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Students:
[Student Bios and
Project
Descriptions]
[Project Clusters]
Student
Bios and Project
Descriptions:
 Richard Arias
Hernandez,
PhD Student
Science & Technology Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy, NY, USA
[bio]
Project
Description
IT policy
analysis from a STS post-colonial perspective addresses a
macro/structural perspective that informs citizens and policy-makers in
Colombia to advance the political debate on IT policy beyond budget
considerations towards societal and
political implications. This topic promotes an intelligent
policy-making process that demands lay-people and interest groups
involvement in designing IT policies to revitalize democracy and to
include communities of practice in political life. This research
deconstructs the current dominant discourse that relates IT to
development, constantly promoted and repeated as mantra by multilateral
banks, international institutions, technocrats and Colombian
government. The current questions that guide the research are: How and why has IT
entered into the discourse of development as an unproblematic black
box?, How and why has IT been inscribed into policies for development
in Colombia?, How social structures and knowledge has been produced in
Colombia to sustain technocracy in IT agencies and to withdraw
citizens, parties and interest groups from political debate? Why the
narrative IT-development maintains itself and becomes stronger even in
front of counter-evidence?
|
 Kirsten
Boehner,
PhD Student
Human-Computer Interaction Group, Cornell University
Ithaca, NY, USA
[bio]
Project
Description
At the Culturally
Embedded Computing Group, led by
professor Phoebe Sengers, and part of Cornell’s Information
Science Program and Science & Technology Studies Department we
try to incorporate the alternative approaches as we analyze, design,
build, and evaluate information technology in a cultural context. As
part of our Critical Technical Practice (to use Phil Agre’s
term) we integrate technical system-building with cultural,
philosophical, and critical reflection on technical practice. We seek
to elucidate the ways in which technologies reflect and perpetuate
unconscious cultural assumptions, and accordingly we design, build, and
test new computing devices that reflect alternative possibilities. In
this workshop we want to further explore all these concepts, and focus
on the role of ambiguity
in design and its evaluation. We believe that ambiguity, which
ostensibly seems far removed from engineering practice, plays a
significant part of human experience and also stands in direct contrast
to the common strategies of reductionism and representation. Can we
reconcile ambiguity with technical practice and find a place for it
within technology? How does ambiguity change our understanding of
virtues like openness, autonomy, accountability, privacy, authority and
expertise? What decides the priorities of one over the other? What is
the role of narrative strategies such as defamiliarization,
exaggeration, and ambiguity in design and in shaping the way we
conceive of technology? Finally, how do we evaluate uses of ambiguity
if ambiguity defies codification and therefore operationalization? We
believe that as emotive, social, and spiritual beings, people
continuously sense and respond to technology in complex ways. We want
to explore how technology alters or even augments this practice without
reducing its complexity and non-formalism.
|
 Jericho Burg,
PhD Student
Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego
San Diego, CA, USA
[bio]
Project Description
My dissertation examines how different understandings of famine become
embedded in famine early warning systems, and how this shapes
humanitarian efforts to mitigate and prevent famine by enabling certain
kinds of responses and precluding others. Famine early
warning
systems – large-scale information systems combining climate,
agricultural, market and public health data – have become a
major
focus in the campaign against famine, incorporating database, remote
sensing, and information technologies with on-the-ground data
collection. Given what is at stake in the work of these systems
–
people’s lives – examining what their designs omit
is as
important as examining what they include. One thing they omit is the
experiences of famine of the communities they identify as
famine-affected. In fact, famine experts often know little about what
famine-affected people know about famine. Ethnographic studies suggest
that those who experience famine conceptualize it quite differently
from early warning experts and that their knowledge of famine is quite
different from the understandings early warning systems provide. While
my research so far has also excluded the understandings of
famine-affected people in favor of those of early warning experts, I am
interested in how this exclusion occurs in early warning system design
and operation, and its effects. This is the first step in redesigning
the process of early warning system design to incorporate the
participation of famine-affected people as experts. The study is based
on ten months of participant observation, interviewing and archival
data collection among different organizations involved in famine early
warning in Ethiopia, as well as intensive interviews with early warning
and food security experts in Washington, DC; Rome, Italy; and Nairobi,
Kenya.
