Future Humanities最新文献

{"title":"Operationalization of (Trans)gender in Facial Recognition Systems: From Binarism to Intersectionality","authors":"Giovanni Pennisi","doi":"10.1002/fhu2.17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/fhu2.17","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In a paper published in 2018, Os Keyes investigated how the literature on Automated Gender Recognition systems (AGRs) conceived gender, finding that 94.8% of the papers treated it as binary, 72.4% as immutable and 60.3% as a physiological component. In the author's view, this is indicative of an <i>operationalization</i> of gender, that is, the assumption that the latter is a discrete and objectively applicable parameter. Keyes claims that such a vision is blind to the performative aspects of gender and particularly dangerous for transgender people. Here I will follow on these remarks, providing several examples that show how AGR systems' failures in recognizing the faces of transgender people are capable of both perpetuating and amplifying gender stereotypes and inequalities. Then, I will introduce the notion of <i>intersectionality</i>, which is the idea that humans ‘sit at the crossroads’ of many physical, social, and political factors, whose combination generates dynamics of discrimination or privilege. I will focus on a subfield of intersectional studies, that is, intersectional stereotyping, which explains how we usually make assumptions and judgments about an individual or group of people based on multiple social identities or categories they belong to, such as their race, gender, sexual orientation, class, religion and ability. I will argue that this area of research provides us with a set of knowledge that might help us rethink and redesign the data sets for AGR. Specifically, I will draw on three key notions of intersectional stereotyping—‘perceiver goals’, ‘category accessibility’ and ‘category fit’—and use them to envision new ways of collecting images for assessing gender through facial recognition. Finally, I will explicate why my observations call for an urgent integration between computer science and gender studies.</p>","PeriodicalId":100563,"journal":{"name":"Future Humanities","volume":"2 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/fhu2.17","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141597122","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Not About U: Social Dissonance at a Land-Grab University","authors":"Richard Finlay Fletcher","doi":"10.1002/fhu2.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/fhu2.9","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Mattin's durational concert <i>Social Dissonance</i> and concept of social dissonance offer compelling devices to understand a central tension within institutions of higher education in settler colonial contexts. As faculty and students increasingly enact and experience forms of decolonial pedagogy in their classrooms, the settler colonial origins and structures of the university remain unchallenged. In the specific case of the ‘Land-Grant’ university system, created through the federal 1862 Morrill Act, the findings of a 2020 ‘Land-Grab Universities’ report describes the extent of their founding on the forced expropriation of Indigenous land and life. This article mixes the settler author's repeated experiences of <i>Social Dissonance</i> at documenta 14, in both Athens, Greece, and its traditional home of Kassel, Germany, and how its institutional and pedagogical contexts translate to a sequence of teaching experiments in his classrooms at a ‘Land-Grab’ university. These experiences and experiments are framed by two failures, both institutional and individual, that offer the author a concrete insight into the concept of social dissonance to understand how different levels of alienation operate through colonial intrusion into educational contexts by an exclusionary settler worldview. At the same time, the author attempts to harness this settler colonial noise-as-device by attuning to echoes of <i>Social Dissonance</i> in the vital work of living, Indigenous artists, and their alternative pedagogical initiatives.</p>","PeriodicalId":100563,"journal":{"name":"Future Humanities","volume":"2 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/fhu2.9","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141439625","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Tracing the Digital Plant Humanities: Narratives of Botanical Life and Human-Flora Relations","authors":"Paul Longley Arthur,&nbsp;John Charles Ryan","doi":"10.1002/fhu2.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/fhu2.15","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this paper, we trace the emergence of what we term the <i>digital plant humanities</i> (DPH) as an evolution of burgeoning botanical interest among environmental and digital humanists. We argue that DPH coalesces the theoretical and methodological frameworks of the three research areas of plant humanities, environmental humanities, and digital humanities. After conceptualising DPH, we analyse three projects representative of the emergent field—the Native American Ethnobotany Database; Herbaria 3.0; and Microcosms: A Homage to Sacred Plants of America—while referring to a broader range of formative projects including the Plant Humanities Lab.</p>","PeriodicalId":100563,"journal":{"name":"Future Humanities","volume":"2 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/fhu2.15","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141424957","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contesting efficacy: Tensions between risk and inclusion in computer vision technology","authors":"Morgan Klaus Scheuerman","doi":"10.1002/fhu2.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/fhu2.12","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Machine learning (ML) methods are now commonly used to make automated predictions about human beings—their lives and their characteristics. Vast amounts of individual data are aggregated to make predictions about people's shopping preferences, health status, or likelihood to recommit a crime. <i>Computer vision</i>, an ML task for training a computer to metaphorically ‘see’ specific objects, is a pertinent domain for examining the interaction between ML and human identity. <i>Facial analysis (FA)</i>, a subset of computer vision trained to complete tasks like facial classification and facial recognition, is trained to read visual data to make classifications about innate human identities. Identities like age (Lin et al., <span>2006</span>), gender (Khan et al., <span>2013</span>), ethnicity (Lu &amp; Jain, <span>2004</span>) and even sexual orientation (Wang &amp; Kosinski, <span>2017</span>). Often, decisions about identity characteristics are made without explicit user input—or even user knowledge. Users, effectively, become ‘targets’ of the system, having no ability to contest these classifications. Surrounding these identity classifications are concerns about bias (e.g., Buolamwini &amp; Gebru, <span>2018</span>), representation (e.g., Hamidi et al., <span>2018</span>; Keyes, <span>2018</span>) and the embracing of pseudoscientific practices like physiognomy (e.g., Agüera y Arcas et al., <span>2017</span>).