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Inaugural Lecture: Too Much or Too Little?

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

For a long time, information was scarce. Messages and letters were transmitted at the speed of human or equine legs. The materials upon which information was inscribed were either too heavy or too perishable to circulate. But by the end of the eighteenth century, as machines took over, not only the means of transmitting information but what counted as information had changed. Knowledge and experience now yielded to the objectivity of information, grounded, for example, ...

TMI Talk: Make a Poem Cry: Creative Writing from California’s Lancaster Prison

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Make a Poem Cry is an anthology from one of California’s high-security prisons brought to us through the creative writing classes of Luis J. Rodríguez. Rodríguez and formerly incarcerated writer Kenneth E. Hartman have selected work penned from 2016 to 2018. These are poems, essays, stories, and more mined from the depths of familial, racial, and economic violence. They are imaginings for how to address trouble and crime without punishment, dehumanization, and violence in return. ...

TMI Talk: The Climate Infowhelm

Zoom

Climate infowhelm is the experience of feeling overwhelmed by too much information about the environmental crisis. Heather Houser will discuss how infowhelm feels, sounds, and looks in various media and how contemporary art manages environmental knowledge and provides new ways of understanding environmental change. Audience Q&A will follow. Heather Houser is the Mody C. Boatright Regents Professor in American and English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Ecosickness ...

TMI Talk: Critical Race Theory (CRT): What It Is, What It Isn’t, and What You Need to Know

Zoom

Critical Race Theory (CRT) seeks to understand why inequality persists in a society that has explicitly condemned racism and has repeatedly adopted laws and policies intended to eliminate it. Drawing on research in history, social sciences, and the humanities, CRT demonstrates how laws and policies can reproduce racial inequality—even when they are adopted without explicit racial bias. CRT is thus an important tool to support our nation’s ongoing efforts to achieve a robust multiracial democracy. ...

TMI Talk: GPS for the Brain: Networks, Urbanisms, Algorithms

Zoom

Laura Kurgan will talk about her recent work involving network science and urban theory. She will present work from the Center for Spatial Research on the Urban History of Algorithms: Homophily and Weak Ties, a history which not surprisingly lies dormant in its use in network science. She will also present new work on navigation theory in neuroscience, which revisits and asks questions about the canonical urban theory of Kevin Lynch (1970) and Fred Jameson's ...

TMI Talk: Creating, Weaponizing, and Detecting Deep Fakes

Zoom

Although varied in their form and creation, deep fakes refer to AI-synthesized image, audio, or video. Deep fakes add to a long line of techniques for manipulating reality, but their introduction poses new risks because of the democratized access to what would have historically been the purview of Hollywood-style studios. In this talk, Farid will provide an overview of how deep fakes are created, how they are being used and misused, and if and how ...

TMI Talk: How Are You? Sentiment, Surveillance, and Anti-Asian Racism

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Sentiment analysis entails the widespread surveillance of users' posts and actions to determine how they feel. This talk outlines the importance of early- and mid-20th-century studies of women workers and Japanese and Japanese-American internees in U.S. WWII internment camps to the rise of sentiment analysis. A reception will follow. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University and leads the Digital Democracies Institute, which was launched ...