|
 Anita
Chan,
PhD Student
Program in Science, Technology, and Society, MIT
Cambridge, MA, USA
[bio]
Project
Description
Free software technologies are increasingly shaping national political
agendas in Latin America. In the last decade, over a dozen pieces of
legislation have been introduced in Latin American nations that would
mandate the use of free software over proprietary software in public
administration, and a growing number of prominent government-supported
technology projects in schools, public offices, and public-access
centers have been deployed using free software. Central to the trend of
Latin American governments’ interest in free software
technologies are the activities of local and international networks of
free software proponents. My dissertation project examines
the
spread of these movements in Peru and Mexico, two of the first Latin
American nations where governments undertook free software projects.
I’m interested in exploring what the internal dynamics of
these
global and local exchange networks are, what strategies are employed to
enroll political and technical allies, and how these practices of
knowledge exchange build new understandings of citizenship and
property, digital and otherwise. My contention is that in order to
enter into dialogue with national governments and diverse international
publics, these actors rely on the strategic use of both the legal code
of law and the technological code of free software. In advocating for
free software technologies, I read these networks of “civic
programmers” as contesting established neoliberalist
practices of
governments -- which have faciliated the growth of regional monopolies
by transnational corporations like Microsoft – and advancing
in
its place alternative visions of government, citizenship and the uses
of information technologies within global information societies.
|
 Grace Chung,
PhD Student
School of Communication, Simon Fraser University
Vancouver, BC, Canada
[bio]
Project Description
Although
stakeholders’ views are often
incorporated into the initial design of large technical
infrastructures, such as transit systems, designers generally make the
final decisions about such issues as the incorporation of transit
safety and security technologies, the locations of train stations, and
the layout and size of platforms. By studying the discourse among
designers in the technical design process, this work will shed light on
the communication that occurs in planning and designing the technical
infrastructure of a transit station. The case study that will be
outlined is based in Seattle, Washington, with the development of a $5
billion dollar monorail system of the City of Seattle. Plans are
underway to develop a light-rail public transit system known as the
Green Line. The transit project will soon be in the official design
stage, which allows me to study the initial phases of the technical
design process of the fully automated and driverless transit
infrastructure. Incorporated into the design of the Green Line will be
elements of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). The ITS elements
will be in the form of an automated fare collection system, its
interoperability to the Regional Fare Collection System and its
multi-modal traveler information elements. An ITS infrastructure, in
the case of the monorail, will be applied to transit stations that has
the ability to monitor and digitally track embodied humans. As such, to
contextualize the design process of a transit station, this study will
in part consider the socio-technical impacts, such as that of privacy,
of the incorporation of ITS technologies into such a system.
|
 Partha
Das Chowdhury,
PhD Student
Algorithms Group, University of Hertfordshire
UK
[bio]
Project Description
Privacy has never
been an explicit goal of authorization mechanisms. The traditional
approach to authorisation relies on strong authentication mechanisms
and audit is linked to authorization via a permanent credential linked
to a long term fixed identity. Such an approach based on strong
identity forces users into a compulsive trust relationship with the
system. We explore the view that this compulsive trust relationship
between users and various entities of a system is unnecessary and can
have undesirable consequences. We look into the consequences such
undesirable trust relationships can have on individual privacy, and
investigate the extent to which taking a unified approach to trust and
anonymity can provide useful leverage to address threats to privacy
without compromising the principal goals of authentication and audit.
