March 2026 - Members - lists.sigcis.org

Application deadline extended: Computer Class at the University of Toronto
by Scott Richmond 04 Mar '26

04 Mar '26

Friends, colleagues, and fellow travellers: apologies for the mass email. Please circulate this widely in your networks! *CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: "Computer Class" * Summer Institute at the Centre for Culture and Technology: *JUNE 1–5, 2026* Application Deadline: extended to *MARCH 15* Computer Class is a one-week seminar-style institute for graduate students and practitioners in artistic, humanistic, and social-scientific fields who are interested in coding, computer history, and critical use of technology. Computer Class brings us back to primary school. We play, dream, doodle, futz, make, break, and debug computer programs. We draw pictures with code. We make our own chatbots. We read theory and philosophy and psychoanalysis. We work with primary documents from the history of computing. We learn new ways of getting on with these strange machines we call computers. We also decide how we spend our time together: Computer Class is participant-driven, dedicated to the question of what we actually want to do with our computers—and how to expand our desire for, with, and around computers. All are welcome to apply, but priority will be given to humanities and fine arts graduate students. Computer Class is targeted towards students in terminal degree programs, such as MFA or PhD programs. Participants should have substantial interest in digital media culture or aesthetics, the history of computing, creative, or expressive coding, media theory, critical code studies, or other relevant artistic or humanistic research practice. Learn more at computerclass.ca.

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Call for Abstracts for AISB 2026 Symposium: Hype, Promise, and Speculation: AI Bubbles and the Replication Crisis in Computer Science
by Susannah Glickman 04 Mar '26

04 Mar '26

Dear all, Hope you are enjoying the very beginnings of spring! I am on the program committee for this exciting upcoming symposium and wanted to pass along the details below. All the best, Susannah Call for Abstracts: AISB 2026 Symposium: Hype, Promise, and Speculation: AI Bubbles and the Replication Crisis in Computer Science 1-2 July 2026 AISB 2026, University of Sussex, UK, https://aisb.org.uk/ Keynote Speaker: Anil Seth, Prof of Cognitive & Computational Neuroscience Symposium: https://aisb.org.uk/aisb-2026-symposium-hype-promise-and-speculation <https://aisb.org.uk/aisb-2026-symposium-hype-promise-and-speculation/#Sympo…> Submission: Abstracts of 500 words Deadline: 23 March 2026 Please send any questions to Y. J. Erden (University of Twente): y.j.erden(a)utwente.nl <mailto:y.j.erden@utwente.nl> The replication crisis The replication crisis has crossed multiple fields in science asking if results presented in published papers can be reproduced, repeated, and/or replicated. In their efforts to verify results various disciplines, including computer science, have already found that the answer for too many papers is “no”. In this symposium we look at the replication crisis as it pertains especially to computer science, whether within the discipline, or as applied to, or utilised in, other disciplines, such as computational modelling for neuroscience. AI bubbles It’s clear that AI development is expanding substantially, but the extent to which this growth is sustainable is unclear. Meanwhile, the possibility of this becoming another bubble, like those from the dot com boom and real estate, is clear. A bubble is a vague concept that captures where a process or commodity is valued or hyped beyond its intrinsic worth, typically in unsustainable ways. If contemporary expectations currently dominating the AI field do turn out to be a bubble we can expect further expansion, and then collapse, typically causing damage in the process. We invite papers from a wide range of disciplines, including: computer science, AI, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Explainable AI, philosophy, behavioural sciences, social sciences, and those working with computational models, e.g. in finance. Example research questions: What kinds of impacts are computational methods having on science, e.g. machine learning methods, statistical analysis? How do computer science methods harm or help the replicability of research? Is research in computer science replicable? Does the name ‘Artificial Intelligence’ have an effect on what is expected of AI? Are current valuations (financial, social etc) of AI realistic? Is there an AI bubble in science? Related bubbles that might be relevant to these topics, e.g. is big data also a bubble? Organising Committee Y. J. Erden (University of Twente) y.j.erden(a)utwente.nl <mailto:y.j.erden@utwente.nl> Kiona Bijker (University of Twente) k.bijker(a)student.utwente.nl <mailto:k.bijker@student.utwente.nl> Katleen Gabriels (Maastricht University) k.gabriels(a)maastrichtuniversity.nl <mailto:k.gabriels@maastrichtuniversity.nl> Martin Lentschat (Université Toulouse) martin.lentschat(a)univ-tlse2.fr <mailto:martin.lentschat@univ-tlse2.fr> Doina Bucur (University of Twente) d.bucur(a)utwente.nl <mailto:d.bucur@utwente.nl>

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Call for Papers: Delete – Strategies of Negation in the Age of Data Suffocation (Queen Mary, September 2026)
by Jiri Anger 04 Mar '26

