The Culture of Surveillance

18 February 2019 4:00pm5:00pm
David Lyon presents key arguments from his most recent book The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a way of life. In this book he examines how surveillance is not only something ‘done to us’ – it is something we do in everyday life. He focuses on our varied, mundane experiences of surveillance, insisting that it is time to stop using Orwellian metaphors and find ones suited to twenty-first-century surveillance. Lyon argues that the culture of surveillance may help to domesticate and naturalise surveillance of unwelcome kinds, and considers which kinds of surveillance might be fostered for the common good and human flourishing.

2018 Bodies, Devices and Platforms Symposium

27 November 2018 9:30am4:00pm
This one day symposium looks across a range of disciplines to consider the coming together of the body with digital devices and media platforms. In this formulation, the body is tracked, networked, coded, monitored and represented on a range of digital media platforms. This involves a making available of the body to the algorithmic and participatory logics of digital media platforms and an entangling of its experiences with these architectures. The networked body is explored as fundamental to understandings of both the body and the digital economy. Presenters: Elizabeth Stephens, Gavin J.D. Smith, Lisa Bode, Shanti Sumartojo, and Sarah Pink.
VIDEO AVAILABLE

Vanguard Theatre Festival

24 October 2018 7:30pm26 October 2018 11:00pm
New Directors, New Plays, New Work
Three nights of new theatre

2018 WiP Conference - Monsters: What have we created?

25 September 2018 9:30am26 September 2018 8:00pm

2018 Lloyd Davis Memorial Public Lecture: Shakespeare and Statistics

12 September 2018 6:00pm7:30pm
Shakespeare and statistics is not an obvious pairing, but digital texts of his plays and poems are now widely available, and scholars are getting used to analysing them with computers.

Tastemaking in Post-digital Literary Culture: The Role of Book Blogs

31 August 2018 3:00pm4:00pm
This presentation considers book blogs as shared expressions of readers' aesthetic conduct across print and digital formats, connected to the publishing industry (including through self-publishing) while also aligned with recreation and pleasure. To tease out some of the distinctions within book blogging, I describe two contrasting networks: highbrow literary blogs, and romance fiction blogs. While new media enables increased participation of readers in book culture, this participation is stratified into taste-based groups, which are themselves further stratified by hierarchy as bloggers accumulate a specific kind of ‘readerly capital’. Presenter: Beth Driscoll.
VIDEO AVAILABLE

Hey Siri! How should I title my talk?

24 August 2018 3:00pm4:00pm
Despite being of utmost importance for interpreting speech, most commercial conversation bots and speech analysis systems ignore the wider pragmatics of talk. Pitch, pause, intensity, gaze, and other important modalities are discarded by bots, which also refrain from interrupting or talking over their human counterpart, despite its equally important role in natural conversation. In this talk I will look at recent trends towards the inclusion of pragmatics in bot technology, including some of our own original analytic tools for analysis of pitch, pause and intensity in conversation. Presenter: Dan Angus.
VIDEO AVAILABLE

2018 S.W. Brooks Public Lecture - On Political Performance Art and Rob Fordian Performatives

22 August 2018 6:00pm7:30pm
Highly performative and provocative reign of Toronto mayor Rob Ford, a figure who raised important questions about the boundaries between public and private life, about the constant demand for self-exposure on a highly public world stage

2018 George Watson Public Lecture ~ Host Community Acculturation Orientations, Ethnic Minority Communication, and Perceptions Toward Ethnic Minorities

17 August 2018 3:00pm4:00pm
Two studies on relationship among acculturation orientations of Chinese Hongkongers, their perceptions toward South/South-East Asian minority members, and Chinese cultural value orientations as well as intercultural communication competence.

The Deep History of the Platform

16 August 2018 9:00am
This workshop stresses the important ways in which contemporary Platform Media and their associated economic forms are connected with, extensions and modifications of previous arrangements in communication and media infrastructures, logistics and legal treatment. The workshop will trace the ways in which various aspects of platformisation are part of longer histories and connected to previous attempts to shape media as infrastructures under varying degrees of corporate control. Presenters: Vibodh Parthasarathi, Julian Thomas, Ramon Lobato, Dan Angus, Nic Carah, Tom O’Regan, Allison Fish, Barbora Jedlickova, and Andrew Ventimiglia.

Digital Emporiums: Indian Platform Capitalism

13 August 2018 9:30am4:00pm
This one day symposium will examine the ways in which the growing platformisation of not just the media but business and governmental operations are occurring in India. With India the second largest country in the world by population and likely to overtake China as the largest in the next twenty years India’s experience of and development of its platform economy is likely to become increasingly central to the global digital economy. Presenters: Vibodh Parthasarathi, Shishir Jha, Scott Fitzgerald, Pradip Thomas, and Adrian Athique.

Researching Media Platforms: A Research Methods Conversation

10 August 2018 9:30am11:00am
In this roundtable, presenter Angela Wu will step participants through a number of her Platform media projects and the mixed methods she deployed in them. Her methodologies draw from media studies, science and technology studies, cultural sociology, and network science. She has deployed these with respect to research on (1) data analytics and algorithmic cultures, (2) web use and digital infrastructures, and (3) information technology, politics, in post-reform China.

Algorithmic cultural recommendation: the coded gaze and Google’s face match up

3 August 2018 3:00pm4:00pm
Using Google’s face match as a case study it argues that the extension of cultural access to media architectures while opening a new space for sharing can obscure the embedding of objects within digital economies and logics. It puts forward the notion of algorithmic cultural recommendation and argues the need to reimage the outsourcing of curatorial practices to new forms of algorithmic mediation. Presenter: Caroline Wilson-Barnao.
VIDEO AVAILABLE

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