Are scientific memes inherited differently from gendered authorship?

This paper seeks to build upon the previous literature on gender aspects in research collaboration and knowledge diffusion. Our approach adds the meme inheritance notion to traditional citation analysis, as we investigate if scientific memes are inherited differently from gendered authorship. Since authors of scientific papers inherit knowledge from their cited authors, once authorship is gendered we are able to characterize the inheritance process with respect to the frequencies of memes and their propagation scores depending on the gender of the authors. By applying methods that enable the gender disambiguation of authors, missing data on the gender of citing and cited authors is dealt with. Our empirically based approach allows for investigating the combined effect of meme inheritance and gendered transmission. Results show that scientific memes do not spread differently from either male or female cited authors. Likewise, the memes that we analyse were not found to propagate more easily via male or female inheritance.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Researchers collaborate with same-gendered colleagues more often than expected across the life sciences

Evidence suggests that women in academia are hindered by conscious and unconscious biases, and often feel excluded from formal and informal opportunities for research collaboration. In addition to ensuring fairness and helping to redress gender imbalance in the academic workforce, increasing women's access to collaboration could help scientific progress by drawing on more of the available human capital. Here, we test whether researchers tend to collaborate with same-gendered colleagues, using more stringent methods and a larger dataset than in past work. Our results reaffirm that researchers co-publish with colleagues of the same gender more often than expected by chance, and show that this 'gender homophily' is slightly stronger today than it was 10 years ago. Contrary to our expectations, we found no evidence that homophily is driven mostly by senior academics, and no evidence that homophily is stronger in fields where women are in the minority. Interestingly, journals with a high impact factor for their discipline tended to have comparatively low homophily, as predicted if mixed-gender teams produce better research. We discuss some potential causes of gender homophily in science.Peer reviewe

PLOTINA FIinal Conference Book of Abstracts. Regendering Science for an Inclusive Research Environment.

This E-book is a result of the H2020 PLOTINA project Final Conference, ReGendering Science. For an inclusive research environment, held in the Università di Bologna (27th-28th of January 2020, https://www.plotina.eu/plotina-final-conference/). It includes the abstracts selected thanks to the call for abstracts that the Consortium – in collaboration with scholars from different European institutions – launched in October 2019. PLOTINA: Promoting gender balance and Inclusion in Research Innovation and Training (G.A. 666008) aimed at identifying and addressing the obstacles hampering gender equality in Research Performing Organizations

World Literature and Dissent

World Literature and Dissent reconsiders the role of dissent in contemporary global literature. Bringing together scholars of world and postcolonial literatures, the contributors　explore the aesthetics of resistance through concepts　including　the epistemology of ignorance, the rhetoric of innocence, the subversion of paying attention, and the radical potential of everydayness.　　 　 Addressing a broad range of examples, from the　Maghrebian　humanist Ibn Khaldūn to India’s Facebook poets and examining writers such as Langston Hughes, Ben　Okri, Sara Uribe, and Merle Collins, this highly relevant book reframes the field of world literature in relation to dissenting politics and aesthetic.　 It asks the urgent question:　how critical practice might　cultivate　radical thought, further social justice, and value human expression

Book review of " Giuseppina Pellegrino and Alessandro Mongili (eds.) Information Infrastructure(s): Boundaries, Ecologies, Multiplicity, Cam- bridge, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014, pp. 337"

book revie

Video Games for Earthly Survival: Gaming in the Post-Anthropocene

In this paper I evaluate the sixth mass extinction on planet Earth, and its implications for the medium of the video game. The Anthropocene, a term popularized by the end of the 20th century to refer to the geological impact of human beings on planet Earth, assumes temporal development, a ‘before’ and ‘after’ the appearance of humankind. The ‘after’ period, the Post-Anthropocene, is repeatedly claimed by scientists to be approaching within the next few decades, as over-consumption is destroying vital resources of the planet. Allegedly, the sixth mass extinction in the history of our planet is already unfolding, and might determine the disappearance of life from Earth and, as far as we know, from the Universe and beyond. Video games responding to the arrival of the future is not just imagined in fictional settings (e.g. The Legenda of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Nintendo, 2000; Horizon: Zero Dawn, Guerrilla Games, 2017), but within game design. In the last decade an increasing number of video games requiring limited human intervention has been released. Incremental/ idle games such as Cookie Clicker (Julien Thiennot, 2013) and AdVenture Capitalist (Hyper Hippo Productions, 2014) require an initial input from the player to start, and then keep playing themselves in the background operations of a laptop or smartphone. Virtual environments can be entirely designed by algorithms, as experimented by Hello Games for No Man’s Sky (2016). Artificial Intelligence is also used to play games. Screeps, a massive-multiplayer online game, requires players to program an AI that will play the game in their place, and which will “live within the game even while you are offline” (Screeps Team, 2014). Ghost cars in racing games replace the human actor with a representation of their performance. The same concept is further explored by the Drivatar of the Forza Motorsport series (Microsoft Studios, 2005-2017), which simulates the driving style of the player and competes online against other AI-controlled cars. These are only some of the examples that suggest that human beings are becoming peripheral in the act of playing games. In short, it is probably becoming ‘easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of gaming’. While studies on games with no players, and on the non-human side of gaming, have been proposed in the past, my presentation takes a non-normative and non-systemic approach to the study of games for the Post-Anthropocene. I am concerned with the creative potential of the paradoxes, spoofs, and contradictions opened by games that take Man/Anthropos as being no longer at the centre of ‘interaction’, ‘fun’, and many other mythological aspects of digital gaming. Nonhuman gaming questions the historical, political, ecological and even geological situatedness of our knowledge on games and gamers, interaction and passivity, life and death

The Paranoiac-Critical Method of Reflectance Transformation Imaging

A performative talk examining Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), an open source computational photographic process that is transforming methodologies in archaeology and heritage conservation for its ability to interactively re-light artefacts within a virtual hemisphere of illumination and extrude a digital topography that is hyper-legible in space-time, from its contemporary application in facial recognition via Bertrand Tavernier's 1980 science fiction film La Mort en Direct and a return of the death mask through digital extrusion, ultimately locating a progenitor of the heightened objectivity promised by RTI paradoxically in Surrealist photography and the fugitive facialities of Salvador Dali's Paranoiac-Critical Method. As emerging imaging technologies such as RTI are seen to open novel ways of extracting latent data from historical artefacts, reassembling objects of study in a new (virtual) light, collateral opportunities provided by these technologies to re-enter archival still and moving image recordings inadvertently recalibrate their spatio-temporal ground and destabilise their indexical reading through an excessive production of new traces and signs. If methodologies can be seen to play a significant role in constructing their objects of study, then emerging computational imaging operations such as RTI have their own subjectivities to disclose: In performing a media archaeology of this digital process, the talk proposes that we not only narrate the subjects of our study but the very tools of investigation themselves

World Literature and Dissent

World Literature and Dissent reconsiders the role of dissent in contemporary global literature. Bringing together scholars of world and postcolonial literatures, the contributors　explore the aesthetics of resistance through concepts　including　the epistemology of ignorance, the rhetoric of innocence, the subversion of paying attention, and the radical potential of everydayness.　　 　 Addressing a broad range of examples, from the　Maghrebian　humanist Ibn Khaldūn to India’s Facebook poets and examining writers such as Langston Hughes, Ben　Okri, Sara Uribe, and Merle Collins, this highly relevant book reframes the field of world literature in relation to dissenting politics and aesthetic.　 It asks the urgent question:　how critical practice might　cultivate　radical thought, further social justice, and value human expression