We propose that many applications would benefit from having ways of
making authorization decisions without using fixed credentials. We
propose such mechanisms in this dissertation, using which policies can
be enforced in access control systems without compromising the privacy
of a user. The approaches proposed in my dissertation allow clients to
control the risks to which they are exposed by bearing the cost of
relevant countermeasures themselves rather than forcing clients to
trust the system infrastructure (to protect them from the threats they
are exposed to) and bear an equal share of the cost of all
countermeasures whether or not effective in this case. Our approaches
allow a lay-off of trust and entities are not compelled to transitively
trust other entities which form part of a system. |
 Shay
David,
PhD Student
Science & Technology Studies, Cornell University
Ithaca, NY, USA
[bio]
[homepage]
Project Description
At the Culturally
Embedded Computing Group,
led by professor Phoebe Sengers, and part of Cornell’s
Information
Science Program and Science & Technology Studies Department we
try
to incorporate the alternative approaches as we analyze, design, build,
and evaluate information technology in a cultural context. As part of
our Critical Technical Practice (to use Phil Agre’s term) we
integrate
technical system-building with cultural, philosophical, and critical
reflection on technical practice. We seek to elucidate the ways in
which technologies reflect and perpetuate unconscious cultural
assumptions, and accordingly we design, build, and test new computing
devices that reflect alternative possibilities. In this workshop we
want to further explore all these concepts, and focus on the role of ambiguity
in design and its evaluation. We believe that ambiguity, which
ostensibly seems far removed from engineering practice, plays a
significant part of human experience and also stands in direct contrast
to the common strategies of reductionism and representation. Can we
reconcile ambiguity with technical practice and find a place for it
within technology? How does ambiguity change our understanding of
virtues like openness, autonomy, accountability, privacy, authority and
expertise? What decides the priorities of one over the other? What is
the role of narrative strategies such as defamiliarization,
exaggeration, and ambiguity in design and in shaping the way we
conceive of technology? Finally, how do we evaluate uses of ambiguity
if ambiguity defies codification and therefore operationalization? We
believe that as emotive, social, and spiritual beings, people
continuously sense and respond to technology in complex ways. We want
to explore how technology alters or even augments this practice without
reducing its complexity and non-formalism. |
 Carl Di Salvo,
PhD Student
School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA, USA
[bio]
Project Description
As a designer and
researcher I am concerned with issues of agency. But rather than
arguing about agency from first principles, I am interested in
addressing agency as a value. In particular, I am interested in three
questions: How can we better facilitate agency through the design of
products, how do different kinds of products perform or allow the
performance of different kinds of agency, and how can we use design as
a critical and interventionist device to reveal and reflect on the
arguments made about agency in both academic research environments and
with a more general public. My current inquiry is situated in the
domain of robotic products. Recently there has been a surge in the
research and development of robotic technologies. As robotic
technologies are positioned to become more common as products it is
important to reveal and address their particular design challenges. The
forms and functions of robots are often explicitly constructed as
imitations of living entities, to serve social purposes or to perform
service activities. Through these forms and functions robots are
ascribed qualities such as emotion and intelligence and roles such as
personal assistants and companions. My research struggles with how to
account for and address these peculiar characteristics of robots within
the context of design. Specifically, my research combines theoretical
and empirical analysis with a reflective of process of designing
conceptual prototypes and evaluating those prototypes with members of
the robotics research community and the larger public. The
intent of my research is to contribute both the engineering and design
communities, as well as to contribute to broader discourse on agency
and human values. |
 Gordon Euchler,
PhD
Student
Management, University of Cambridge
Cambridge, UK
[bio]
Project Description
I am researching
the work of Michel Serres and Bruno
Latour to try to develop a non-essentialist theory of the IT-artefact.
Essentialism means that technology has properties, which are completely
independent of its environment. Hence the implementation of a certain
technology would lead to the same outcome in every context (Grint and
Woolgar, 1997). However, in order to analyze technology in all its
complexities and to take it seriously, it is necessary to avoid
essentialism (Jones, 1998; Orlikowski and Iacono, 2001).
I found some concepts in Serres' and Latour's work, which should allow
to avoid essentialism: the may be summarized under the term relational
materiality: it is assumed that every entity can be related back to
nature (atoms) rather than to immaterial ideas (Serres, 2000).
Furthermore entities can only exist and resist entropy by being open
and exchange properties with other actors - order is exchanged against
entropy (Serres, 1992c). Hence entities are not able to have inherent
characteristics.
