[SIGCIS-Members] [CfA EASST/4S Prague] Other Indigenous “Knowledge Engineering” Systems: Designing and operating knowledge technologies at scale in emerging worlds

Fri Feb 28 09:17:31 PST 2020

Dear Yoehan,

This abstract looks great! I just wanted to acknowledge you on your citational work too, I appreciate how thoughtful you are about the questions and fields you are engaged in. :) 

All best,
Theo

Sent from my iPhone

> On Feb 28, 2020, at 5:56 AM, Yoehan Oh <yoehan.oh at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> A QUICK AND GENTLE REMINDER:
> 
> On Mon, Jan 6, 2020 at 3:46 PM Yoehan Oh <yoehan.oh at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Dear list members, 
>> 
>> Apologies for cross-posting.
>>  
>> Please take into consideration submitting your abstract to the open panel session at the EASST/4S conference in Prague, August 2020, "Other Indigenous “Knowledge Engineering” Systems: Designing and operating knowledge technologies at scale in emerging worlds." The upcoming EASST/4S conference 2020, the joint conference of the annual European Science and Technology Studies (STS) conference and the worldwide major annual STS conference, will be held in Prague, August 18-21, 2020 (official website: https://www.easst4s2020prague.org/). If you have any question, feel free to contact me (ohy at rpi.edu). If you might, hopefully, find this interesting to others in your networks, please share it with them.
>> 
>> Key dates and the CfA are as the following:  
>> 
>> KEY DATES
>> 29 February 2020: Deadline for abstract submission: 
>> 15 April 2020: Notification of acceptance of all abstracts
>> 
>> TITLE
>> Other Indigenous “Knowledge Engineering” Systems: Designing and operating knowledge technologies at scale in emerging worlds (Open panel 131)
>> 
>> ABSTRACT
>> Some scholars in digital humanities and critical internet and digital technologies studies have asked for bringing critical concerns about race, gender, postcoloniality, and other inequal power structures to their field (Nakamura 2013; Noble et al. 2016; McPherson 2013; Posner  2016; Risam 2018; Benjamin 2019). One way to address those concerns is illuminating technically-inventive subjectivities, by appreciating and thus empowering them through conceptualizations they deserve. STSers have conceptualized them and their artifacts as “Black vernacular technological creativity,” “techno-vernacular creativity,” (Fouché 2006; Gaskins 2019), “innovation from below” (Williams 2018), “ethnocomputing,” (Petrillo 1994; Tedre et-al. 2006; Eglash 1999), “postcolonial computing,” (Irani et-al. 2010; cf. Burrell 2012), and “black software” (McIlwain 2019); historians of computing have studied information architectures, hardware, and software in the Middle East, Latin America, East Asia, Midwestern U.S., and (post-)communist contexts (Bowker 1994; Medina 2011; Tinn 2018; Rankin 2018; Švelch 2018; Biagioli et-al. 2019). To further these conceptualizations, this panel  will focus on less resourceful worlds’ captures of knowledge technologies, predominated by a few resourceful countries’ R&D communities like U.S., Canada, some Western Europe countries, China, and Japan: Knowledge discovery by data, Data engineering, Semantic technologies, and Search engines, etc (Collins 1987; Forsythe 1993). Questions to be addressed are: How indigenous, aboriginal, vernacular, decolonial, de-ColdWar, or less capitalistically/settler-colonially exploitative the knowledge engineering practices at scales by technical actors in the underrecognized/emerging worlds can be? Which speculative, experimental, or empirical cases can we dig into as the Indigenous “Knowledge engineering” Systems (Watson-Verran et al. 1995; Brereton et-al. 2015; Chamunorwa et-al. 2018)?
>>  
>> KEYWORDS: knowledge engineering, knowledge technologies, technological agency, indigenous knowledge systems, emerging worlds
>> 
>> THREE CATEGOREIS: Big Data; Information, Computing and Media Technology; Postcolonial/Decolonial STS
>>  
>> CONVENORS: Yoehan Oh, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
>> 
>> Wish you a happy new year. 
>> Best, 
>> Yoehan 
>> 
>> 
>> REFERENCES
>> * Acker, Amelia, and Joan Donovan. 2019. "Data craft: a theory/methods package for critical internet studies." Information, Communication & Society 22(11): 1590-1609.
>> * Aouragh, Miriyam, and Paula Chakravartty. 2016. "Infrastructures of empire: towards a critical geopolitics of media and information studies." Media, Culture & Society 38(4): 559-575.
>> * Benjamin, Ruha. 2019. Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim Code. John Wiley & Sons.
>> * Biagioli, Mario, and Vincent Antonin Lépinay, eds. 2019. From Russia with Code: Programming Migrations in Post-Soviet Times. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
>> * Bowker, Geoffrey C. 1994. Science on the Run: Information management and industrial geophysics at Schlumberger, 1920-1940. MIT press.
