Abstract:

Considerable scholarship has established that algorithms are an increasingly important part of what information people encounter in everyday life. Much less work has focused on studying users’ experiences with, understandings of, and attitudes about how algorithms may influence what they see and do. The dearth of research on this topic may be in part due to the difficulty in studying a subject about which there is no known ground truth given that details about algorithms are proprietary and rarely made public. In this talk, I will report on the methodological challenges of studying people’s algorithm skills based on 83 in-person interviews conducted in five countries. I will also discuss the types of algorithm skills identified from our data. The talk will advocate for more such scholarship to accompany existing system-level analyses of algorithms’ social implications and offers a blue print for how to do this.

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Eszter Hargittai is Professor and Chair of Internet Use and Society at the Institute of Communication and Media Research, University of Zurich. Previously, she was the Delaney Family Professor in the Communication Studies Department at Northwestern University. In 2019, she was elected Fellow of the International Communication Association and also received the William F. Ogburn Mid-Career Achievement Award from the American Sociological Association’s section on Communication, Information Technology and Media Sociology. For over two decades, she has been researching people’s Internet uses and skills, and how these relate to questions of social inequality.

The French Culture Workshop is co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, the DLCL Research Unit, the France-Stanford Center, and the Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute.

After a long period of under-appreciation, Michel Serres's prescient and unique writing is now beginning to receive the attention it has long deserved. This talk explores the distinctiveness and contemporaneity of Serres’s thought, paying particular attention to the  "figures" that distinguish not only the themes he addresses, but also the way he approaches and passes between them. What emerges is a picture of a body of work radically distinct from that of his contemporaries Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault, and a set of concerns the timeliness of which is only now becoming evident.

Dr. Christopher Watkin is a Senior Lecturer at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, where he teaches across French and Literary Studies. He is the author of a number of books in modern and contemporary thought, including Phenomenology or Deconstruction? (2009), Difficult Atheism (2011), and French Philosophy Today: New Figures of the Human (2016). His latest monograph, Michel Serres: Figures of Thought, is due to be published with Edinburgh University Press in early 2020. Chris is currently working on a project interrogating the concepts of freedom and liberation in contemporary thought and society in the light of what has been called the Western “emancipation narrative”. He blogs about philosophy and academic research at christopherwatkin.com, and you can find him on Twitter @DrChrisWatkin.  

The French Culture Workshop is co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, the DLCL Research Unit, the France-Stanford Center, and the Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute.

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/P1-Q0OSo4yM

About this Event: The governance of big data and the prevention of their misuse is among the most topical issues in current debates among security experts. But what does it mean when security is not an issue for the stakeholders governing big biomedical data? This paper answers this question by looking at what it describes as a peculiar omission of the issue of security in the biggest harmonization cluster of biomedical research in Europe - BBMRI-ERIC. While it does treat personal data, the risks and threats are constructed through a language of anticipation and self-governance rather than security. The analysis explains why: based on document analysis, interviews, and field research, it studies (1) how are risks and threats constructed in the research with big biomedical data, (2) what regime of their governance is established in this area, and (3) what are the implications for the practices of science and the politics of security. The paper argues that this silence is a by-product of bureaucratization and responsibilization of security, which is in biobanking characteristic by discourse and practices of responsible research, ethics, and law. The paper suggests that this regime of governance precludes the prospects of addressing bigger questions that biobanks may need to deal with in the future, such as regarding the access to the biomedical data by state or private actors and their use for policing, surveillance, or other types of population governance.

Speaker's Biography: Dagmar Rychnovská is Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the Techno-science and societal transformation group at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna. She holds a PhD in International Relations (Charles University in Prague), an MA in Comparative and International Studies (ETH Zurich and University of Zurich), and an LLM in Law and Politics of International Security (VU University Amsterdam). Her research interests lie at the intersection of international relations, security studies, and science and technology studies. Her current research explores security controversies in research and innovation governance, with a focus on bioweapons, biotechnologies, and biobanks.

On January 11, 2020 Taiwan held its presidential and legislative elections. Many observers expected the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to run an online disinformation campaign during the lead-up to the election in support of their preferred candidate, Han Kuo-yu, who was challenging incumbent Tsai Ing-wen. Such concerns were increased by demonstrated PRC online disinformation targeting the Hong Kong protests, and claims by an alleged PRC spy saying he led disinformation efforts targeting Taiwan during the 2018 elections. 

In this talk, we delve into case studies that highlight the role social media plays in disinformation at large in the Taiwanese information environment. We examine that while the fears of disinformation were generally not realized, we did find evidence of coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook, in particular on fan Pages and Groups for the two candidates. Our findings hold implications for researchers trying to distinguish authentic hyper-partisan domestic activism from coordinated disinformation. 

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Carly Miller is a social science researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory. In addition to covering the Taiwanese election, she assists the team in other digital forensic research and thinking about how researchers external to social media platforms think about disinformation campaign and concepts such as attribution. Before coming to Stanford, Carly was a Team Lead at the Human Rights Investigations Lab at Berkeley Law School where she worked to unearth patterns of various bad actors’ media campaigns. Carly received her BA with honors in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in May 2019.

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Vanessa Molter is a Research Assistant at SIO and a Master in International Policy candidate at Stanford University, where she focuses on International Security in East Asia. At SIO, she monitors and writes on the Taiwanese social media environment. Previously, she has studied Taiwanese security affairs at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taipei, Taiwan, a government-affiliated defense think-tank. Vanessa is fluent in Mandarin and holds a B.S. in International Business and East Asian studies from Tubingen University, Germany.