New Books in Technology

New Books Network

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

  1. 14時間前

    Marnie Hughes-Warrington, "Artificial Historians" (Routledge, 2025)

    I spoke with Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington about her 2026 book Artificial Historians, co-authored with Anne Martin and Lewis Yarlupurka O’Brien. A distinguished historian, philosopher, academic leader, and Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) based at the University of Adelaide, my guest explores how the logic of history, defined around trivalent logic (the “maybes,” the “ifs,” the ontological uncertainties), intersects with and challenges the logic of dominant AI algorithms. The book raises urgent questions about the changing status of human agency, the ethics of AI-powered data collection about us, and the de facto histories that AI is writing about us every second—histories that may decide whether we can travel, access education, or receive medical care. We talk about the opportunities that this perspective on AI presents to humans (and historians in particular!), how some non-Western conceptions of history—for instance, those of the Indigenous nations of Australia—complicate the dominant Western understanding of what history is, and the challenges we must address as we hand over more and more data and delegate the writing of actual human histories to AI. Aristotle makes a cameo, and my guest talks about how the economy might be shifting from knowledge bias to ethics bias. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

  2. 1日前

    Xiaochang Li, "Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

    Since the advent of computers, society has fantasized about conversing with machines. In Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2026), Dr. Xiaochang Li shows readers how that dream both fueled the demand for data and set the stage for today’s generative AI.  With original research and clear explanations, Dr. Li elucidates the origins of what’s known as natural language processing (NLP) and the heated twentieth-century debates between computer scientists, linguists, and communication engineers that shaped today’s technology. Starting with early devices that recorded, analyzed, and attempted to interpret human speech, she demonstrates how computer speech recognition, particularly efforts led by Bell Labs and IBM, advanced technology by deemphasizing linguistic meaning in favor of statistical prediction. In other words, researchers gradually abandoned systems that sought to understand human language, opting instead for work-arounds that simply predicted patterns in speech and text data. That solution became incredibly and surprisingly adaptable. As Dr. Li reveals, transforming linguistic questions into engineering ones ushered in the routine operation of search engines, spam filters, and the varied content sorting and recommendation mechanisms that regulate the access, circulation, and legitimacy of information across every platform. But this has all come at the cost of forever requiring copious and ever-growing amounts of new data. At its core, Divination Engines illuminates how the artifacts of human communication—speech, text, and images—have become both the fodder for and products of computers. This connection between communication and computation, Li shows, has given rise to data-driven analytics, machine learning, and today’s algorithmic culture. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

  3. 3日前

    Special Episode: Accounting for Computing, or Why We So Badly Need a New Social and Economic History of Everyday Digital Technology Use

    This special episode features a short talk Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, gave at the Jefferson Scholars Foundation in Charlottesville, Virginia. The event featured a great mix of historians and Science and Technology Studies scholars and was organized by Jacob Bruggeman, who recently finished his dissertation on the politics of computer hackers at Johns Hopkins University and is now headed to a job at Ohio State University. Thanks to Jacob for putting the event together and hearty congratulations on his accomplishments. In the talk, Vinsel argues that we are missing a synthetic social and economic history of how our adoption and use of digital technologies over the past fifty years has affected everyday life in many social spheres, including work, religion, politics, schools, and family life. He also points to some exemplary scholars who have laid some initial groundwork on these topics and gives some suggestions for primary and secondary sources we can use to do this work. Most of all, the talk is an open invitation to collective work - because doing this project well goes far beyond what any individual can do alone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

  4. 8月23日

    Seth C. Lewis, Rodrigo Zamith, and Tomás Dodds, "Journalism in the Age of AI: From Acceleration to Reimagination" (Polity, 2027)

    What if AI’s biggest impact on journalism isn’t replacing journalists, but forcing us to rethink what journalism is for? In this episode, Joanne Kuai speaks with Seth C. Lewis, Rodrigo Zamith, and Tomás Dodds, authors of Journalism in the Age of AI: From Acceleration to Reimagination (Polity, 2027). For decades, journalism has been caught on a “hamster wheel” of acceleration: producing more stories, for more platforms, with fewer resources. AI promises even greater efficiency, but is doing more with less really what journalism needs? Lewis, Zamith, and Dodds argue that the current AI moment offers something more consequential: an opportunity to reimagine journalism itself. The conversation explores what remains distinctly human about journalism when machines can increasingly perform creative and cognitive tasks; how dependence on AI companies and digital infrastructure is reshaping media power; what AI means for journalism education and human judgement; and whether journalism can harness these technologies in ways that strengthen, rather than erode, its democratic purpose. The conversation also raises a more fundamental question: is preserving journalism as an institution the goal, or should we rethink how society meets its information needs altogether? Journalism in the Age of AI is available open access. Learn more and access the book here. About the authors Seth C. Lewis is the inaugural Elcan Jefferson Scholars Foundation Distinguished Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Previously, he was the founding holder of the Shirley Papé Chair in Emerging Media and Director of Journalism at the University of Oregon. In his research, Lewis examines the social implications of emerging technologies and their consequences for news and public life. Rodrigo Zamith is an Associate Professor and former Chair of the Journalism Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of journalism and technology, with a focus on understanding the social implications of emerging technologies for how news is produced, distributed, and consumed. He is a recipient of UMass’ Distinguished Teaching Award. Tomás Dodds is an Assistant Professor in Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Director of its Public Tech Media Lab. His research examines the evolving relationship between journalism and technology, with a focus on how journalists and media organizations can develop open-source tools and artificial intelligence systems that serve the public interest. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

