{"id":1342,"date":"2025-01-16T21:02:58","date_gmt":"2025-01-16T21:02:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sciencestudies\/?p=1342"},"modified":"2025-01-19T10:58:58","modified_gmt":"2025-01-19T10:58:58","slug":"human-ghosts-in-the-machine-a-talking-sts-seminar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/sciencestudies\/2025\/01\/16\/human-ghosts-in-the-machine-a-talking-sts-seminar\/","title":{"rendered":"Human Ghosts in the Machine: A Talking STS seminar"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Centre for Science Studies is pleased to invite colleagues to join the latest in our \u2018Talking STS<\/a>\u2019 series, in which two colleagues \u2013 one from Lancaster, one from a different institution \u2013 discuss an issue of shared concern.<\/p>\n

This hybrid research seminar will focus on the forms of relationality and sensi(a)bility that go into maintaining software infrastructures. It includes contributions from Paula Bialski<\/a> (Associate Professor of Digital Sociology, University of St. Gallen) and Carolyn Pedwell<\/a> (Professor in Digital Media, Lancaster University). The event will be chaired by Joe Deville.<\/p>\n

The discussion will take place on Tuesday February 11th<\/strong>, 13:00-14:00 GMT \/ 14:00-15:00 CET. Any and all colleagues, from Lancaster and elsewhere, are welcome.<\/p>\n

Carolyn will draw on research<\/a> from her British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, ‘Speculative Machines and Us: Intuition, AI, and the Making of Computational Cultures’. Paula will draw in part on work that has informed her recently published book, published by Princeton University Press, Middle Tech: Software Work and the Culture of Good Enough<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Human ghosts in the machine: On the history and present of sociality in software systems<\/h1>\n

Unless a programmer is working in a brand-new start-up, software developers don\u2019t develop code from scratch. Software projects, especially in older ageing corporations, are built on years and years of work created by other developers. These developers, while building our everyday infrastructures, not only have to make sense of their own code but also so-called \u201clegacy code\u201d \u2013 old lines of code that were written by other developers that keeps existing in the code stack.<\/p>\n

This event looks at the past and the present of working with media systems and the\u202frelational and sensory understanding of software. Developers not only live in a culture of sense-making or \u201cfiguring stuff out\u201d in relation to their current colleagues\u2019 practices but also in relation to years of other developers\u2019 code, or \u201cghosts\u201d of coders who left the company, yet their creative output lives on in the present.\u202fComputing systems also depend on and (re)produce various modes of common sense that entangle historical and emergent cultural, socio-political, economic, and ecological \u2018truths\u2019 about how the world works.<\/p>\n

Software is an \u201cobject subject to continuous change and lived with over time as it evolves\u201d (Cohn 2019, 423), one that does not sit still \u201clong enough to be easily assigned to conventional explanatory categories\u201d (Mackenzie 2006, 18). It is therefore crucial that we understand the complex forms of relationality and sensi(a)bility that go into maintaining our software infrastructures, understanding software as a relational object made up of different worldly ontologies and creative voices of coders who are forced to interact with one another as their software system evolves. Computational common sense, in turn, is a recursively mediated set of relations and a pertinent site of both sociotechnical discovery and \u201cpolitical struggle\u201d (Gramsci, 1971).<\/p>\n

Event details<\/h1>\n