AI, Computational Society & Culture
The ‘AI, Computational Society & Culture’ research cluster at the Sussex Humanities Lab aims to build and sustain productive occasions for interaction, collaboration and exchange among those who are thinking about thinking machines within and beyond the University of Sussex.
This SHL cluster brings together humanities and social sciences researchers who are developing critical inquiries into data, automation,
AI and digital media as well as researchers from engineering and informatics who are working on computational technologies, machine learning and AI applications and methodologies.
The establishment of this cluster is predicated on the reflection that such interdisciplinary inquiries are fundamental efforts to understand key aspects of the world and of ourselves and need to be situated alongside questions about knowledge production.
This SHL cluster is an exciting opportunity to foster AI research at the University of Sussex and expand it to involve the humanities and the social sciences as crucial partners in its development.
SHL researchers working in this cluster include (alphabetical order):
Dr Beatrice Fazi, Dr Nimi Hoffman, Dr Kate Howland, Dr Ben Roberts, Dr Justyna Robinson, Dr Ivor Simpson, Dr Julie Weeds, Prof David Weir
PROJECTS IN THIS CLUSTER INCLUDE:
- Automation Anxiety
Automation Anxiety was an AHRC research network which aimed to develop digital methods to analyse contemporary cultural anxiety about automation.
- CEPOL - Communication Power of Politicians in a Digital Age & Consequences for Participation & Democracy
PI: Kari Steen-Johnsen, Institute of Social Research, Oslo
Partner: Klaus Johannsen, Uni Research, Bergen
Partner: Andrew Salway, SHL
Partner: Cristian Vaccari, Loughborough UniversityDigitalization challenges the traditional role of mass media as gatekeepers and distributors of political information in the public sphere. Thus new opportunities open up for politicians to set the agenda and communicate with voters. The CEPOL project will study the implications of this development for representative, deliberative and participatory democracy by studying politicians' agenda setting and framing powers vis-a-vis citizens, and citizens' use of this type of political information.
Funded by the Institute for Social Research
- Concept Analytics
Concept Analytics aims to understand human thinking by analysing conceptual layering in texts. We develop and apply innovative tools and techniques that combine both the distant reading of texts and corpus linguistic techniques to objectively identify suitable targets for analysis and subsequently analyse them. Our ideas embrace Digital Humanities thinking in that big data exploration works best when there is dialogue between different views and layers of data.
- Disrupting Daesh: measuring takedown of online terrorist material and its impacts
This article contributes to public and policy debates on the value of social media disruption activity with respect to terrorist material. In particular, it explores aggressive account and content takedown, with the aim of accurately measuring this activity and its impacts. The major emphasis of the analysis is the so-called Islamic State (IS) and disruption of their online activity, but a catchall “Other Jihadi” category is also utilized for comparison purposes. Our findings challenge the notion that Twitter remains a conducive space for pro-IS accounts and communities to flourish. However, not all jihadists on Twitter are subject to the same high levels of disruption as IS, and we show that there is differential disruption taking place. IS’s and other jihadists’ online activity was never solely restricted to Twitter; it is just one node in a wider jihadist social media ecology. This is described and some preliminary analysis of disruption trends in this area supplied too.
Funded by: Home Office
- Digital Culture and the Limits of Computation
PI: Beatrice Fazi
As the speed and scale of computing expand, and as software becomes more ubiquitous in everyday life, the following question comes to the fore: what, today, can be said to challenge, or even resist, the calculations of computation? This research engages with that question by bringing the notion of ‘incomputability’, as defined by mathematics and computer science, into the cultural theory of digital media. Computing is founded upon the logical discovery that certain functions will never be calculated. In 1936, Alan Turing showed that there are limits to computation, because there are problems that cannot be resolved via algorithmic means. In digital media theory, questions about the limits of computation have become equally important, and are often expressed via renewed critiques of instrumental rationality. These critiques are drawn and developed from established philosophical traditions within the humanities (e.g. phenomenology, critical theory, poststructuralism), which see computation as limited because life, experience and culture can never be fully encompassed by calculation. The two debates, in science and the humanities, are different, yet they are both predicated upon the same striving to understand processes of mechanisation. This project brings the two perspectives into dialogue with one another in order to explore some of the ways in which the limits of computation can be theorised in digital media studies.
