Luke Stark
Biographic Data
| ID | 117687 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Luke Stark |
| GIVEN NAMES | Luke |
| FAMILY NAME | Stark |
| SIGNATURE | STARK L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Dartmouth College |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2537-846X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 120 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 16 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
A Conversation About Generative Artificial Intelligence
This is a wide-ranging conversation on the ways that generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) is changing history and historical disciplines. Topics covered include the impact of gen AI on historical practice, its effects on archival research, the ethics of its use, strategies for combating biases, and inclusivity. The participants are Canadian scholars chosen based on their prior publications about AI and history. They represent a range of di…
(Un)stable diffusions
Generative AI is a uniquely public technology. The large language models behind ChatGPT and other tools that generate text and images is a major develop in publicity as much as technology. Without public data and public participation, these large models could not be trained. Without the attention, hype, and hope around these technologies, the big AI firms probably could not afford the computational costs to train these models. Our special issue q…
Artificial intelligence and the conjectural sciences
Drawing on prior work in the history and philosophy of statistics, I argue that in many cases analyses powered by artificial-intelligence (AI) techniques such as machine learning (ML) are fundamentally 'conjectural': reliant on ex post facto abductive logics often misinterpreted in contemporary machine-learning systems as reliably reproducible truth. Here I relate what Carlo Ginzburg calls 'the conjectural sciences' as a historical category to th…
Breaking Up (with) AI Ethics
The ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) have become a matter of public concern. According to a recent Stanford report, the number of research papers in the area given at major conferences such as the annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems has increased fivefold since 2014, and ethics officers now abound at global technology firms (Moss and Metcalf 2020). Such major institutions as the US government, the United Nations, and …
Measurement of the Equality of the Drug Welfare Induction Level of Chinese Patients With Chronic Diseases in Gansu, Sichuan, Hebei, and Zhejiang Based on the Bivariate Theil-T Index Method
Objectives: This study aimed to measure the induction level of drug welfare in Chinese patients with chronic diseases using a bivariate Theil index. Design: The bivariate Theil-T index was used to hierarchically decompose the relevant survey data, and the contribution rate of the intragroup gap and the intergroup gap to the total gap was investigated to better understand the current drug welfare induction level of Chinese patients with chronic di…
The emotive politics of digital mood tracking
Through a values in design (VID) analysis, this article assesses two mood-tracking apps (Moodscope and MoodPanda) to argue the particular interface design choices of these applications serve to influence their users’ sense of sociality and self-fashioning. The design features of these artifacts signal a broader shift in the sociotechnical definitions and discourses of the feeling of an individual, enabling an emergent emotive politics at work acr…
Better, Nicer, Clearer, Fairer
This paper uses frame analysis to examine recent high-profile values statements endorsing ethical design for artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML). Guided by insights from values in design and the sociology of business ethics, we uncover the grounding assumptions and terms of debate that make some conversations about ethical design possible while forestalling alternative visions. Vision statements for ethical AI/ML co-opt the langu…
Data Is the New What? Popular Metaphors & Professional Ethics in Emerging Data Culture
A growing list of high-profile controversies involving the social impacts of ar- tificial intelligence systems (AI), digital data collection and algorithmic analy- sis have forced difficult conversations around the ethics of data-intensive digi- tal technologies and so-called “big data” research.These incidents are directly relevant to newly coalescing cultures of “data science,” an emergent field which seeks both to interpret and capitalize on t…
The Work of Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Problematic use of data, patterns of bias emerging in AI systems, and the role of platforms like Facebook and Twitter during elections have thrown the issue of data ethics into sharp relief. Yet the focus of conversations about data ethics has centered on computer scientists, engineers, and designers, with far less attention paid to the digital practices of artists and others in the cultural sector. Artists have historically deployed new technolo…
Desanctifying the charisma of numbers
In 1890, the British psychologist and statistician Sir Francis Galton was asked to contribute to an article in the journal Mind. That article, written by American psychologist James McKeen Cattell
Facial recognition, emotion and race in animated social media
