Convergence, Ahead of Print.
This paper is a reflection on the points of convergence between live performance and the media within Indian stand-up comedy. Traditionally, live performance has been seen in opposition to the media. While the former is defined by spatial and temporal co-presence of the audience and spectators, the latter has neither (Auslander, 2012). While stand-up comedy is primarily live, digital and mass media are used extensively by comedians to build a professional reputation for themselves through their presence and participation on social media. However, after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, much of performance art – including stand-up comedy – has moved online. That is, comedians are experimenting with the online media: Zoom, Instagram Live, Facebook Live and so on, to put up live performances that would otherwise have been performed within a comedy club or café. This paper derives its theoretical basis from Philip Auslander’s postulation of liveness in a mediatised culture and digital liveness which ‘results from our conscious act of grasping virtual entities as live in response to the claims [technology makes] on us’ (2012: 13). The paper attempts a theoretical reflection on how to ‘read’ a stand-up comedy performance for pedagogical purposes in these different contexts as the idea of liveness, mediatisation and our experience of the live evolves with time and context.
Category Archives: SAGE Publications Ltd: Convergence:
(De)constructing machines as critical technical practice
Convergence, Ahead of Print.
This paper discusses the role of technology under the framework of Critical Technical Practice specifically in the form of constructing artefacts and deconstructing tools in order to produce what Philip Agre would describe as ‘reflexive work of critique’ (Agre, 1997:155). By presenting the activities and methods used in the teaching and shaping of undergraduate courses, this paper aims to show how technical objects, such as data, datasets, application programming interfaces and machine learning models, can be considered as discursive subjects, demonstrating pedagogical understanding across fields. The courses operate in the humanities tradition and take critical technical practice as a didactic approach, insofar as software and data are understood and manipulated on an instrumental level, while encouraging critical engagement and embodied reflection that bridge the technical and social/cultural domains. Within this pedagogical approach, critical is not only understood as a paradigm of rationality or quantitative, data-driven argumentation, but as adopting a critical position – that is, to research and reflect on the social structures and cultural phenomena entangled with digital objects, bodies, tools, methods and software production. By embracing work-in-progress and reflexive exploration, we aim to extend the notion of critical technical practice by unfolding how (de)constructing machines can be achieved beyond thinking of technology as neutral instrumentalisation. The challenge is how to find a balance, not only as researchers but as educators, unfolding aspects of both formality and functionality as well as questioning and understanding technology at a discursive and critical level. We argue that learning technical practice in an educational setting is not an end, but rather a means to question existing technological structures and create further changes in socio-technical systems.
This paper discusses the role of technology under the framework of Critical Technical Practice specifically in the form of constructing artefacts and deconstructing tools in order to produce what Philip Agre would describe as ‘reflexive work of critique’ (Agre, 1997:155). By presenting the activities and methods used in the teaching and shaping of undergraduate courses, this paper aims to show how technical objects, such as data, datasets, application programming interfaces and machine learning models, can be considered as discursive subjects, demonstrating pedagogical understanding across fields. The courses operate in the humanities tradition and take critical technical practice as a didactic approach, insofar as software and data are understood and manipulated on an instrumental level, while encouraging critical engagement and embodied reflection that bridge the technical and social/cultural domains. Within this pedagogical approach, critical is not only understood as a paradigm of rationality or quantitative, data-driven argumentation, but as adopting a critical position – that is, to research and reflect on the social structures and cultural phenomena entangled with digital objects, bodies, tools, methods and software production. By embracing work-in-progress and reflexive exploration, we aim to extend the notion of critical technical practice by unfolding how (de)constructing machines can be achieved beyond thinking of technology as neutral instrumentalisation. The challenge is how to find a balance, not only as researchers but as educators, unfolding aspects of both formality and functionality as well as questioning and understanding technology at a discursive and critical level. We argue that learning technical practice in an educational setting is not an end, but rather a means to question existing technological structures and create further changes in socio-technical systems.
From tool to tool-making: Reflections on authorship in social media research software
Convergence, Ahead of Print.