Funded by: British Academy / Leverhulme Small Research Grant
- Merchants & Miracles: global circulations and the making of modern Bethlehem
PI: Jacob Norris (SHL)
Archivist: Freja Howat-Maxted
Partner: Leila Sansour, Open BethlehemA two-year AHRC-funded project that uncovers the global movements of migrants from Bethlehem in the 19th and early 20th centuries
- Reassembling the University: The Idea of a University in a Digital Age Selfie Stick Project
PI: David Berry (SHL)
A project examining how the university has become a highly contested space through the creation of networks of relations between devices, bodies, sites, and institutions.
- Sussex Surveillance Group
Current members of the Sussex Surveillance Group: Duncan Edwards (IDS); Gordon Finlayson (HAHP); Paul Lashmar (MFM); Chris Marsden (LPS); Erik Millstone (SPRU); Ioann Maria Stacewicz (SHL); Judith Townend (LPS); Alban Webb (SHL); Dean Wilson (LPS).
The Sussex Surveillance Group (SSG) – a cross-university network established in 2016 – runs a programme of interdisciplinary workshops and seminars that brings together academics from journalism, history, philosophy, geography, law, sociology, criminology, informatics, psychology, politics, international development and digital humanities and Mass Observation. We explore critical approaches to understanding the role and impact of surveillance techniques, their legislative oversight and systems of accountability in the countries that make up what are known as the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence alliance (United Kingdom, America, Canada, New Zealand, Australia), and identify lessons to be learnt by developing countries in the process of building surveillance capabilities. In this, we are motivated by three interrelated concerns. In what ways are surveillance practices changing public, corporate and governmental behaviour and what are the implications for democratic society? How are digital technologies and computational cultures reconceptualising the role and purpose of surveillance in the Twenty-First Century? What effective mechanisms of accountability are available to scrutinize and monitor surveillance activities?
The SSG emerged from two ‘masterclass’ seminars supported by the Sussex Humanities Lab and organised by Dr Paul Lashmar (MFM) and Dr Alban Webb (SHL) in 2016. The first seminar, featuring investigative journalist Duncan Campbell and former NSA Technical Director and whistle-blower William Binney, examined bulk data collection in the context of the UK Investigatory Powers Bill (now Act). At the second, Dr Lina Dencik (Cardiff University) reported on the impact of the Snowden intelligence leaks, three years on.
In addition: the moral implications of personal bulk data collection were explored at a seminar convened by the Sussex Centre for Social and Political Thought; Dr Paul Lashmar is Co-Investigator on the ESRC-funded Data Psst! Network; and Dr Judith Townend (LPS) leads, with Guardian Media Group, research involving an expert group of journalists, NGOs and policy-makers and lawyers, which has led to a report on surveillance and journalistic source protection that was launched in Parliament in February 2017.
- Text Analysis Group (TAG)
The TAG laboratory was co-founded by Professor David Weir and Dr Jeremy Reffin. We have a team of 14 PhD students and research fellows. See here for further details.
TAG is part of a long line of AI research at Sussex, starting in the 1960's. We conduct research in NLP, the analysis of text and language by computers, and apply these technologies to the interpretation of text documents, social media and other communications, working with business, government and others.
- Visualising Uncertainty
Led by Jo Lindsay Walton (SHL) and Polina Levontin (Imperial), in collaboration with the Analysis under Uncertainty for Decision-Makers Network (AU4DM), the Alan Turing Institute, the designer Jana Kleineberg, and researchers from Imperial and Warwick, this project explores the use of visualisation and other perceptualisation methods to incorporate uncertainty information into decision-making. The project has involved workshop days with AU4DM, The Conduit, and Dstl, and the open publication of Visualising Uncertainty: A short introduction (2020).