Lately my research is guided by the role violence play in the process
of creating objects, and how to avoid it. This took me towards the work
of Rene Girard. |
 Nathan Freier,
PhD Student
The Information School, University of Washington
Seattle, WA, USA
[bio]
Project Description
Children navigate
a complex world of social entities, natural phenomenon, constructed
artifacts, and information systems. As the seminal developmental
psychologist Jean Piaget proposed, children construct their knowledge
by interacting with and acting upon the entities and artifacts that
constitute their environment. Given such a constructivist developmental
process, what would be the social and moral impact of frequent
interactions with embodied, autonomous, personified robots that exhibit
such characteristics as biological motion, social grace, communicative
ability, and apparent intentionality? Furthermore, which specific
affordances of the robotic design lead to specific types of social and
moral attributions, and can we inform the design of these technologies
to be sensitive to the important value implications at hand? I intend
to take these questions up in my research. Specifically, in this study,
I propose to conduct a value sensitive design investigation to better
elucidate how the design of sociality in a humanoid robot impacts
children’s specific attributions of moral standing when the
robot is placed into one of two roles, victim or victimizer. By
utilizing observational, interactional, and semi-structured interview
methodologies, I seek to ascertain whether children categorize the
robot into one of four classes: (1) an entity which can be both a
victim and victimizer, like an adult human; (2) an entity which can be
a victim but not a victimizer, like an infant; (3) an entity which
cannot be a victim but can be a victimizer; and, finally, (4) a thing
which can neither be a victim nor a victimizer, like a stone. In order
to relate the designed sociality of the robot with children’s
judgments of moral standing in the context of these role plays, I
propose to vary the designed sociality of the robot between conditions
of low and high sociality.
|
 Jeremy Hunsinger,
PhD
Student
Science and Technology Studies, Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA, USA
[bio]
Project
Description
My dissertation
provides the foundation for this
analysis by analyzing free/libre and open source software (floss).
Until the early 1970's most software was either floss, or was designed
and produced for specific machines by the machine producers or by
consultants. The advent of licensing of software separate from
hardware, and the commoditization of hardware created the environment
for commoditized software, which in many instances closed access to the
code, making users unable to make the necessary changes and
customizations for their systems. In resistance to that, the floss
tradition regained traction in some communities in the early 1980's.
Much of the basic software and systems of the internet is predicated on
floss systems and open standards. My dissertation analyzes that
software and the code as a mode of production in order to discern the
ways in which it governs the communities that use it. In doing so, I am
establishing the presence of values and assumptions in the software
code and its interfaces. These values are part of the relations of
production which govern the relationship between producers and users of
the internet. In establishing this line of research, I'm providing a
firm foundation for future research on the values in information
systems. |
 Matthew Kam,
PhD Student
Computer Science, Berkeley Institute of Design, University of
California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA, USA
[bio]
Project
Description
Matthew's
research focuses on how to design
technologies that empower underserved communities in both "Third world"
and developed countries to raise their living standards. He is
currently working on two related projects:
1. Learner-centered tools for constructivist, small-group collaborative
learning. These tools build on the rich storytelling oral traditions
prevalent in some low-income rural regions by scaffolding students to
author multimedia comic stories and electronic games targeted at fellow
students. In the process of creating these artifacts to explain
academic concepts to others, i.e. active learning, student users are
expected to discover and address gaps in their understanding.
2. Record-keeping architecture that preserves privacy while enhancing
transparency, shared control, auditability and responsive access to
services. This architecture aims to be a toolkit that facilitates local
software developers in building kiosk applications that conform to the
above requirements. Such kiosk applications will provide community
clinics, case workers, shelters and other community service providers
with simple solutions for communicating and coordinating with their
clients. |
 Eddan Katz,
J.D. (University of
California, Berkeley)
Executive
Director, Information
Society Project, Yale Law School
New Haven, CT, USA
[bio]
Project
Description
This project
focuses on the misattribution of moral
agency to circumvention technologies banned under the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Both in substance and in structure,
the DMCA marks a significant departure from the legislative sphere of
copyright by shifting from the traditional copyright concern over the
infringing acts of violators to the criminalization of devices. This
shift creates an imbalance favoring the rights of copyright owners at
the expense of public access to copyrighted works.
The thesis of this project is that the source of the problematic
asymmetry is the isolation of technology from its human use, as
evidenced in the legislative history and judicial decisions of the
DMCA. The underlying premise of the new copyright violations of the
DMCA is that circumvention devices are deemed to have some quality of
being inherently “bad,” as separate from their
application.