  5. 8月20日

    Jeff Jarvis, "Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

    Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad (Bloomsbury, 2026) is the epic story of the magnificent 19th-century machine that rendered Gutenberg's movable type obsolete and opened the portal to the long century of mass media. The Linotype mechanized the 400-year-old process of setting type one laborious letter at a time, and thus ignited an explosion of newspaper, book, and magazine empires.This is a tale populated with wondrous characters: tragic inventors, malign media moguls, hand-typesetters called the Swifts who turned their craft into a spectator sport, and authors and journalists who chronicled the turmoil of their time, their every word molded into metal type by what some viewed as a thinking machine. This revolution in media technology helped to propel Mark Twain into literary celebrity, but it also cost him his fortune – as well as his sense of humor and optimism.The era of the Linotype was a bridge between Twain's Gilded Age with its tycoons of steam, steel, and wire and today's Gilded Age with its barons of bits and AI. Its history provides an opportunity to reflect on how technology changes culture just as new technologies – the internet and artificial intelligence –manufacture their endless streams of words today. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

  6. 8月17日

    Jehnie Burns on Mixtape Culture

    Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with writer and researcher, Jehnie I. Burns about her book, Mixtape Nostalgia: Culture, Memory, and Representation (Lexington, 2023). This conversation builds on earlier ones on music and technology, especially our earlier episode with Anthony Kwame Harrison about the ethnography of hiphop. Vinsel and Burns chat about the rise of mixtape culture, how it played out in different subcultures, and how it was wrapped up in and transformed by technological change. We also announce some big news at the beginning of the episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

  7. 8月15日

    Aarthi Vadde, "We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature (Columbia UP, 2026)

    We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature (Columbia University Press 2026) by Aarthi Vadde is a groundbreaking account of mass writing in the twenty-first century, identifying rarely recognized forms of literary possibility amid the profound upheavals in traditional publishing. Aarthi Vadde examines the explosion of textuality across digital platforms: countless writers, diverse publishing formats, and vast communities of readers responding to stories publicly and instantly. Countering ubiquitous decline narratives, she offers powerful examples of literary innovation, adaptation, and survival. Among them are Jonathan Lethem and Lauren Oyler’s challenges to individualist ideas of authorship, the Twitter fiction of Jennifer Egan and Teju Cole, Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman’s collaborative writing on Wattpad, conceptual projects like Book from the Ground, and the experimental use of chatbots by authors including Sheila Heti. Through nuanced and illuminating readings, We the Platform shows how platform-based writing has altered cornerstone concepts of authorship, aesthetic form, and craft, delivering a bold new understanding of literature now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

  8. 8月9日

    Beyond Free Speech: Why AI Governance Demands Freedom of Thought

    Are we driving our technology, or is it starting to drive us? In this thought-provoking conversation, Eli Karetny sits down with researcher and author Eduardo Albrecht to explore the invisible, rapidly encroaching frontier of AI governance and data surveillance.Moving far beyond traditional debates about data privacy, Albrecht warns of a near future where the state and corporate partners bypass human speech entirely, relying instead on "sentiment detection" to ascribe thoughts and make decisions that impact our physical lives. Together, they trace the historical trajectory of control—from early fingerprinting and eugenics to modern biometrics and neural implants—and challenge the modern illusion of state efficiency at the expense of human agency.Tune in for a deep dive into the two fundamental rights required to safeguard the future of democracy: absolute transparency over our data, and an evolving, radical defense of our collective freedom of thought. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

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予告編

番組について

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

情報

  • クリエイター
    New Books Network
  • 配信期間
    11年 - 26年
  • エピソード
    1129
  • 制限指定
    不適切な内容を含まない
  • Copyright
    © New Books Network
  • 番組のWebサイト
    New Books in Technology

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