04 Mar '26

Dear colleagues, We invite you to submit proposals for the conference: Delete: Strategies of Negation in the Age of Data Suffocation Read the full CfP and apply by 31 March: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/arts/research/research-events/items/delete-strategie… Where: BLOC Cinema, Queen Mary University of London When: 17–18 September 2026 Keynote speakers: Neta Alexander (Yale University), Thomas Dekeyser (University of Southampton) Seventeen years ago, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger made an argument about deleting as indissolubly linked to our capacity to survive and move forward (Schönberger 2009). At the time, this claim pointed to a paradox: while digital technologies offered unprecedented possibilities for erasure, the critical and sometimes subversive function of deletion as a form of negation was already beginning to erode. With the rapid expansion of storage capacities and tracking mechanisms, deletion has since become increasingly reduced, contested, or even impossible. How has the status of deleting changed from then to the present, when the daily rise of AI slop and the turbulence of world politics render this gesture seemingly futile? Back in the late 2000s, we could argue that deleting still carried some weight. We regularly got rid of films, songs, games, or apps to free up space on hard drives. We erased blog posts or discussion forum conversations to avoid future embarrassment. At the same time, glitchy or pixelated images and sounds were still considered worth preserving and sharing. Fast forward to 2026, and we hardly even care enough to delete something. We can access all the entertainment we “need” through subscription platforms like Netflix, Spotify, or Steam, and the files we keep are often dispersed across multiple drives and clouds. Our social media interactions and exchanges with AI models like ChatGPT are effectively permanent, marked in digital ink and accessible for extraction by others. We are surrounded by lossless, high-resolution images and sounds, and even systemic failures have turned into mere pauses between updates (Alexander and Appadurai 2019). At the same time, many claim that the very logic of disruption has become fully co-opted by Big Tech, and therefore has little value for cultural production and its persistence (Owens 2024). With all these problems in mind, our conference proposes to revisit current strategies of deletion both in the service of power (however we may define it) and for the purpose of resistance, refusal, or, more radically, as forms of negation of existing power structures. There are efforts across disciplines to showcase both how the current online regime deletes certain memories, histories, subjectivities, and forms of labour (Lingel 2021, Thylstrup 2025) and how creative strategies may rupture or perforate the relentless deluge of images, sounds, and texts (Dekeyser and Culp 2023, Klik 2026). The conference aims to bring together media scholars, artists, archivists, and activists to examine how these opposing dynamics might be understood and mobilised. Instead of treating deletion as a lost or purely technical operation, we ask how it might regain critical relevance. Our aim is to collectively reflect on, and experiment with, infrastructures, methodologies, and epistemologies in which deleting can once again operate as a meaningful cultural and political act. Best wishes, Jiří Anger Jiří Anger British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (2024-2026) School of the Arts Queen Mary University of London https://qmul.academia.edu/JiriAnger Towards a Film Theory from Below: Archival Film and the Aesthetics of the Crack-Up<https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/towards-a-film-theory-from-below-979876510726…> Bloomsbury Academic, 2024 BAFTSS Awards 2025: Runner-Up, Best Monograph Cycles of Labour: In the Metaverse, We Will Be Housewives<https://necsus-ejms.org/cycles-of-labour-in-the-metaverse-we-will-be-housew…> Co-authored with Veronika Hanáková and Martin Tremčinský NECSUS, 2023 BAFTSS Awards 2025: Winner, Best Videographic Criticism

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RESEARCH GROUP - HOW IS AI CHANGING SCIENCE? (HIACS) - FINAL CONFERENCE - PREDICTIVE PRACTICES/AI IN RESEARCH - March 25-27, UNIVERSITY OF BONN, GERMANY
by Andreas Sudmann 02 Mar '26

02 Mar '26

Dear colleagues and friends, From March 25 to 27, 2026, the University of Bonn will host the final conference of the research group “How Is AI Changing Science? Research in the Era of Learning Algorithms (HiAICS)”. The conference is titled: Predictive Practices/ AI in Research The event examines how AI-based methods are reshaping contemporary research practices—particularly with regard to infrastructures, data regimes, and forms of predictive work. Over the past years, the transdisciplinary HiAICS group has investigated how learning algorithms transform epistemic procedures, evidentiary standards, and institutional structures across disciplines. The final conference aims to open this discussion to a broader academic audience and to foster exchange across fields. The programme brings together 25 speakers from climatology, sociology, media studies, history of science, computer science, law, anthropology, mathematics, philosophy, and related disciplines. Keynote speakers are Gabriele Gramelsberger (RWTH Aachen University), Alexander Waibel (KIT/Carnegie Mellon University), and Markus Gabriel (University of Bonn). A panel discussion on the second day will feature Alexander Winkler, Christian Djefall, Gabriele Schabacher, Orit Halpern, Anne Dippel, and Christian Bauckhage. Further information and the full programme are available here: https://lnkd.in/dVTeFeg3 Please note that capacity is limited. Participants who are not registered speakers are required to register by March 17, 2026: https://lnkd.in/d_NiFnAw We would be grateful if you could share this announcement within your institute and among potentially interested colleagues. For further inquiries, please contact: contact.howisaichangingscience(a)gmail.com <mailto:contact.howisaichangingscience@gmail.com> Kind regards, Andreas Sudmann Research Group https://howisaichangingscience.eu/ PD Dr. Andreas Sudmann Scientific Coordinator & Principal Investigator Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn Institut für Sprach-, Medien- und Musikwissenschaft Abteilung Medienwissenschaft Lennéstraße 1 53113 Bonn @asudmann@uni-bonn.de https://www.linkedin.com/in/asudmann/

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