The attribution of moral agency to a technological device is a
fundamental source of the imbalance of the DMCA. Since neither Congress
nor the courts ever defined "technology," this project explores three
strands of the meaning of technology - (1) as a device; (2) as applied
science; and (3) as an ideology - in order to illuminate the
appropriate role of copyright regulation of technology in a digitally
networked environment. |
 Julien Le
Nestour,
PhD Student
Center for the Sociology of Organizations, Institute for Political
Studies
Paris, France
[bio]
Project Description
The research aims
at studying the software conception and production
activities through a "sociological lens" in order to account for the
difficulties generally encountered by software projects. In fact, we
seek to characterize the social dynamics and interactions that occur
during such projects and that would provide clues to understand the
high rate of failure of software projects.
We try to understand the different roles involved in the conception and
production of a software and the way they "shape" the final product
which will be delivered. More specifically, we try to clarify the
process by which the "functional boundaries" of a
software are determined: how the very first idea of a software burst
out? Who decides this is a good idea and the project has to be started?
How is this first idea modified, negotiated, made acceptable by all the
actors throughout the project?
This involves determining the different categories of workers engaged
in a project, their "habitus" (or the particular way in which they
perceive the reality) and the criteria used to judge and make decisions
inside each of these categories. Besides, the influence of the
organizational context will be specifically studied. The final goal
being to link the organizational dynamics and power structures among
all the actors to the design and
functional decisions.
We hope this research would permit to cast some light on the reasons
why software products don't generally address the needs of the
customers, are more costly than planned and are released with important
delays. |
 Noëmi Manders,
PhD Student
Delft
Technical
University
Delft, The
Netherlands
[bio]
Project
Description
My research focuses on the ethical aspects of
the
use of personal data in Identity Management and Profiling
Architectures. There is increasing need for datamining and profiling
technologies in government, business, policing and health care. The
development of new identity management and profiling technology rapidly
increases, but there is little research on the ethical consequences and
normative assumptions of these technologies. The PhD project aims at
the formulation of relevant ethical principles for the value
sensitive design of profiling and identity management technologies. My
research is part of a larger research project "Alter Ego", in which
government agencies, technical universities and IT industry collaborate
in designing a Universal Profiling Architecture for cross-domain
applications. This project provides use cases in which numerous
databases will be coupled and integrated. These will serve as cases for
ethical reflection and integration of moral considerations in the
design process.
What is already clear at this stage of my research is that research is
required with regard to the conceptual and moral issues of (personal)
identity and on how people want to (re)identify themselves with regard
to profiles and digital identities. The principle of informed consent
is taken as a central moral principle that must be implemented in
contexts of ambient, pervasive and ubiquitous computing which are
highly dynamic, complex and intransparent to the user. |
 Kyle
May,
PhD Student
School of Public Policy, George Mason University
Fairfax, VA, USA
[bio]
Project
Description
The proposed
research will reveal the societal impact and provide tools to mitigate
the effects of false and misleading Internet Disseminated Medical
Information (IDMI). Users seeking IDMI are making decisions based on
faulty or fraudulent information. At a minimum, this leads to the
spread of false information and leaches money from the pockets of the
misinformed. At its worst this costs lives. The work will investigate
the roles that authority, ethics, and policy play in IDMI. The
investigation into authority will involve determining how a resource
(IDMI site) can gain and lose credibility based on a pre-determined and
accepted set of criteria. Determining authority will provide users a
tool to evaluate IDMI sites. Ignoring ethical considerations and
responsibilities allows for the spread of false or misleading IDMI. An
examination of the ethics behind misleading IDMI sites will reveal
ownership or a lack thereof of content provision. Used in conjunction,
the roles of ethics and authority will allow users to more fully
appreciate whether IDMI content represents sound science or
intentional/unintentional fraud. In addition, policy makers might use
the results of this work to determine where and when regulation and
enforcement is needed to dissuade further fraudulent IDMI sites. |
 Daniel Menchik,
PhD Student
Sociology, University of Chicago
Chicago, IL, USA
[bio]
Project Description
How has medicine
responded to increasing penetration of digitally-delivered scientific
information into the hospital and the home? Interaction with
exogenously-produced medical knowledge delivered via digital networks
is daily part of the doctor’s routine. Patients are
becomingly increasingly aware of potential treatments for own health
needs and the consequences of accepting procedures or prescriptions.