>> * Brereton, Margot, Paul Roe, Ronald Schroeter, and A. Lee Hong. 2015. "Indigenous knowledge technologies: Moving from knowledge capture to engagement, reciprocity and use." In At the Intersection of Indigenous and Traditional Knowledge and Technology Design, edited by Nicola Bidwell and Heike Winschiers-Theophilus, 239-258. Informing Science.
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>> * Ebner, Susanne. 2019. “Hierarchies of Knowledge: Usage of a Chinese Media App in Rural Tamil Nadu” presented at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, New Orleans, U.S.
>> * Eglash, Ron. 1999. African fractals: Modern computing and indigenous design. Rutgers University Press.
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>> * Fouché, Rayvon. 2006. "Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud: African Americans, American artifactual culture, and black vernacular technological creativity." American Quarterly 58(3): 639-661.
>> * Gaskins, Nettrice R. 2019. “Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation across the African Diaspora and Global South.” In Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, edited by Ruha Benjamin, 252-274. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
>> * Irani, Lilly, Janet Vertesi, Paul Dourish, Kavita Philip, and Rebecca E. Grinter. 2010. "Postcolonial computing: a lens on design and development." In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems, ACM. 1311-1320.
>> * Kita, Chigusa, and Hyungsub Choi. 2016. "History of computing in East Asia." IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 38(2): 8-10.
>> * McIlwain, Charlton. 2019. Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter. Oxford University Press, USA.
>> * McPherson, Tara. 2013. “US operating systems at mid-century: The intertwining of race and UNIX.” In Race after the Internet, edited by Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White, 27-43. Routledge.
>> * Medina, Eden. 2011. Cybernetic revolutionaries: Technology and politics in Allende's Chile. MIT Press.
>> * Nakamura, Lisa, and Peter Chow-White, eds. 2013. Race after the Internet. Routledge.
>> * Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. NYU Press.
>> * Noble, Safiya Umoja, and Brendesha M. Tynes. 2016. The intersectional internet: Race, sex, class, and culture online. Peter Lang International Academic Publishers.
>> * Petrillo, Anthony. 1994. “Ethnocomputers in Nigerian Computer Education.” Paper presented at the 31st Annual Conference of the Mathematical Association of Nigeria (March 1994).
>> * Philip, Kavita, Lilly Irani, and Paul Dourish. 2012. "Postcolonial computing: A tactical survey." Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(1): 3-29.
>> * Posner, Miriam. 2016. “What’s Next: The Radical Unrealised Potential of Digital Humanities.” In Debates in the digital humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, 32-41. University of Minnesota Press.
>> * Risam, Roopika. 2018. New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
>> * Snow, Jackie. 2018. “We’re in a diversity crisis”: Cofounder of Black in AI on what’s poisoning algorithms in our lives.” MIT Technology Review (Feb 14, 2018).
>> * Stöckelová, Tereza, and Jaroslav Klepal. 2018. "Chinese Medicine on the Move into Central Europe: A Contribution to the Debate on Correlativity and Decentering STS." East Asian Science, Technology and Society. 12(1): 57-79.
>> * Rankin, Joy Lisi. 2018. A People's History of Computing in the United States. Harvard University Press.
>> * Stevens, Hallam. 2019. "Digital Infrastructure in the Chinese Register." Made in China Journal. 4(2): 84-89.
>> * Švelch, Jaroslav. 2018. Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games. MIT Press.
>> * Tedre, Matti, Erkki Sutinen, Esko Kähkönen, and Piet Kommers. 2006. "Ethnocomputing: ICT in cultural and social context." Communications of the ACM 49(1): 126-130.
>> * Tinn, Honghong. 2018. "Modeling Computers and Computer Models: Manufacturing Economic-Planning Projects in Cold War Taiwan, 1959–1968." Technology and culture 59(5): S66-S99.
>> * Watson-Verran, Helen, and David Turnbull. 1995. "Science and other indigenous knowledge systems." In Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 2nd edition, edited by Jasanoff, S., G. E. Markle, J. Peterson, and T. Pinch, 115-139. Sage.
>> * Williams, Logan D. A. 2018. Eradicating Blindness: Global Health Innovation from South Asia. Palgrave Macmillan. 
>> 
>> -- 
>> Yoehan Oh
>> Ph.D. Student
>> Department of Science and Technology Studies
>> Rensselaer Polytechnic institute
>> 110 8th Street
>> Troy, NY 12180  USA
>> e-mail: ohy at rpi.edu ; yoehan.oh at gmail.com
>> phone: (518) 368-1257 
>> pronoun: he/him
> 
> 
> -- 
> Yoehan Oh
> Ph.D. Student
> Department of Science and Technology Studies
> Rensselaer Polytechnic institute
> 110 8th Street
> Troy, NY 12180  USA
> e-mail: ohy at rpi.edu ; yoehan.oh at gmail.com
> phone: (518) 368-1257 
> pronoun: he/him
> _______________________________________________
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