School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableSurveillance, Sexuality, Subversion: A Digital Poetics of Langston Hughes and James Baldwin’s FBI Files(Modern Language Association, 2021-01-07)
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ItemCybernetic Funeral Systems(IEEE, 2021)Using Postphenomenology (one of many methods informed by Wiener's cybernetics) as an analytical approach, this paper examines three examples of robot participation in, and mediation of, funerals. The analysis of robot mediation of funerals challenges the idea that death rituals are exclusively human performances and experiences, and instead repositions them as cybernetic systems of entanglement and impact. The paper begins with an introduction to the relevance of postphenomenological theory, then moves to the case of CARL, a robot that enables remote participation in funeral ceremonies. We argue that the [Human-Robot-Funeral] relation and its variants are both engaging and alienating, through revealing-concealing, magnification-reduction and a more generalised enabling-constraining. Technological mediation is also evident in the case of Pepper, a robot that has officiated at funerals as a Buddhist monk. We describe similarities and differences in the way CARL and Pepper manifest the [Human-Robot-Funeral] relation. The final example is AIBO, a companion robot that becomes the locus of a funeral ritual. This offers a radical case that directly challenges humans' self-proclaimed exceptional ontology.
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ItemIan Fairweather: Artist At Large(Commercial Press, 2019)
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ItemTHE AFTERLIVES OF MEMORIAL MATERIALS: DATA, HOAX, BOT(University of Illinois Libraries, 2019)The study of death online has often intersected with questions of trust, though such questions have evolved over time to not only include relations of trust between individuals and within online communities, but also issues of trust emerging through entanglements and interactions with the afterlives of memorial materials. Papers in this panel attend to the growing significance of the afterlives of digital data, the circulation of fake deaths, the care attached to memorial bots, and the intersection of robots and funerals. Over the last twenty years the study of death online developed into a diverse field of enquiry. Early literature addressed the emergence of webpages created as online memorials and focused on their function to commemorate individuals by extending memorial artefacts from physical to digital spaces for the bereaved to gather (De Vries and Rutherford, 2004; Roberts, 2004; Roberts and Vidal, 2000; Veale, 2004). The emergence of platforms for social networking in the mid-2000s broadened the scope of research to include increasingly knotted questions around the ethics, politics and economics of death online. Scholars began investigating issues like the performance of public mourning, our obligations to and management of the digital remains of the deceased, the affordances of platforms for sharing or trolling the dead, the extraction of value from the data of the deceased, and the ontology of entities that digitally persist (e.g. Brubaker and Callison-Burch, 2016; Gibbs et al., 2015; Karppi, 2013; Marwick and Ellison, 2012; Phillips, 2011; Stokes, 2012). Scaffolding this scholarship are a number of research networks, including the Death Online Research Network and the DeathTech Research Network, who encourage international collaboration and conversation around the study of death and digital media, including supporting this AoIR panel. This panel contributes to the growing field of research on death and digital media, and in particular poses challenges to focus on the commemoration of humans to encompass broader issues around the data and materiality of digital death. Digital residues of the deceased persist within and circulate through online spaces, enrolling users into new configurations of posthumous dependence on platforms, whilst at the same time digital afterlives now intersect with new technologies to create emergent forms of agency such as chatbots and robots that extend beyond the human, demanding to be considered within the sphere of digital memorialisation. Questions of trust emerge in this panel through various kinds of relationality formed with and through digital remains. These extend from relations of trust in the digital legacies now archived within platform architectures and how we might curate conversations differently around our personal data; to the breaking of trust in the internet when creating or sharing a hoax death; to the trust involved in making and caring for a posthumous bot; to the trust granted to robots to perform funerary rites. It is anticipated that this panel will not only appeal to scholars interested in the area of death and digital media, but also engage with broader scholarly communities in which questions of death now arise in larger debates around data, materiality, and governance on and of the internet. References Brubaker, J. R. and Callison-Burch, V. (2016) Legacy Contact: Designing and Implementing Post-mortem Stewardship at Facebook. Paper presented at CHI Workshop on Human Factors in Computer Systems, San Jose California. de Vries, B. and Rutherford, J. (2004) Memorializing Loved Ones on the World Wide Web. