Each month, we share our multiple practices around one carefully selected theme. You can see more of the DNS Recap series and sign up to get it in your inbox 📪 at this link.
“Narrative Change Practice” is the theme of the first newsletter. We are providing a platform for people from different disciplines to explore digital narrative shifts.
“Narratives are the stories being told, bodies telling them, and media that shape them.”
Tobias Zuser currently teaches at CUHK, HKBU, and EdU, covering media studies, cultural studies, digitalization, sports policy, and sports management. He suggests that “we need to find new ways of thinking about digital narratives through stories, bodies, and media. Second, we need to transform this knowledge into actionable output”.
“We build nutrition labels like you have for food but for data sets, with the idea being that if you knew more about the data before you use it, you could make better choices about how and whether to use the data.”
Kasia Chmielinski (they/them) is the Co-Founder of the Data Nutrition Project and a fellow at Stanford University focused on building responsible data systems. They gave a talk on responsible technology development last month. In the interview with DNS, they shared their thoughts on data transparency, arguing cultural changes are needed to bring more voices in the process of building datasets.
By urging shifting focus from the harms of AI systems to reimagining alternatives for new infrastructures, and promise of a more humane future, Nishant Shah, Fangyu Qing, and Longhan Wei together write this scouting report to address the biases, falsehoods, subjective opinions, manipulative intentions, that are instilled in AI systems.
This report is in collaboration with the Professorship in Music-based Therapies and Interventions and facilitated by the Stichting Doubleyoutee.
By understanding gossip as an alternative narrative, Xiaoyun Huang presents how gossip in China’s digital space embraced feminist agitations, raised feminist awareness, and launched feminist actions.
Starting from “The Last Mile Problem”, Fangyu Qing changes the narrative of the “last mile” for the state to reach its citizens and reexamines the “last mile” through the lens of people in everyday life, arguing the “last mile” could also be seen as the “first mile” to interact with state power.
Next, we are going to organize a range of events to continuously explore practical ways of shifting the digital narrative and connect different stakeholders to make narrative change interventions.
In March, the AuthEx pillar in DNS will host a week-long in-person fellowship programming where we collectively examine the boundaries and positionality of digital care in the face of online harms.