags:
Posted in philosophy, Postphenomenology, Technology | 2 Comments »

Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Heidegger

20 January 2011

Søren Riis is one of those few people out there who have also been intrigued with the Heidegger-Latour relationship (see his paper (Riis, S. (2008). “The Symmetry between Bruno Latour and Martin Heidegger: The Technique of Turning a Police Officer into a Speed Bump.” Social Studies of Science 38(2): 285-301.) This time he has come out with a book on Heidegger and technology, though it does sound like there is also a Latourian twist to it.

Riis, Søren (2011) Zur Neubestimmung der Technik: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Martin Heidegger, Francke Verlag, Tübingen

Contrary to Heidegger, Riis advances a number of contentious arguments, which goes to show that biotechnology may indeed hold the “saving power” of modernity, complex modern machines are kinds of artworks, and ancient craftsmanship may be as dangerous as modern technology. Turning Heidegger’s arguments against himself, Riis demonstrates how Heidegger’s thinking in his principal work ”Being and Time” lays the foundation for a radical attack on human existence, which concerns ancient as well as modern technology.

In making the different arguments, emphasis is given to Heidegger’s hermeneutic tricks and techniques, which Heidegger utilizes in order to make his own thinking seem more coherent.

Hat tip OOP.

Tags:
Posted in Books, Bruno Latour, Martin Heidegger, Postphenomenology, Technology | Leave a Comment »

Beyond the PDF (and books and journal articles)

17 January 2011

I haven’t had the time to read through all the materials of the Beyond the PDF workshop but the whole thing is very intriguing. The main premise seems to be that the popular PDF format in which scientific articles tend to be published and disseminated these days is hindering the development of scientific knowledge. These guys for example argue that

Scientific publications are becoming more imaging and multimedia intensive. Although the publication format for scientific research papers has transitioned from printed magazines and journals to digital formats in recent years, the widely used PDF digital format lacks imaging support for high-resolution images and multimedia. Papers in PDF format available on the Internet have dramatically increased the accessibility of scientific information. However, communication of complete research data is not being realized due to the technical limitations of the PDF format.

Scientific papers in PDFs only tend to contain the final output of the research process, when contemporary technologies would already enable researchers to share many other artefacts involved in the scientific process:

What is a piece of science? That is up to a researcher but in general one can think of it as an experiment or all the things done to lead to a paper. During the course of doing a piece of science, a researcher will produce many different artifacts: data, slides, papers, experiment write-ups. For all these types of artifacts, different outlets (i.e. websites) are useful in sharing and communicating these artifacts.

The links section is also worth checking out. There is an interesting summary at the bottom of the page about the pros and cons of PDF.

 

Tags:,
Posted in Science Studies, Technology | Leave a Comment »

« Older Entries
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 66 other followers