</p><p>In this short paper, I present several considerations for contestability for computer vision. By contestability, I refer to the agency that an individual has to contest the inputs and outputs of a computer vision system—including how one's data is collected, defined and used. I specifically focus on one identity trait for which to ground consideration: <i>gender</i>. Gender is a salient characteristic to consider given that criticisms of computer vision have stemmed from concerns of both sexism and cissexism, discrimination against transgender and nonbinary communities (Hibbs, <span>2014</span>). Gender in computer vision has largely been presented as binary (i.e., male vs. female) and has been exclusive of genders beyond the cisgender norm (e.g., in automatic gender recognition (AGR) systems that classify gender explicitly [Hamidi et al., <span>2018</span>; Keyes, <span>2018</span>; Scheuerman et al., <span>2019</span>]; in facial recognition systems that fail to properly recognise noncisgender male faces [Albiero et al., <span>2020</span>, <span>2022</span>; Urbi, <span>2018</span>]).</p><p>More specifically, I question whether the efficacy of AI technologies, like computer vision, are the correct pathway to ‘inclusivity’ for historically marginalised identities, like cisgender women and trans communities. By efficacy, I refer to the technical capability of a computer vision system to accurately classify or recognise diverse genders. Inclusivity thus refers to the inclusion of diverse genders in effective classification, rather ","PeriodicalId":100563,"journal":{"name":"Future Humanities","volume":"2 1-2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/fhu2.12","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140895181","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The wicked problem of naming the intangible: Abstract concepts, binary thinking, and computer vision labels","authors":"Delfina Sol Martinez Pandiani","doi":"10.1002/fhu2.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/fhu2.11","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Delving into the intricate complexities of naming and categorizing the visual evocation of abstract concepts, this paper brings to light the limitations of relying on binary thinking to tackle these inherently intricate “wicked problems.” As computer vision applications rapidly expand, the pressing challenge of accurately labeling these abstract concepts in visual media comes into focus, necessitating a close examination of the interplay between visual data, nuanced cultural meanings, and artificial intelligence (AI). This work discusses the role these concepts play in automatic visual indexing, as well as the ways in which they expose how binary frameworks curtail technical performance and perpetuate power dynamics. To address this, the paper draws upon insights from recent cognitive neuroscience research and advocates for a more comprehensive, queer, and situated understanding of these concepts. This approach highlights the significance of humanistic and ethical perspectives in shaping the trajectory of AI development.</p>","PeriodicalId":100563,"journal":{"name":"Future Humanities","volume":"2 1-2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/fhu2.11","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140895180","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Dis-playing gender: From ludic reconfiguration to utopic outcomes in gender-swap apps","authors":"Francesco Piluso","doi":"10.1002/fhu2.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/fhu2.8","url":null,"abstract":"<p>An increasing number of AI-based gender-swap applications have become a popular trend in our social media platforms and communities, rising controversial issues beyond their apparently playful intent. The primary ludic function informing the use/consumption of such apps opens to further signification and valorization of the produced images. In many cases, the portrait pictures, modified through a system of filters, assume an existential and utopic value for (transgender and nonbinary) users who have the possibility to reimagining and reperforming their gender identity. At the same time, the social availability and disposability of such images risk to trivialize the subjective and highly complex process of sexual and gender transition undergone by many people on their own material body in real life. The aim of this paper is to point out the ambivalences and the possibilities opened by gender-swap apps for what concerns the issue of gender identity. Through the analysis of a corpus of promotional messages and users' responses to the gender-swap apps, it is argued that these trans-faces, far from operating a flawless passing from a gender to the other, constantly dis-play the social construction and deconstruction of sexual and gender binary identities.</p>","PeriodicalId":100563,"journal":{"name":"Future Humanities","volume":"2 1-2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/fhu2.8","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140343043","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Machine learning for the history of ideas","authors":"Simon Brausch,&nbsp;Gerd Graßhoff","doi":"10.1002/fhu2.