Event Description

The Digital Transformations Platform, CBS, and the research project AI Reuse is pleased to invite you for a workshop with Dr. Natasha Schüll. The workshop is co-hosted by DISTRACT (SODAS, KU), and Stine Lomborg, KU.

Digital epistemologies and heuristics such as data containment, data reuse, or data leaks point to, as well as obscure, the complexities of living with data. How to parse the distinct data epistemologies that operate in the contemporary world, and how to understand their alignments, contradictions, and interactions?
In this workshop, anthropologist Natasha Schüll approaches this question from the vantage of her research into self-tracking and wearable technologies. Schüll will begin with an overview of the themes and questions at stake, present a set of case studies depicting different epistemological orientations to self-data, and then open up the workshop to collective discussion.
How do data epistemologies reproduce, as well as depart from, entrenched social hierarchies and prevailing economic imperatives? Beyond providing critical diagnostics, the workshop sets out to consider how data epistemologies might be ethically and collaboratively reimagined.

Please use this opportunity to discuss your own questions and cases in relation to data typologies and epistemologies. 

We have limited seating to ensure the possibility for dialogue so please register before March 10, 2020 via the link. A set of readings related to the themes of the workshop will be available to registered participants after March 10.

About Natasha Dow Schüll

Natasha Dow Schüll is a cultural anthropologist and associate professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her 2012 book, ADDICTION BY DESIGN: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton University Press), draws on extended research among compulsive gamblers and the designers of the slot machines they play to explore the relationship between technology design and the experience of addiction. Her next book, KEEPING TRACK (under contract with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), concerns the rise of digital self-tracking technologies and the new modes of introspection and self-governance they engender.