For generations, we’ve seen the representation of Artificial Intelligence and Quantum technologies evolve in movie theaters and the media — and now it’s part of our everyday lives, from our phones to in our homes. But what is the science, and what is really possible with these technologies? And what’s at stake with humanity?
Join a live taping of the “Ways of Knowing” podcast where we’ll host a lively discussion with one of the podcast’s co-producers and faculty experts from the UW’s College of Arts & Sciences.
Admission
UWAA members and guests: $10 Alumni and friends: $15
Golden M. Owens explores and teaches about representations of race and gender, artificial intelligence, haunting, popular culture, and racialized sounds and voices. Her current book project examines intelligent virtual assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, contending that these aides evoke and are haunted by Black women domestic servants–both enslaved and free–in the United States. The project analyzes popular 20th and 21st-century media depictions of Black female domestic workers, robotic and/or artificially intelligent servants/helpers, labor-saving products and devices, and contemporary virtual aides.
Dr. Owens’ work appears in Sounding Out! and the Journal for Cinema and Media Studies. She has recently discussed her work on the Ways of Knowing podcast and on ASALH TV. Her research has been funded by the Ford Foundation, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation, Northwestern University’s Office of Fellowships, The Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, and The Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities.
Anna Preus studies 20th-century literature in English and data science in the humanities. She is especially interested in how historical print cultures are being transferred online through large- and small-scale text digitization efforts and in how digital resources can help us tell new kinds of stories about literary history. She is currently working on a book titled Publishing Empire: Colonial Authorship and British Literature, 1900-1940, which offers a pre-history of postcolonial publishing in England that is informed by historical data. With Melanie Micir, Dr. Preus is co-editor of a digital edition of Hope Mirrlees’s modernist long poem, Paris, and with Melanie Walsh and Maria Antoniak, she is at work on interrelated projects focused on the capacities of Large Language Models for poetry generation and poetic form evaluation.
Also involved with the collaborative projects Responsible Datasets in Context and the Cultural Analytics Research and Teaching Initiative, Dr. Preus’ work has appeared or is forthcoming in ELH: English Literary History, EMNLP: Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Feminist Modernist Studies, Modernism/modernity Print Plus, and the edited collection Expressive Networks: Poetry and Platform Cultures. Her research has been supported by ACLS, the Mellon Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Simpson Center for the Humanities. At UW she leads the Humanities Data Lab, co-leads the Humanities Data Science Summer Institute, serves as core faculty in the Textual and Digital Studies program, and is a Data Science Fellow with the eScience Institute.
Chris Hoff is the co-creator of The World According to Sound and a freelance audio producer and sound engineer. He has spent more than 15 years working in local journalism in San Francisco (KALW and KQED public radio). He has collaborated on numerous award-winning documentaries, long-form audio pieces, and live radio shows which have aired on NPR, the BBC, and public radio stations throughout the country; and which have been distributed as podcasts via Pineapple Street Studios, OZY, and Luminary Media.
Hoff co-creates The World According to Sound, of which The Washington Postwrites, “each episode contains a neat little story about an evocative, unusual soundrendered in intense aural detail.” He has expanded the podcast into a touring live show;guest lectured at numerous institutions including Brown, UC Berkeley, Cornell, andUniversity of Virginia; and made an online listening series during the Covid-19 pandemic, Outside In. For the last three years he has been publishing the podcast series under the title “Ways of Knowing,” which deals with humanistic research and thought.
About the venue
KALW Public Media is not just a radio station — it’s an experiment in what public media should be. Based in the Bay Area, KALW serves as a catalyst for civic engagement, a home for groundbreaking storytelling, and a training ground for the next generation of media-makers.
