CALL FOR PAPERS / TALKS
“An articulation is the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time”.[1]
Deadline: Friday 27th January 2023 (11.59pm UK time)
A 2-day single track symposium taking place in Edinburgh on 23rd-24th February 2023, Articulating Data is concerned with interrogating the systems which evidence, process, and profit from our textual and vocal communications in an age of ubiquitous machine learning and AI.
As well as the technologies and devices that capture and monetise vocal data as it is written, uttered and heard, Articulating Data also aims to explore and visualise the resultant reconfigurations of the self, body, home, and received ideas of social and legal relations that are a necessary result of communication in a digital age.
From the privacy and security issues of smart devices such as Alexa or Ring doorbells, to the forensic profiling of voice data, machine translation, accent analysis and the monetisation of linguistic data by social media and search platforms, how articulation is enacted, utilised and controlled is a critical political and ethical concern in terms of accessibility, agency and the (in)security of information.
With keynotes from academia and the critical art world, the symposium will bring together ideas from across disciplines, and provide a platform for early career scholars and artists working in this field.
As part of Articulating Data, we are soliciting papers or talks to be presented at the symposium in Edinburgh in February 2023. Successful applicants will receive honoraria of £300 plus travel and accommodation.
We welcome proposals from scholars and/or activists who seek to explore and critique how articulation – be it textual, (non)verbal, vocal or more-than-human – is enacted in in an age of ubiquitous machine learning and AI, and with what consequence. Papers can be theoretical, practise or evidence based, or a mixture. You will have access to a screen for slides, and are welcome to bring any artefacts that might help illustrate your talk. Please note that for economic and environmental reasons, we can only accept abstracts from the European region.
Topics might include:
- Machine listening & forensic linguistics
- Linguistic capitalism
- Deep fake articulation
- Machine translation & accent analysis
- Vocalisation & AI
- Emojis, unicode & other symbols
- Sign language
- More-than-human communication
- Voice assistants & smart technologies
- Data security, privacy and surveillance
To submit an abstract please click HERE
Application requirements:
- A brief biographical sketch (no more than 200 words)
- Up to 300-word abstract
Timeline:
- Deadline for CFP: 27th January 2023, 11.59pm UK Time
- Decisions: 31st January 2023
- Symposium and exhibition: 23rd-24th February 2023
Articulating Data is led by Dr. Pip Thornton, Chancellors Fellow in GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh, in collaboration with, Dr. Murad Khan, Senior Lecturer in Creative Computing at University of the Arts London, Dr. Andrew Dwyer, Lecturer in Information Security at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Martin Disley, Artist and Researcher at Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh. Please direct any questions to pip.thornton@ed.ac.uk
[1] On Postmodernism and Articulation An Interview with Stuart Hall. Ed.Lawrence Grossberg, 53
pip thornton art & research 