Congratulations to PhD student Julia Jeonghyun Parke, a top 20 finalist in the SSHRC’s 2024 Storytellers Challenge.
This annual contest challenges postsecondary students to show Canadians, in up to three minutes, how social sciences and humanities research is affecting our lives, our world and our future for the better.
For her research, Parke tracks the activities of virtual influencers, computer-generated characters with fictional names, faces and backstories who do the work of social media influencers. Who is making virtual influencers? Why are they doing it? What’s going to happen now that generative AI makes it easy for anyone to make their own virtual influencer? Specifically, Parke investigates why creators tend to make virtual influencers who are young women of colour – especially when many of the creators themselves are male and often of different racial identities.
The top five winners of the 2024 Storytellers Challenge will be announced in May.
Watch Speculating Race: Creator Motivations for Designing Virtual Influencers of Colour on YouTube
Featured News
Alum Albert Tai’s entrepreneurial journey
Alumnus Albert Tai’s Hypercare startup was featured in the Globe and Mail this week as one of four U of T startups that are solving global challenges with innovative solutions. Tai, who graduated from the Faculty of Information in 2017, launched Hypercare that same year, together with Dr. Joseph Choi, an emergency physician and assistant […]
MMST students, alumna contribute to Governor General’s Award-winning exhibit
Students from the Museum Studies capstone course (2022/23) played a key role in creating an exhibit that has just been named winner of the Governor General’s History Award for Excellence in Community Programming. Grace Kovacs, Hanjia Li, Abera Rajendran and Marie Song helped put together “Standing in the Doorway: Lived Histories and Experiences of the Chinese Community”. The exhibit drew on new oral histories, loaned […]
Faculty of Information at ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work
Faculty of Information professors and students will have a strong presence at the 27th ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW) taking place in San José, Costa Rica next week (November 9-13). CSCW is the premier venue for research in the design and use of technologies that affect groups, organizations, communities, and […]
Congratulations to our newest grads!
The Faculty of Information celebrated its newest grads on October 30. A total of 105 Master of Information students received their degrees alongside one Master of Museum Studies student and five PhD students. Congratulations to all 112 of our Fall 2024 grads. Photos from the ceremony and reception are now available to browse and download.