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/fhu2.6","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The information technological progress that has been achieved over the last decades has also given the humanities the opportunity to expand their methodological toolbox. This paper explores how recent advancements in natural language processing may be used for research in the history of ideas so as to overcome traditional scholarship's inevitably selective approach to historical sources. By employing two machine learning techniques whose potential for the analysis of conceptual continuities and innovations has never been considered before, we aim to determine the extent to which they can enhance conventional research methods. It will amount to a critical evaluation of how the advantages of computational in-breadth analysis could be combined with the merits of traditional in-depth analysis in a philosophically fruitful way. After a brief technical description, the approach will be applied to an example: the conceptual (dis)continuity between medieval and early modern philosophy. All the challenges encountered during development and application will be carefully evaluated. We will then be able to assess whether these tools and techniques present promising extensions to the methodological toolbox of traditional scholarship, or whether they do not yet have the potential for a task as complex as the analysis of philosophical literature. The present investigation can thus be seen as an experiment on how far one can go with current machine-learning techniques in this area of research. In doing so, it provides important insights and guidance for future advances in the field.</p>","PeriodicalId":100563,"journal":{"name":"Future Humanities","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/fhu2.6","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50124046","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ecological cosmopolitan citizenship","authors":"Michel Bourban","doi":"10.1002/fhu2.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/fhu2.5","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article investigates the ecological components and implications of cosmopolitan citizenship. Supporters of the model of cosmopolitan citizenship tend to take the natural environment as a background assumption. In contrast, this article argues that if they want to fulfill the demands of cosmopolitan justice, cosmopolitan citizens should also be ecological citizens. The first part highlights that cosmopolitan citizenship relies on two ecological claims: the environmental impacts claim and the environmental precondition claim. The second part addresses two tensions between cosmopolitan citizenship and ecological citizenship: the tension between economic development and environmental protection and the tension between resourcism and strong environmental sustainability. The third part explores two implications of the convergence between ecological citizenship and cosmopolitan citizenship: the interconnection of the public and the private spheres and the move from anthropocentrism to nonanthropocentrism. The objective is to link cosmopolitan theory with green political theory by taking a fresh look at cosmopolitan citizenship.</p>","PeriodicalId":100563,"journal":{"name":"Future Humanities","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/fhu2.5","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50115977","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Valedictory lecture: We are rooted but we flow","authors":"Rosi Braidotti","doi":"10.1002/fhu2.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/fhu2.4","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This is the text of the valedictory lecture that Rosi Braidotti delivered in June 2022, to mark the retirement from her academic position at Utrecht University. It was conceived as a spoken text and written within the rhetorical tradition of valedictory speeches. The text traces the different phases of Braidotti's career in terms of institutional practice and theoretical developments over the last 40 years. Combining academic analysis with deep ethical passion, Braidotti argues for the need of combining critique with creativity, and radicalism with excellence, to highlight the relevance of the new humanities for our troubled world. Ending on a high note of affirmative ethics, Braidotti calls for a more inclusive, diverse and critical practice of the humanities, as a living experiment of what we are capable of becoming.</p>","PeriodicalId":100563,"journal":{"name":"Future Humanities","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/fhu2.4","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50125324","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Human measure and natural fecundity: Mythos and logos in the past and future of the humanities","authors":"Ian Angus","doi":"10.1002/fhu2.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/fhu2.3","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The beginnings of social forms are shrouded in, and justified by, myths which establish both the manifest content of stories and religion. The replacement of myth by logic is never total and the role of logic depends upon the mythic origin that it partially replaces. The form of heritage is constituted in large part by the manner in which intertwining between mythos and logos is structured. Taking the measure of humanitas today means noting, not only the internal articulation of a heritage but those elements of a given heritage which resonate with other heritages. The proximity of Socrates and Protagoras, in Plato's dialogue of the same name, allows us to glimpse a possibility not visible in any other confrontation between Socrates and the sophists: a unity of philosophy and rhetoric in the constitution and heritage of humanism. George Lukács' late, unfinished work, The Ontology of Social Labour, aimed to establish an ontological foundation for the relation between science and religion. In this way, the ontology of labour introduces a new twist into the relation between mythos and logos. One critical comment about Lukács' ontology of labour pertinent to the relation between mythos and logos is that the experience of nature in labour may be more affirmative than the trajectory of classical Marxism allows. The productivity of labour, which increases with social organization and division of labour, is based upon natural fecundity. A human being lives a necessary paradox of seeing human excellence and good in distinction from nature and as part of the nature that surpasses it. The humanities are charged with investigating this paradox in all its forms. Even while inhabiting a given tradition, the mythos/logos complexes of other societies may be approached, listened to, and even understood.</p>","PeriodicalId":100563,"journal":{"name":"Future Humanities","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/fhu2.3","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50136069","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}