This spring, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun will join CAHI’s Distinguished Scholar series to give a talk titled “Roadblocks as Opportunities: Working Across Disciplines to Counter Polarization and Mis-Information.”
Chun’s talk will outline projects led by Simon Fraser University’s Digital Democracies Institutes that analyze and counter the proliferation of online “echo chambers," and mis/disinformation by integrating research in the humanities, social and data sciences. In particular, the talk will discuss how moving from factuality to authenticity opens avenues into understanding the spread of "fake news.”
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University, is at the forefront of contemporary Critical Data Studies and digital humanities. Her pioneering research sheds light on discriminatory algorithms, as well as the spread of misinformation, and abusive language, in network analytics and big data. As leader of Simon Fraser’s Digital Democracy Group, she oversees research that seeks to combat discrimination online by fostering democratic exchange and developing methods for creating effective online counterspeech.
Chun is the author of Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (2016), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (2011), Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (2006), and numerous other publications. Her new book, Discriminating Data, comes out this fall from MIT Press. Her work has been recognized with fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, ACLS, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, among other organizations.
The College of Arts