Social media research software has come to play increasingly important roles in processes of knowledge production. While epistemological, logistical, legal, and ethical concerns put the spotlight on the software tools researchers are relying on, little attention is paid to the role of the ‘toolmaker’ beyond a vague idea of the ‘power’ wielded by those who design, develop, and maintain these technical artifacts. This paper seeks to address this role, both conceptually and with attention to practical concerns, as a form of hybrid and relational authorship. We thereby shift the focus from tool to tool-making, from artifact to practice, in an attempt to produce a different kind of ‘unblackboxing’ of tools than the somewhat overused tropes of open source code or open data. Our contribution proceeds in three steps. We first address tools and tool-making from a theoretical perspective, suggesting that their epistemological orientation reaches more deeply into the networks of research practice than words like ‘bias’ admit and proposing to consider the specific kind of hybrid authorship that emerges in this context. Calling on our own experiences as toolmakers, we then reflect on a cluster of issues where this authorial function becomes particularly visible. Here, we examine how motivations and commitments orient what a piece of software does and how it does it and discuss tool-making from the perspectives of co-development, maintenance and care, and ethics by design. We conclude by arguing that the most pressing concerns for tool-making lie in institutional arrangements that are crucial for the life of research software.
Social media research software has come to play increasingly important roles in processes of knowledge production. While epistemological, logistical, legal, and ethical concerns put the spotlight on the software tools researchers are relying on, little attention is paid to the role of the ‘toolmaker’ beyond a vague idea of the ‘power’ wielded by those who design, develop, and maintain these technical artifacts. This paper seeks to address this role, both conceptually and with attention to practical concerns, as a form of hybrid and relational authorship. We thereby shift the focus from tool to tool-making, from artifact to practice, in an attempt to produce a different kind of ‘unblackboxing’ of tools than the somewhat overused tropes of open source code or open data. Our contribution proceeds in three steps. We first address tools and tool-making from a theoretical perspective, suggesting that their epistemological orientation reaches more deeply into the networks of research practice than words like ‘bias’ admit and proposing to consider the specific kind of hybrid authorship that emerges in this context. Calling on our own experiences as toolmakers, we then reflect on a cluster of issues where this authorial function becomes particularly visible. Here, we examine how motivations and commitments orient what a piece of software does and how it does it and discuss tool-making from the perspectives of co-development, maintenance and care, and ethics by design. We conclude by arguing that the most pressing concerns for tool-making lie in institutional arrangements that are crucial for the life of research software.
Interface critique at large
Convergence, Ahead of Print.
This article considers how the pursuit of problematization advocated by Agre’s concept of critical technical practice has been articulated in relation to the increasing proliferation of interfaces across everyday life. While the ethos of Agre’s work to bridge the split identity of critique and craft can readily be found in reflexive design or software art, these cases are not always situated within broader ecologies of practice that also grapple with the asymmetries and exploitative aspects of interface design. Drawing from software studies and media theoretical accounts of the interface as a fluid milieu, I provide a navigational matrix to contextualize modes of interface critique at large, namely specifying traps and enclosures, surfacing asymmetries and augmenting alternatives. I argue, finally, that these modes provide an invitation to develop new metacritical theories and common capacities, particularly through the possibilities of grappling with systems of domination otherwise built to prefigure our experiences of them.
This article considers how the pursuit of problematization advocated by Agre’s concept of critical technical practice has been articulated in relation to the increasing proliferation of interfaces across everyday life. While the ethos of Agre’s work to bridge the split identity of critique and craft can readily be found in reflexive design or software art, these cases are not always situated within broader ecologies of practice that also grapple with the asymmetries and exploitative aspects of interface design. Drawing from software studies and media theoretical accounts of the interface as a fluid milieu, I provide a navigational matrix to contextualize modes of interface critique at large, namely specifying traps and enclosures, surfacing asymmetries and augmenting alternatives. I argue, finally, that these modes provide an invitation to develop new metacritical theories and common capacities, particularly through the possibilities of grappling with systems of domination otherwise built to prefigure our experiences of them.
Reproduce and adapt: Homestuck in print and digital (Re)Incarnations
Convergence, Volume 29, Issue 5, Page 1168-1182, October 2023.
Homestuck is a hypermediated webcomic adventure that tells its story through music, animation, gameplay and even the structural features of its Web site interface. But it has also been 1) published in print as a book series and 2) ported to a new host to preserve content that used Flash Player, which is now obsolete. Both print publication and digital port simultaneously reproduce and recreate the first iteration of Homestuck – that is, they do and do not adapt it. This article uses adaptation theory to approach the under-researched question of the transition of a work from a digital format to print and porting. It identifies key sites of adaptation in what might otherwise be called versions and discusses the consequences of changes in medium/mode. The article highlights areas where the interactive mode must be adapted to showing or telling and explores how new interactive modes can emerge from a codex. It argues that Homestuck’s metafictional narratives in particular must be adapted in these new versions because they arise from an interactive relationship with the reader. Because the earlier webcomic has now been wholly replaced by the port, understanding these changes as adaptation allows us to see what is at stake the preservation of digital-born works. Homestuck’s versions show adaptation theory to be a vital lens for understanding the consequences of the differences that arise when multimedia digital-born works are reproduced with other technologies, an occurrence that will only grow more frequent over time.