Access to medical information has changed, yet the social role of the
health information expert has not.
My project addresses the changing role of the physician in respect to
new information sources. Building on work in the sociology of
knowledge, medicine and science, and using the tools of microsociology
and social network analysis, I am examining how information enters the
clinic via networks, interacts with existing knowledge, influences
behavior with patients, and is visualized on the chart. By
understanding the respective recontextualization processes, I hope to
gain insight into the way that contemporary innovations influence the
profession and associated institutions. |
 David Ribes,
PhD
Student
Sociology, University of California, San Diego
San Diego, CA, USA
[bio]
[homepage]
Project
Description
As a
investigative site GEON has been particularly
rich, and has enabled various research tracks: organizational and
communicative, but also following relationships to state bodies, and
changes in practice of science as information technologies are
introduced, to name a few. In this paper, and for the workshop, I will
address the heterogeneous adoption of information technologies within
GEON. GEON is offering a plethora technological resources which are
substantially new to the participating geo-scientists. These
technologies include distributed computing and data-sharing servers
('the Grid' ), visualization, data-registration software, and knowledge
representation to name a few. What is particularly interesting, perhaps
even odd, is the extreme heterogeneity of responses with which the
geo-scientists, often as a collective, react to these technologies. The
range of reaction stretches from complete apathy to outright alarm. In
this paper and workshop I would like to explore how a technology comes
to be charged with 'value' - that is, how a technology comes to be
identified as significant, in this case epistemically significant, to
the planned adopters. |
 Erich Schienke,
PhD Student
Science
& Technology
Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy, NY, USA
[bio]
[homepage]
Project
Description
Over the past two
decades, funding research into
plausible solutions to eco-environmental problems in China has become a
scientific and political imperative of global organizations,
transnational enterprises, national bureaus, and local administrations.
Central to the deci-sion making process, at all scales of institutional
governance, is the production of knowl-edge about the current status of
eco-environmental conditions (monitoring and describing the
eco-environmental present) and the development of various possible
remediation strategies (modeling and predicting the eco-environmental
future). However, amongst the rich scientific and political-economic
work on eco-environmental governance in China (mostly focused on
pollution and preservation), there is little in the way of a detailed
his-torical accounting as to how China has built its national
(State-China) and local (Urban-Beijing) capacity to monitor and model
its eco-environmental status, specifically, through the use of
Environmental Monitoring (EM), Geographic Information Systems (GIS),
and Remote Sensing (RS). The production of such a history and of
currently emerging devel-opments in national and local Environmental
Information Systems (EIS) 2 capacity will provide a foundation for
comparison and critique as to how: 1) researchers in China have had
their work link up in the development of ”new transnational
scientific and political communities”; 2) various strands of
their work have been brought together into a viable lo-cal epistemic
framework; and 3) particular eco-environmental representations have
brought together ”multiple communities of researchers,
government
officials, and citizens.”
Through ethnographic interviews, participant observations, and archival
research this study will work to answer one main question: Since 1979,
how has China’s scientific and technological capacity to
monitor
and model its urban environment developed, and in turn shaped policy
initiatives and directives? An answer will be derived from the
following three sub-questions: 1) How have international agreements,
pressures, and collaborations shaped and influenced China’s
capacity and expertise in EIS? 2) How have developments in EIS
capabilities and project choices been shaped by plans for the
sustainable urban de-velopment of Beijing? 3) How are EIS analyses
informing and directing local urban policy developments in Beijing? To
answer these three questions, a detailed description of
China’s
capacity and expertise building efforts in EIS since 1979 will need to
be gathered primarily across five State run institutions in Beijing,
China. These are: under the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS)–
the
Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences (RCEES), the Institute
for Geographic Sciences and Natural Resource Research (IGSNRR); under
State authority– the State Environmental Protection Agency
(SEPA), and the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Environmental Protection
(BEPB).
