On the 5th of December, the TAIGA focus area on Critical, Ethical, Legal and Social AI (CELS-AI) and the Department of Law will host a research seminar on the proposal to give the Swedish Security Service a wider mandate to use AI in processing data, including open data from the web, social media etcetera to discover threats.
The book Critical Theory of AI by Sociology professor and DIGSUM director Simon Lindgren is out now. Approaching artificial intelligence from the often overlooked perspective of critical social theory, the book provides a much-needed intervention on how both old and new theories conceptualize the social consequences of AI.
On the 21th of November, Humlab will host a talk on “Studying platforms when platforms restrict access: Methods for critical digital media studies” by Tim Highfield, University of Sheffield.
On the 24th of November, the TAIGA focus area on Education and AI invites you to a talk on “AI literacy – what and for whom?” held by Linda Mannila, University of Helsinki and Linköping University. The talk is a part of TAIGA’s seminar series #frAIday on different perspectives of AI.
On the 10th of November, Astri Moksnes Barbala, Doctor in Sociology and research scientist at SINTEF, will be giving a talk on “Willful subjects in the platform society: Feminist activism and user agency on Instagram”.
Mathilda Åkerlund has received funding for the project “Men who hate women online: A study of the internet as a new arena for the mobilisation of organised gender-based hate”, in which organized forms of misogyny that are expressed in Swedish internet environments will be analyzed. The project will specifically focus on so-called incels.
Umeå University Department of Law and Odesa I. I. Mechnikov National University Faculty of Economics and Law in association with the Centre for Transdisciplinary AI (TAIGA) at Umeå University invite you to an online seminar on “AI Generated Works – Emerging Models for Regulating Intellectual Property Rights”.
DIGSUM’s research group in Digital Sociology has recently appointed Felicia Lundstedt as a new PhD student.
On the 17th of November, DIGSUM-member Josef Siljebo at the Department of Education will be defending his doctoral thesis “Leading learning through digitalization in Swedish schools – beyond school leaders?”
The TAIGA focus area on Critical, Ethical, Legal, and Social perspectives on AI (CELS-AI) invites any researchers with an interest in the societal implications of AI to a networking event where you can find common research interests, collaborations, or simply reach out with what you are currently working on.
Welcome to partake in the upcoming conference Advancing Research Communication hosted by Humlab on the 11-13th of December.
On the 22th of September, DIGSUM researcher Markus Naarttijärvi will be giving a talk on ”TAIGA and CELS-AI – Making sense of the word-soup that helps you do AI research as a social scientist”.
On the 19th of September, Anne Kaun, professor at Södertörn University and external member of DIGSUM’s research project Programmable Politics, will be giving a talk at Humlab, titled “On Prisons, Welfare Service Centers, and Public Libraries: Interfaces and Backends of the Digital Welfare State”.
DIGSUM at Umeå University invite PhD students to take part in our PhD course “Data Science in Social Media Research” (7.5 credits).
DIGSUM is happy to present a new issue of The Journal of Digital Social Research, our open access journal. Trust, Media, and Science in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic is a special issue, edited by guest editors Donya Alinejad, Adriano José Habed, and Jaron Harambam, with a special foreword by José van Dijck.
Samuel Merrill has received funding for a micro-project called Artificial Intelligence and Social Memory: Critical Explorations of AI’s Implications for Societal Remembrance from Umeå University’s Centre for Transdisciplinary AI (TAIGA).
DIGSUM is happy to present a new issue of The Journal of Digital Social Research, our open access journal. Blockchain Scenes is a special issue, edited by guest editors Nathalie Casemajor and William Straw.
Samuel Merrill will receive NordForsk funding for a three-year project involving researchers from Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland called: PastForward: The political uses of the past in digital discourses about Nordic futures.
Mathilda Åkerlund has recently published an article titled The Sweden paradox: US- far-right fantasies of a dystopian utopia. In this article she analyzes how Sweden has come to be imagined and represented on the websites of US far right organisations.
DIGSUM's Digital Sociology group is looking for a new PhD candidate. The position is fully funded and salaried for four years. The research will be in the area of public opinion dynamics, broadly defined. This includes the study of disinformation and misinformation, and also related phenomena such as conspiracy theories, propaganda, hate speech, and so on. A particular focus for the research is how these forms may occur under societal threats.