Homestuck is a hypermediated webcomic adventure that tells its story through music, animation, gameplay and even the structural features of its Web site interface. But it has also been 1) published in print as a book series and 2) ported to a new host to preserve content that used Flash Player, which is now obsolete. Both print publication and digital port simultaneously reproduce and recreate the first iteration of Homestuck – that is, they do and do not adapt it. This article uses adaptation theory to approach the under-researched question of the transition of a work from a digital format to print and porting. It identifies key sites of adaptation in what might otherwise be called versions and discusses the consequences of changes in medium/mode. The article highlights areas where the interactive mode must be adapted to showing or telling and explores how new interactive modes can emerge from a codex. It argues that Homestuck’s metafictional narratives in particular must be adapted in these new versions because they arise from an interactive relationship with the reader. Because the earlier webcomic has now been wholly replaced by the port, understanding these changes as adaptation allows us to see what is at stake the preservation of digital-born works. Homestuck’s versions show adaptation theory to be a vital lens for understanding the consequences of the differences that arise when multimedia digital-born works are reproduced with other technologies, an occurrence that will only grow more frequent over time.
From critical technical practice to reflexive data science
Convergence, Ahead of Print.
In this article, we reconsider elements of Agre’s critical technical practice approach (Agre, 1997) for critical technical practice approach for reflexive artificial intelligence (AI) research and explore ways and expansions to make it productive for an operationalization in contemporary data science. Drawing on Jörg Niewöhner’s co-laboration approach, we show how frictions within interdisciplinary work can be made productive for reflection. We then show how software development environments can be repurposed to infrastructure reflexivities and to make co-laborative engagement with AI-related technology possible and productive. We document our own co-laborative engagement with machine learning and highlight three exemplary critical technical practices that emerged out of the co-laboration: negotiating comparabilities, shifting contextual attention and challenging similarity and difference. We finally wrap up the conceptual and empirical elements and propose Reflexive Data Science (RDS) as a methodology for co-laborative engagement and infrastructured reflexivities in contemporary AI-related research. We come back to Agre’s ways of operationalizing reflexivity and introduce the building blocks of RDS: (1) organizing encounters of social contestation, (2) infrastructuring a network of anchoring devices enabling reflection, (3) negotiating timely matters of concern and (4) designing for reflection. With our research, we aim at contributing to the methodological underpinnings of epistemological and social reflection in contemporary AI research.
In this article, we reconsider elements of Agre’s critical technical practice approach (Agre, 1997) for critical technical practice approach for reflexive artificial intelligence (AI) research and explore ways and expansions to make it productive for an operationalization in contemporary data science. Drawing on Jörg Niewöhner’s co-laboration approach, we show how frictions within interdisciplinary work can be made productive for reflection. We then show how software development environments can be repurposed to infrastructure reflexivities and to make co-laborative engagement with AI-related technology possible and productive. We document our own co-laborative engagement with machine learning and highlight three exemplary critical technical practices that emerged out of the co-laboration: negotiating comparabilities, shifting contextual attention and challenging similarity and difference. We finally wrap up the conceptual and empirical elements and propose Reflexive Data Science (RDS) as a methodology for co-laborative engagement and infrastructured reflexivities in contemporary AI-related research. We come back to Agre’s ways of operationalizing reflexivity and introduce the building blocks of RDS: (1) organizing encounters of social contestation, (2) infrastructuring a network of anchoring devices enabling reflection, (3) negotiating timely matters of concern and (4) designing for reflection. With our research, we aim at contributing to the methodological underpinnings of epistemological and social reflection in contemporary AI research.
Interfering with the black-box-tradeoff model: Gephisto, a one-click Gephi for critical technical practice
Convergence, Ahead of Print.
This paper presents and justifies Gephisto, an experimental tool visualizing networks in one click. Gephisto’s design exemplifies how we can interfere with a user’s utilitarian goals, by giving them what they wish (an easy way to get a network map) but in disobedient ways (the produced map is different every time the tool is used) that encourage them to engage further with the tool’s methodological tenets. As an apparatus, Gephisto aims to incentivize untrained users to become more critical of their network mapping practices. As an intervention into the field of digital methods, it aims to show that tools that support critical thinking do not have to be hard to use and hostile to beginners. We criticize the idea that tools range from easy-to-use black boxes for unreflexive lazy-thinkers, to complex and demanding instruments for hard-thinking experts. We argue that learners need ease of use and critical thinking at the same time, and that it is possible to design tools that support both needs at once. We offer an alternative model where we acknowledge the active role of the user in deciding the tradeoff between learning to master the tool, and progressing toward their utilitarian goals. We argue that the design of the tool should not oppose the beginner’s need for assistance in decision making, but find other ways to incentivize critical thinking.