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 49(1), 5-26. Gibbs, M., Meese, J., Arnold, M., Nansen, B., and Carter, M. (2015) #Funeral and Instagram: Death, Social Media and Platform Vernacular. Information Communication and Society, 18(3): 255-268. Karppi, T. (2013) Death proof: on the biopolitics and noopolitics of memorializing dead Facebook users. Culture Machine, 14, 1-20. Marwick, A. and Ellison, N. (2012) “There Isn’t Wifi in Heaven!” Negotiating Visibility on Facebook Memorial Pages. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 56(3), 378–400. Phillips, W. (2011) LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to Grief Online. First Monday 16(12). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org Roberts, P. (2004) The Living and the Dead: Community in the Virtual Cemetery. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 49(1), 57-76. Stokes, P. (2012) Ghosts in the Machine: Do the Dead Live on in Facebook? Philosophy and Technology, 25(3), 363-379. Veale, K. (2004) Online Memorialisation: The Web as a Collective Memorial Landscape For Remembering The Dead. The Fibreculture Journal, 3. Retrieved from http://three.fibreculturejournal.org
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ItemNo Preview AvailableMaking Sense of Emotion-Sensing: Workshop on Quantifying Human Emotions(ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY, 2021)
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ItemStitching together lacquer cabinets(The Commercial Press, 2019)
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ItemThe Philosopher’s Stone: Art and Nature in Eighteenth-century European Porcelain Production(Bononia University Press, 2021)
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ItemBeyond a binary of (non)racist tweets: A four-dimensional categorical detection and analysis of racist and xenophobic opinions on Twitter in early Covid-19(IEEE, 2021-12-15)Transcending the binary categorization of racist and xenophobic texts, this research takes cues from social science theories to develop a four-dimensional category for racism and xenophobia detection, namely stigmatization, offensiveness, blame, and exclusion. With the aid of deep learning techniques, this categorical detection enables insights into the nuances of emergent topics reflected in racist and xenophobic expression on Twitter. Moreover, a stage wise analysis is applied to capture the dynamic changes of the topics across the stages of early development of Covid-19 from a domestic epidemic to an international public health emergency, and later to a global pandemic. The main contributions of this research include, first the methodological advancement. By bridging the state-of-the-art computational methods with social science perspective, this research provides a meaningful approach for future research to gain insight into the underlying subtlety of racist and xenophobic discussion on digital platforms. Second, by enabling a more accurate comprehension and even prediction of public opinions and actions, this research paves the way for the enactment of effective intervention policies to combat racist crimes and social exclusion under Covid-19.
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ItemFalse Face Must Hide What the False Heart Doth Know: The Literary Face in the Age of AI(ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY, 2021)This position paper examines a range of technological and algorithmic issues through the lens of literary and cultural theory about the face, in particular the ways in which emotion, expression and gesture are conveyed in literary texts. In doing this, it canvasses some of the primary aims and theoretical contexts of a new ARC project, Literature and the Face: A Critical History, which draws on literary, philosophical and visual traditions to generate comprehensive new knowledge about changing textual discourse about the face.
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ItemPrivatising East Germany: Re-unification and the Politics of Real Estate(Ex-Embassy, 2018)‘In our time,’ Fredric Jameson wrote in a 2015 essay, ‘all politics is about real estate.’ Jameson’s clear-eyed conclusion makes immediate sense, read from within the embassy – a patch handed to the Australian state, then back to the GDR, then to the Federal Republic of Germany (via the Treuhand, as explained below), then to private owners, real estate developers and jobbing artists. Jameson goes on to list the varieties of this politics of real estate, which reaches ‘from the loftiest statecraft to the most petty manoeuvring around local advantage. Postmodern politics is essentially a matter of land grabs, on a local as well as global scale. Whether you think of … Palestine or of gentrification and zoning in American small towns, it is that peculiar and imaginary thing called private property in land … at stake.’ Within capitalism, he continues, ‘the land is not only an object of struggle between the classes, between rich and poor; it defines their very existence and the separation between them. Capitalism began with enclosure and with the occupation of the Aztec and Inca empires; and it is ending with foreclosure and dispossession, with homelessness on the individual as well as the collective level, and with the unemployment dictated by austerity and outsourcing, the abandonment of factories and rustbelts.’