The Digital Humanism TU Wien Lecture Series reminds us of next week’s talk:

Tuesday, February 4, 2024 at 5:00 p.m. (17:00) Central European Time (UTC+1)

Topic: “Misinformation and Social Media as a Historical Process: Insights from the American Experience”
(scroll down for abstract and CV)

Speaker: James W. Cortada (Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota, USA)
Moderator: Susan Winter (University of Maryland, College of Information Studies, USA)

To participate in the talks via Zoom go to: https://tuwien.zoom.us/j/96389928143?pwd=UU5YRkNuRmdoWHV4MFBwMWRCcUErdz09
(Password: 0dzqxqiy)

The talk will be live streamed and recorded on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/digitalhumanism

For further announcements and information about the speakers in the Lecture Series, see https://dighum.org/#latest-news. Please note that you can access the slides and recordings of our past events via that link.

In case you missed the last lecture by Marc Rotenberg you can watch the recording of “After the US Elections: the Future of AI Policy and Digital Humanism”. The recordings of our workshop “A Paradigm Shift in Computer Science?” in November are also available.

See here abstract and cv:

ABSTRACT “Misinformation and Social Media as a Historical Process: Insights from the American Experience”:

This presentation discusses the nature of false or misinformation in U.S. social media. Social media is today widely used by the American public as a major component of its use of the Internet as a whole. It is argued that these collections of facts are similar to those that have existed for over 200 years in this country. The problem of such information is serious, its characteristics are described, and how it is (or should be) dealt with concludes the presentation.

Short Bio of James W. Cortada:

Dr. James W. Cortada is a senior research fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. He is an historian specializing in corporate history, and that, too, of all manner of information since the start of the Second Industrial Revolution of the early 1800s. He is the author of a series of books on information’s history, including Fake News Nation: The Long History of Lies and Misinformation in America (2019) co-authored with Professor William Aspray, Birth of Modern Facts (2023), and Today’s Facts: Understanding the Current Evolution of Information (2025). He also spent four decades working at IBM Corporation in sales, consulting and management. 

Short Bio of Susan Winter:

Dr. Susan Winter, Associate Dean for Research, College of Information Studies, the University of Maryland. Dr. Winter studies the co-evolution of technology and work practices, and the organization of work. She has recently focused on ethical issues surrounding civic technologies and smart cities, the social and organizational challenges of data reuse, and collaboration among information workers and scientists acting within highly institutionalized sociotechnical systems. Her work has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. She was previously a Science Advisor in the Directorate for Social Behavioral and Economic Sciences, a Program Director, and Acting Deputy Director of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure at the National Science Foundation supporting distributed, interdisciplinary scientific collaboration for complex data-driven and computational science. She received her PhD from the University of Arizona, her MA from the Claremont Graduate University, and her BA from the University of California, Berkeley.

This is the last message sent by Hannes Werthner, retired professor at the Faculty of Informatics, TU Wien, on behalf of the Digital Humanism Initiative Committee. He writes:

With this lecture announcement, I would also like to say goodbye to you all as chairman of the steering committee of the digital humanism initiative. I still remember how we started in 2019, it was a long and short journey at the same time. We have achieved a lot – including some institutionalization with our non-profit association. This is the right time to pass the “torch” of the chairmanship to a younger person. I thank Stefan Woltran (Prof for AI at TU Vienna) for agreeing to take over the chairmanship – he will do a great job, I wish him all the best. Finally, our two books (Perspectives on Digital Humanism and Introduction to Digital Humanism, both with Springer) have reached over 1.160.000 downloads Thank you all for supporting our common idea – digital humanism. Let us be optimistic and follow Popper: optimism is a duty – there is no alternative.