This paper presents and justifies Gephisto, an experimental tool visualizing networks in one click. Gephisto’s design exemplifies how we can interfere with a user’s utilitarian goals, by giving them what they wish (an easy way to get a network map) but in disobedient ways (the produced map is different every time the tool is used) that encourage them to engage further with the tool’s methodological tenets. As an apparatus, Gephisto aims to incentivize untrained users to become more critical of their network mapping practices. As an intervention into the field of digital methods, it aims to show that tools that support critical thinking do not have to be hard to use and hostile to beginners. We criticize the idea that tools range from easy-to-use black boxes for unreflexive lazy-thinkers, to complex and demanding instruments for hard-thinking experts. We argue that learners need ease of use and critical thinking at the same time, and that it is possible to design tools that support both needs at once. We offer an alternative model where we acknowledge the active role of the user in deciding the tradeoff between learning to master the tool, and progressing toward their utilitarian goals. We argue that the design of the tool should not oppose the beginner’s need for assistance in decision making, but find other ways to incentivize critical thinking.
Climate futures: Machine learning from cli-fi
Convergence, Ahead of Print.
This paper introduces and contextualises Climate Futures, an experiment in which AI was repurposed as a ‘co-author’ of climate stories and a co-designer of climate-related images that facilitate reflections on present and future(s) of living with climate change. It converses with histories of writing and computation, including surrealistic ‘algorithmic writing’, recombinatory poems and ‘electronic literature’. At the core lies a reflection about how machine learning’s associative, predictive and regenerative capacities can be employed in playful, critical and contemplative goals. Our goal is not automating writing (as in product-oriented applications of AI). Instead, as poet Charles Hartman argues, ‘the question isn’t exactly whether a poet or a computer writes the poem, but what kinds of collaboration might be interesting’ (1996, p. 5). STS scholars critique labs as future-making sites and machine learning modelling practices and, for example, describe them also as fictions. Building on these critiques and in line with ‘critical technical practice’ (Agre, 1997), we embed our critique of ‘making the future’ in how we employ machine learning to design a tool for looking ahead and telling stories on life with climate change. This has involved engaging with climate narratives and machine learning from the critical and practical perspectives of artistic research. We trained machine learning algorithms (i.e. GPT-2 and AttnGAN) using climate fiction novels (as a dataset of cultural imaginaries of the future). We prompted them to produce new climate fiction stories and images, which we edited to create a tarot-like deck and a story-book, thus also playfully engaging with machine learning’s predictive associations. The tarot deck is designed to facilitate conversations about climate change. How to imagine the future beyond scenarios of resilience and the dystopian? How to aid our transition into different ways of caring for the planet and each other?
This paper introduces and contextualises Climate Futures, an experiment in which AI was repurposed as a ‘co-author’ of climate stories and a co-designer of climate-related images that facilitate reflections on present and future(s) of living with climate change. It converses with histories of writing and computation, including surrealistic ‘algorithmic writing’, recombinatory poems and ‘electronic literature’. At the core lies a reflection about how machine learning’s associative, predictive and regenerative capacities can be employed in playful, critical and contemplative goals. Our goal is not automating writing (as in product-oriented applications of AI). Instead, as poet Charles Hartman argues, ‘the question isn’t exactly whether a poet or a computer writes the poem, but what kinds of collaboration might be interesting’ (1996, p. 5). STS scholars critique labs as future-making sites and machine learning modelling practices and, for example, describe them also as fictions. Building on these critiques and in line with ‘critical technical practice’ (Agre, 1997), we embed our critique of ‘making the future’ in how we employ machine learning to design a tool for looking ahead and telling stories on life with climate change. This has involved engaging with climate narratives and machine learning from the critical and practical perspectives of artistic research. We trained machine learning algorithms (i.e. GPT-2 and AttnGAN) using climate fiction novels (as a dataset of cultural imaginaries of the future). We prompted them to produce new climate fiction stories and images, which we edited to create a tarot-like deck and a story-book, thus also playfully engaging with machine learning’s predictive associations. The tarot deck is designed to facilitate conversations about climate change. How to imagine the future beyond scenarios of resilience and the dystopian? How to aid our transition into different ways of caring for the planet and each other?
Cynical technical practice: From AI to APIs
Convergence, Ahead of Print.
