::fibreculture:: Digital Life research seminar - UWS

[Ned Rossiter]

Digital Life research seminar

Institute for Culture and Society in conjunction with Digital Humanities 
Research Group
University of Western Sydney

Tuesday 2 December 2014

Time: 11am-4pm

Venue: EZ.2.14 (Elizabeth Macquarie room), Parramatta (South) Campus

11am-1pm: Professor Roger Burrows, Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of 
London

1pm-2pm: Lunch

2pm-4pm: Associate Professor Michael Darroch, Media Art Histories and 
Visual Culture, University of Windsor

Please RSVP to Christy Nguy C.Nguy at uws.edu.au <mailto:C.Nguy at uws.edu.au> 
by 27 November so that catering can be organised.

Speaker 1

Professor Roger Burrows, Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London

Title

‘Living by Numbers? Metrics, Algorithms and the Sociology of Everyday Life’

Abstract

This talk will focus on the role digital data has in restructuring our 
everyday lives. As individuals, we are all too aware of the identities 
created for us by business and commerce based on what, when and how we 
buy. As professionals, we are faced with a growing number of performance 
metrics influencing work targets and strategy. The reactions to such 
data deluges and their possible consequences will be examined in two 
examples likely to be of interest to the audience – city life and 
academic labour.

Bio

Roger Burrows is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of 
London where is also currently Pro-Warden for Interdisciplinary 
Development. He is the author of over 130 articles, chapters, books and 
reports ranging across urban studies, social media, health and illness, 
the body, consumption, political economy and migration. His research 
current interests are in the fields of: the social life of methods; the 
public life of data; the urban consequences of the 'super-rich'; and 
algorithmic power in the academy.

Speaker 2

Associate Professor Michael Darroch, Media Art Histories and Visual 
Culture, School of Creative Arts, University of Windsor

Title

Patterns that Connect: Scholarly Networks across Transatlantic Media Studies

Abstract

This talk traces the largely unacknowledged contributions of Edward Snow 
Carpenter, Co-Director and founder of Explorations as its chief editor. 
 From the 1940s, Carpenter was exposed to anthropological study that 
advocated humanistic, poetic, and artistic approaches to documenting 
cultures and cultural memory through multiple media (photography, film, 
sound, literary and visual arts) and that opposed positivist ideals of 
value-free scientific anthropological research. He was involved with CBC 
radio and television in the late 1940s and 1950s, contributing his 
studies of visual media and indigenous cultures to the very shape that 
media studies would take during this period. He committed himself to 
research and pedagogy crossing the boundaries of media studies and 
anthropology by drawing upon theoretical vocabularies from across 
humanities, fine arts, social and natural sciences. His later media 
experiments among peoples of Papua New Guinea (1969) and his monumental 
re-evaluation of art historian and anthropologist Carl Schuster's 
unfinished analysis of cultural patterns across ancient symbolism (12 
volumes, 1986-88) led him to produce a series of radical pronouncements 
about visual anthropology’s role in creating comparative frameworks 
within broader media and cultural studies, and the interdisciplinary and 
experimental methods needed for studying contemporary culture and 
cultural memory (Carpenter 1975). Carpenter’s emphasis on ‘patterns that 
connect’ different forms of cultural expressivity across space, time, 
and media lends itself in particular to the creation of a digital archive.

Bio

Associate Professor Michael Darroch teaches in Media Art Histories and 
Visual Culture, School of Creative Arts, University of Windsor. He holds 
a PhD form McGill University in Art History and Communication Studies. 
He is currently a Visiting Fellow, Centre for the Study of Cultural 
Memory, Institute for Modern Languages Research, University of London. 
His most recent publications include Cartographies of Place: Navigating 
the Urban, co-edited with Janine Marchessault (McGill-Queen’s University 
Press, 2014). He was recently awarded a successful SSHRCH Insight Grant 
for a project titled, Patterns the Connect: Re-Curating Edmund 
Carpenter’s Anthropological Media Studies, 2012-16.

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