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

[Yoehan Oh]

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


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-- 
Yoehan Oh
Doctoral Student
Department of Science and Technology Studies
Rensselaer Polytechnic institute
110 8th Street
Troy, NY 12180  USA
e-mail: ohy at rpi.edu
phone: (518) 368-1257
pronoun: he/him
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