In this article, we examine how critical thinking, methods and design are used within the tech industry, using Philip Agre’s notion of critical technical practice (CTP) to consider the rise of ‘cynical’ technical practice. Arguments by tech firms that their AI systems are ethical, contextual, situated or fair, as well as APIs that are privacy-compliant and offer greater user control, are now commonplace. Yet, these justifications routinely disguise the organisational, and economic, reasons for the development of technical systems and features. The article considers how different forms of ‘technical critique’ are used by technical practitioners such as software engineers, applying Agre’s work on CTP, AI planning, grammars of action and empowerment to evaluate, and contextualise these justifications. As Agre understood, technical practitioners are not necessarily ‘a-critical’ or ‘uncritical’ in their approach to the design of technological systems or methods, but ordinarily compare the utility or performance of such according to a golden ethic: ‘does it work?’. Drawing on Agre’s studies of AI in the 1990s, the article considers how and what Agre considered to be the ‘Cartesian soul’ of AI research, on linguistic structuralism, and continues to frame much work within the wider tech industry today. Yet increasingly, as the article shows, ‘narrow’ and cynical forms of technical criticality are being used to legitimise, and publicise, corporate strategies of tech firms, whether through the development of AI systems by automotive start-ups such as Comma, or the management of relations with external developers through APIs, in the case of Facebook. Rather than judging the moral character of technical practitioners, however, the article offers an approach – via the work of Philip Agre – to examine how critical thinking is used, and often abused, within and beyond the tech industry.
In this article, we examine how critical thinking, methods and design are used within the tech industry, using Philip Agre’s notion of critical technical practice (CTP) to consider the rise of ‘cynical’ technical practice. Arguments by tech firms that their AI systems are ethical, contextual, situated or fair, as well as APIs that are privacy-compliant and offer greater user control, are now commonplace. Yet, these justifications routinely disguise the organisational, and economic, reasons for the development of technical systems and features. The article considers how different forms of ‘technical critique’ are used by technical practitioners such as software engineers, applying Agre’s work on CTP, AI planning, grammars of action and empowerment to evaluate, and contextualise these justifications. As Agre understood, technical practitioners are not necessarily ‘a-critical’ or ‘uncritical’ in their approach to the design of technological systems or methods, but ordinarily compare the utility or performance of such according to a golden ethic: ‘does it work?’. Drawing on Agre’s studies of AI in the 1990s, the article considers how and what Agre considered to be the ‘Cartesian soul’ of AI research, on linguistic structuralism, and continues to frame much work within the wider tech industry today. Yet increasingly, as the article shows, ‘narrow’ and cynical forms of technical criticality are being used to legitimise, and publicise, corporate strategies of tech firms, whether through the development of AI systems by automotive start-ups such as Comma, or the management of relations with external developers through APIs, in the case of Facebook. Rather than judging the moral character of technical practitioners, however, the article offers an approach – via the work of Philip Agre – to examine how critical thinking is used, and often abused, within and beyond the tech industry.
Digital transformations in a platform society: A comparative analysis of European football leagues as YouTube complementors
Convergence, Volume 29, Issue 5, Page 1330-1351, October 2023.
The prevalence of digital technologies and emerging social media platforms in the 21st century has altered the ways in which individuals and groups produce and consume elite football (soccer). Elite football is no longer consumed merely through ‘traditional’ media as television or radio. By comparing the ‘big five’ football leagues (the first divisions in England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain), this article examines how these leagues have adapted to an algorithm logic (monetization strategies/content strategies) on YouTube. Drawing from data collected (64,247 YouTube videos) using YouTube Data Tools, we argue that the ‘big five’s’ content creation on YouTube work in a complementary manner to ‘traditional’ platforms, allowing for the testing and adaption of their content practices based on instant consumer feedback. This article makes a contribution to the literature on the symbiotic media/sport relationship with its analysis and insights into the digital transformations occurring in a ‘platform society’.
The prevalence of digital technologies and emerging social media platforms in the 21st century has altered the ways in which individuals and groups produce and consume elite football (soccer). Elite football is no longer consumed merely through ‘traditional’ media as television or radio. By comparing the ‘big five’ football leagues (the first divisions in England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain), this article examines how these leagues have adapted to an algorithm logic (monetization strategies/content strategies) on YouTube. Drawing from data collected (64,247 YouTube videos) using YouTube Data Tools, we argue that the ‘big five’s’ content creation on YouTube work in a complementary manner to ‘traditional’ platforms, allowing for the testing and adaption of their content practices based on instant consumer feedback. This article makes a contribution to the literature on the symbiotic media/sport relationship with its analysis and insights into the digital transformations occurring in a ‘platform society’.