17 March 10.30-17 at Soc&Kom Festsal
The Datafication research programme at the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (HSSH) organises a Datafication Research Festival on Friday 17 March 2023 at the University of Helsinki Centre campus to get to know each other’s work and introduce datafication research at the University of Helsinki to others interested in the field. Sign up for the event here (for catering) by 13 March. You can also follow the programme remotely via Zoom.
Programme:
10.30-12 Opening to Datafication
Keynote: Minna Ruckenstein: How we study datafied life?
Datafication programme directors:
Katja Valaskivi: Datafied Epistemic Contestations
Eetu Mäkelä: Data without Understanding does not lead to Understanding
Emilia Palonen: Doing it all wrong: politics and/in/through social media
Postdocs: Narges Azizifard, Feeza Vasudeva, Dayei Oh: Online Epistemic Communities
Discussion. Chair: Katja Valaskivi
- Lunch -
13.00-14.30 Session on presentations
Vasilis Maltezos (ImagiDem): Bridging Ethnography And AI: Combination and Interchange of Deep Learning and Empirical Visual Analysis Methods to Analyse Visual Political Action
Esko Suoranta (Instrumental Narratives): Fictions of Datafication
Antti Gronow (COMPON): Climate Change Policy, Social Networks and Political Polarization
Xenia Zeiler: Gamification and Gamevironments
Niko Hatakka (MAPS): Platforms on propaganda: How social media companies talk about the problem of public opinion manipulation
Helena Hinke Dobrochinski Candido (AGORA): Datafication in education: reflections on policies and practices
Discussion. Chair: Eetu Mäkelä
- Coffee -
15-16 Panel: Chat GPT and the University
Panelists: Jaana Hallamaa, Petri Myllymäki, Matti Pohjonen, Anna-Mari Rusanen, Arho Toikka
Chair: Emilia Palonen
16-17 Drinks and mingling
The contemporary digital tools we utilize in most aspects of our daily life are not only ordinary tools, but also reversed tools. In addition to us using them, they also use us, collecting data of all possible aspects of human life. This data is used for revenue, governance, and development of AI, but also for profiling, measuring, and nudging our actions. These developments result in continuous changes in social formation and practices of governance that have implications to knowledge production, social interaction, and public communication. Consequently, reconfigurations in the perceptions of human life, sense of communities, belief systems and relationships also take place. These complex, uneven and multifaceted processes are often referred to as datafication.
Datafication can be seen as a techno-social and cultural process in which human life and action are transformed into data. The utilization of this data has profound consequences for patterns of interaction and circulation of information in contemporary societies. The first Datafication Research Festival focuses on the formation, transformation, and perceptions of epistemic communities in the contemporary condition of datafication and brings together research groups working in the field on the Central Campus of the University of Helsinki.