Lecture
LUCDH Lunchtime Speaker Series: One Among Zeroes: AI, Islam and what computational analysis can teach us about religious futures
- Date
- Wednesday 7 December 2022
- Time
- Location
- On Campus: Digital Lab P.J. Veth 1.07 / Online: Kaltura Live Rooms
- Room
- Please register via lucdh@hum.leidenuniv.nl
One Among Zeroes: AI, Islam and what computational analysis can teach us about religious futures
Join us for our next LUCDH lunchtime talk presented by Prof. dr. Bart Barendregt and Dr. Reza Ardekani on Wednesday, 7 December 2022 at 12:00 – 13:00 (CEST).
The One Among Zeroes |0100| Project investigates the Islamic Information Society’s most debated component – artificial intelligence – with multimodal and mixed methods, comparing and contrasting narratives and imagery of AI-religious-futures in the national settings of Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore, each with a considerable yet differently positioned Muslim population. |0100| delivers salient ethnographic evidence, but also probes big and ‘thick’ data to analyse what digital everyday religion is like, how Southeast Asians use AI in everyday life, and how digital technology contributes to exciting societal experiments and ethical dilemmas.
In our talk we will provide the larger framework of the |0100| Project, presenting its overarching questions and methods to next zoom in on the computational component of our research. With automated text-analysis we analyze two different kinds of texts: social media content such as blogs, posts, tweets, and mainstream media content such as newspapers and journals. Thus, we aim to address the question if ‘folk’ notions from user-generated-content differ from ‘established’ notions in mainstream media?
As Twitter is commonly used in the Southeast Asian tech-scene, we will use R libraries to scrape tweets, thus mapping ‘conversational networks’ to see how Southeast Asian users of Twitter, over the years, have been talking about AI, with whom and how their everyday encounters with technology, may have shaped AI-related futures.
We similarly explore the legacy of AI debates in Muslim Southeast Asia through critical discourse analysis to identify future-making practices of the past in archive documents (predictions, jokes, religious fears surrounding AI), but also popular culture products (Islamic-flavoured and Sci-fi films, novels), policy papers, religious and technology journals in Malay, Indonesian and English in the Leiden University Asia Libraries repositories.
Bart Barendregt is scientific director of the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (CADS) and a professor and UNESCO Chair of Digital Diversity. He is also Principal Investigator of the NWO-VICI project One Among Zeroes |0100| Towards an Anthropology of Everyday AI in Islam.
Reza Shaker Ardekani teaches mixed methods and urban sociology at CADS. He holds a PhD in Cultural Geography from the University of Groningen and in his dissertation he focussed on the (re)construction of the Muslim Other within the everyday urban spaces in Amsterdam. He is currently a postdoc in the |0100| Project.
Location: On-campus in the Digital Lab P.J. Veth 1.07 or Online via Kaltura Live Rooms.
To Register: Please email: lucdh@hum.leidenuniv.nl
We very much hope that you can join colleagues on campus in the Digital Lab in P.J. Veth 1.07. However, we will also be live-streaming on Kaltura, so please let us know if you will be attending in person or would like Kaltura Live Room login details.