Join the Faculty of Information’s Crosstalk Series, an informal weekly speaker series in which two faculty members discuss their current research, look for common themes and answer questions from the audience. Learn about diverse research in the field of Information, uncover ‘hidden’ connections and encourage crossectoral collaboration within the Faculty. All students, staff and faculty are welcome. Talks will take place on select Mondays from 11 am to 12 pm in BL728, 140 St. George Street (Claude Bissell Building). Light refreshments will be served.
Fall 2023 Crosstalk Series Line-Up
September 18: History and Design: The Past and Potential of Video Games in Interdisciplinary Scholarship
Alan Galey and Velian Pandeliev
Videogames, like other cultural artifacts, cannot be understood from any single disciplinary perspective. A designer may see an opportunity to create a tool that influences the world around them, an historian may see an artifact that embodies the forces that shaped it, and players inevitably make their own meanings. In this crosstalk, we will consider how historical and design approaches both complement and challenge each other, and what we can learn about multi-/interdisciplinary scholarship as we shift our own perspectives.
October 2: Literature and Data Science: Shared Perspectives and Opportunities
Claire Battershill and Rohan Alexander
Storytelling takes many forms, from graphic novels to handmade books, and from graphs and charts to datasets. In this crosstalk we will discuss some of the connections between data science and literary studies.
October 23: Labour and Information: The Tyranny of the Wage Relationship and Possible Alternatives
Rafael Grohmann and Siobhan Stevenson
Understanding the now & new: The conversation will focus on intersections between labor and information, considering new and ongoing forms of exploitation and precariousness of labour, as well as alternative possibilities considering the workers’ point of view. This involves platformization of labour across sectors and the role of information. Around the world, platform labour has intensified historical inequalities in the world of work, including issues of gender, race and migration. In fact, platform labor takes advantage of structural inequalities, such as informality itself, especially in the majority world, to intensify local and global dependencies. But this context is not definitive. On the contrary, in recent years, workers and policy makers have been fighting for alternatives to platform labour, whether in terms of regulation, workers organizing or building worker-owned platforms. Thus, the talk will focus on alternatives for workers towards a fairer platform economy, which considers issues such as tech sovereignty, intersectionality, and fair work principles. The talk will present concrete cases from Latin America, both in relation to workers and policy.
The historic context as a measure of the transformation of work: As a point of historic comparison, it will also reflect on working conditions in a traditional information labour environment: the public library. Ubiquitous institutions, their seeming banality belies a kind of “canary in the mine” reality with respect to historic and contemporary labour conditions. Both as early adopters of information technologies but also publicly funded institutions, the long slow retrenchment of the past 40+ years, and the unraveling of the social safety net can be seen in contemporary conditions (the weakening of collective bargaining power, incremental deskilling, and an exchange of living labour for dead). From a researcher perspective, insights into challenges around access to workers, and pushback from managerial elites combine to make telling a story other than “motherhood and apple pie” difficult.
October 30: Resiliency & Technology in Marginalized Communities
Negin Dahya and Shion Guha
November 13: Affect and Archives
Wendy Duff and Thy Phu
November 20: Intimate Automations
Beth Coleman and Patrick Keilty
November 27: Technologies and Collaboration
Priyank Chandra and Anastasia Kuzminykh
Informal communities around the world find ways to leverage technologies to self-organise and collaborate, often circumventing formal systems. By examining these sociotechnical practices, we can gain practical insights into how communities navigate daily life, especially in the face of differential power relations. Prof. Chandra’s talk will explore the relationship between informality and collaboration, particularly as mediated through technologies.
The growing complexity of intelligent systems creates a promising opportunity for human-technology collaboration. However, the success of this collaboration is predicated upon the ability of humans and AI to effectively communicate, which involves the ability to understand each other and to efficiently present the information to each other. In this research talk, Prof. Anastasia Kuzminykh will focus on human collaborative communication with AI systems and will cover some of the recent work done with the COoKIE group on understanding the role of communication in Human-AI Collaboration.