|
 Tish Stringer,
PhD Student
Anthropology, Rice University
Houston, TX, USA
[bio]
Project Description
My broad academic goal is to understand practices and technologies of
collaboration and communication used by social movements. To accomplish
this, I investigate the work of media collectives within social
movements. The point of view of these collectives is producing media
with a movement rather than media about a movement. I focus on the
collective modes of production, distribution and reception used by
media collectives because their working practices, not simply their
content, distinguishes them. To accomplish this goal I have been
conducting research with a contemporary media collective called the
Independent Media Center, or Indymedia (indymedia.org), including 3
years with the Houston-based group and researching collectives in other
locations such as Quebec City, Porto Allegre, Brazil, New York City,
London and Miami. Indymedia is fundamentally different from traditional
journalistic organizations in two important ways. First there is an
absence of ownership or profit in Indymedia. What are the ramifications
of the fact that no one "owns" the IMC network, its resources, or the
Free Software that powers it and the fact that no one makes any salary
or profit from it? A second difference is Indymedia reporters do not
attempt to be aligned with a tradition of
“objectivity”, but are motivated to be volunteer
reporters from the passion of their convictions. Indymedia activists
are not trying to provide a more complete news picture; they are trying
to effect practical social change through direct intervention of
information, images and perspectives they consider to be missing from
mainstream news.
In order to contextualize this work I am now conducting four
comparative case studies on media collectives active in other
countries, points in history and with different primary technologies.
The first is Newsreel, a group from the late 1960’s who made
16mm single-reel news shorts examining social struggles in the United
States using an innovative distribution network to make the materials
available to a large constituency of independent screening venues. The
Second, Soviet-era Film Trains was led by Alexander Medvedkin. These
trains were self-contained film factories traveling across the newly
communist country making documentaries about the collective farms and
worker-run factories, editing and screening them on-site. The third,
Undercurrents is a group of video activists in England who for 10 years
have produced video magazines to distribute activist news to a wide
range of independent venues, as well as running a distribution center
for many activist-oriented feature length films and archive
material. Fourth, Big Noise Films are a self-described
radical media collective composed of activists with cameras who helped
found the Indymedia video team. Big Noise’s feature
films such as This is What Democracy Looks Like and Zapatista have had
major impacts on the character of resistance in the communities I have
been researching.
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 Anke van Gorp,
PhD Student
Delft University of Technology
Delft, The Netherlands
[bio]
Project
Description
Technology has a profound influence on society. New possibilities and
new risks arise as a consequence of the employment of new technologies
and products. This raises ethical problems with regard to technology.
At least part of the decisions resulting in risks and opportunities are
made during the design process. The goal of this research is to obtain
insight in how engineers deal with ethically relevant issues in daily
engineering design practice.
It is reasonable to assume that ethically relevant issues and the way
engineers deal with them depend on characteristics of the design
process. I have made use of Vincenti’s dimensions to
characterize different design processes: design type and design
hierarchy (Vincenti, 1990). To obtain empirical data, case studies were
conducted. Two radical design processes, one high level conceptual
design (an ultralightweight sustainable car) and one lower level design
(a lightweight trailer) were studied. Besides these two radical design
processes, two normal design processes also differing in design
hierarchy were studied (design of piping and equipment for the
(petro)chemical industry and the design of a bridge).
In the radical design processes ethical questions were especially
related to operationalisations of ethically relevant criteria such as
safety and sustainability and trade-offs between design criteria. These
operationalisations and trade-offs were made using internal design team
norms. These internal norms were based upon design experience, personal
experience and education of the design team members. In the normal
design processes a regulative framework consisting of regulation, codes
and standards was used. The ethical questions that came up during the
normal design processes were also related to operationalisation of
safety and the making of trade-offs between design criteria. The
regulative framework provided operationalisations and some guidelines
for trade-offs. This did not mean that all ethical issues could be
dealt with by referring to the regulative framework. Some decisions
that engineers had to make for example concerning safety were not
covered by the regulative framework. Parts of the regulative framework
were inconsistent and ambiguous, for example when a choice had to be
made between different technical codes that could be used to design the
concrete foundation of a bridge. Another important ethical issue was
that it was not clear whether the regulative framework was accepted by
all affected actors.
