The Digital Humanities Network and the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto welcome Professor Wendy Chun, Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University
to present the Grafstein Lecture in Communications
Wednesday, February 5, 2020: 4:00 – 6:00 PM
University of Toronto Faculty of Law, Room J140
78 Queen’s Park Crescent, Toronto, Ontario
Description: What does recognition mean in an era of pervasive data capture and automatic pattern detection? Tracing the historical move from “pattern discrimination” to “pattern recognition,” this talk unpacks the logic and politics of recognition at the core of systems designed to automatically identify and classify users. It also examines the gap between user interactions, captured actions and algorithmic projections in order to understand how we have become figures in a drama called “Big Data.”
Bio: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University's Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication. She is author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT 2016), and co-author of Pattern Discrimination (University of Minnesota + Meson Press 2019). She has been Professor and Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she worked for almost two decades and where she’s currently a Visiting Professor. She has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania, Member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and she has held fellowships from: the Guggenheim, ACLS, American Academy of Berlin, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She has been a Visiting Professor at AI Now at NYU, the Velux Visiting Professor of Management, Politics and Philosophy at the Copenhagen Business School; the Wayne Morse Chair for Law and Politics at the University of Oregon, Visiting Professor at Leuphana University (Luneburg, Germany), and a Visiting Associate Professor in the History of Science Department at Harvard, of which she is an Associate.
See The Grafstein Annual Lecture in Communications archives to find out information about past lectures, including in some cases a description, the text, or a video of the lecture.