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 Timothy Weber,
PhD Student
Culture & Communication, New York University
New York, NY, USA
[bio]
Project Description
By building on the work of Bowker and Star, I hope to explore the
(inter-) relationship between informational infrastructures (e.g.
classification schemes, national censuses, networked databases) and
their promotion (and/or exclusion) of certain "styles of reasoning".
Philosophers such as Fred Dretske have pointed to the seminal role of
information receipt in such cognitive activities as concept formation;
here, how we decide to structure our contemporary communication
circuits (in Dretske's terms sorting signal from channel) has a decided
effect on the methods and matter with which we might reason. By similar
lights, information has been characterized with respect to knowledge as
"a difference that makes a difference" - i.e. the very "new" is
determined by what we deem informative (or in communicative terms:
"digitalize"). I purport to explore, therefore, the manner in which
(what might be deemed) the algorithms underlying information
technologies can influence such matters as epistemic norms
(socio-culturally understood).
Specifically, I hope to engage with such questions as: How does the
design of typologies/taxonomies for database software influence truth
modalities or understandings of facticity? What is the relationship of
information architecture to the development of social doxa (e.g. belief
formation)? How might systems design encourage desirable norms of
assertion? And Lastly, is there a notion to be pursued with respect to
something like a "tolerant" system - i.e. how might information
architecture be amenable to a broad spectrum of perspectives (or
perhaps encourage diverse experimentation by its design)? In
exploring such questions, I hope to achieve a greater understanding of
possibilities for "thinking better" with our "thinking machines".
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 Michael Zimmer,
PhD Student
Culture & Communication, New York University
New York, NY, USA
[bio] [homepage]
Project Description
Information interfaces – technologies for arranging, storing,
displaying, retrieving and navigating information, ranging from
scientific classification systems, encyclopedias, maps, library card
catalogs, computer file systems, graphical user interfaces, and web
search engines – serve as a kind of translator, mediating
between information-spaces and users, making one sensible to the other.
An information interface is a necessary medium by which we gain
knowledge: “we envision information in order to reason about,
communicate, document, and preserve…knowledge”
(Tufte, 1990, p. 33). As such, an information interface plays a crucial
role in not only the communication and representation of books in a
collection, files on a hard drive or information on the web, but also
in how we understand these information-spaces, and ultimately, the
world around us. As the power and ubiquity of our information
interfaces intensify, it becomes easier to take the design of such
technologies “at interface value” (Turkle, 1995, p.
103), and more arduous to recognize any corollary effects of our
reliance on such technologies.
Scholars of technology have long recognized the complex relationship
between technology and society. Many humanistic, social and
philosophical explorations into the intersection of technology and
society suggest that the impact of technology on society is not neutral
(see, for example, Johnson and Nissenbaum, 1995; Latour, 1992; Mumford,
1964; Winner, 1980). Such scholars argue that technologies have, in
varying degrees, certain social, political, and ethical biases; they
tend to promote certain values and ideologies, while obscuring others.
Our modern information interfaces are not exempt from such value and
ideological biases. Despite their desire not to be
“evil,” the technologies Google develops, for
example, could very well implicate certain social, political, and
ethical values and ideologies. Yet, Google’s information
interface has remained largely exempt from the type of social,
political, and ethical criticism that other information technologies
have received from scholars of technology.
This study will engage in what Bowker and Star (1999) call an
“infrastructural inversion” to properly expose and
understand the underlying design of Google’s information
interface and to make apparent their social, political and ethical
implications. |
Project
Clusters:
Cluster 1: Kirsten Boehner, Shay
David, Gordon Euchler, Carl
DiSalvo, Nathan Freier
Cluster 2:
Richard
Arias, Anita
Chan, Jeremy Hunsinger, Eddan
Katz, Tish Stringer
Cluster 3: Jericho
Burg, Matthew Kam, Julien
Le Nestour, Anke Van Gorp
Cluster 4:
Grace Chung, Kyle
May, Daniel Menchik, Erich Schienke
Cluster 5:
Noëmi
Manders, David Ribes, Timothy
Weber,
Michael Zimmer
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