Facial recognition systems are increasingly common components of commercial smart phones such as the iPhone X and the Samsung Galaxy S9. These technologies are also increasingly being put to use in consumer-facing social media video-sharing applications, such as Apple’s animoji and memoji, Facebook Messenger’s masks and filters and Samsung’s AR Emoji. These animations serve as technical phenomena translating moments of affective and emotional exp…
Algorithmic psychometrics and the scalable subject
Recent public controversies, ranging from the 2014 Facebook 'emotional contagion' study to psychographic data profiling by Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 American presidential election, Brexit referendum and elsewhere, signal watershed moments in which the intersecting trajectories of psychology and computer science have become matters of public concern. The entangled history of these two fields grounds the application of applied psychological t…
The surveillant consumer
We argue that modern technical and social infrastructures of surveillance have brought a novel subject position to prominence: the surveillant consumer. Surveillance has become a normalized mode of interpersonal relation that urges the person as consumer to manage others around her using surveillant products and services. We explore two configurations of this model: the consumer as observer, effectuated through products for use in the supervision…
Albert Ellis, rational therapy and the media of ‘modern’ emotional management
This article explores the development of therapeutic psychological techniques for emotional management as exemplified by Albert Ellis’s development of rational therapy (RT) in the 1950s and 1960s. A precursor to contemporary Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), rational therapy conceptualized emotion as manageable through scientific self-narration. The article examines how Ellis’s immersion in media techniques and forms accessible to a general aud…
The emotional context of information privacy
Why are ongoing legal, design, and policy debates around information privacy often divorced from the lived experience of everyday digital media use? This article argues that human emotion is a critical but undertheorized element in users' subjective sense of information privacy. The piece advocates for a greater attention to the phenomenology of feeling and to the concept of “visceral” design in information privacy scholarship, policy, and design…
The Conservatism of Emoji
This piece examines emoji as conduits for affective labor in the social networks of informational capitalism. Emoji, ubiquitous digital images that can appear in text messages, emails, and social media chat platforms, are rich in social, cultural, and economic significance. This article examines emoji as historical, social, and cultural objects, and as examples of skeuomorphism and of technical standardization. Now superseded as explicitly moneti…
Algorithmic psychometrics and the scalable subject
Recent public controversies, ranging from the 2014 Facebook 'emotional contagion' study to psychographic data profiling by Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 American presidential election, Brexit referendum and elsewhere, signal watershed moments in which the intersecting trajectories of psychology and computer science have become matters of public concern. The entangled history of these two fields grounds the application of applied psychological t…
The Conservatism of Emoji
This piece examines emoji as conduits for affective labor in the social networks of informational capitalism. Emoji, ubiquitous digital images that can appear in text messages, emails, and social media chat platforms, are rich in social, cultural, and economic significance. This article examines emoji as historical, social, and cultural objects, and as examples of skeuomorphism and of technical standardization. Now superseded as explicitly moneti…
The emotive politics of digital mood tracking
Through a values in design (VID) analysis, this article assesses two mood-tracking apps (Moodscope and MoodPanda) to argue the particular interface design choices of these applications serve to influence their users’ sense of sociality and self-fashioning. The design features of these artifacts signal a broader shift in the sociotechnical definitions and discourses of the feeling of an individual, enabling an emergent emotive politics at work acr…
The Work of Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Problematic use of data, patterns of bias emerging in AI systems, and the role of platforms like Facebook and Twitter during elections have thrown the issue of data ethics into sharp relief. Yet the focus of conversations about data ethics has centered on computer scientists, engineers, and designers, with far less attention paid to the digital practices of artists and others in the cultural sector. Artists have historically deployed new technolo…
The surveillant consumer
We argue that modern technical and social infrastructures of surveillance have brought a novel subject position to prominence: the surveillant consumer. Surveillance has become a normalized mode of interpersonal relation that urges the person as consumer to manage others around her using surveillant products and services. We explore two configurations of this model: the consumer as observer, effectuated through products for use in the supervision…
Albert Ellis, rational therapy and the media of ‘modern’ emotional management
This article explores the development of therapeutic psychological techniques for emotional management as exemplified by Albert Ellis’s development of rational therapy (RT) in the 1950s and 1960s. A precursor to contemporary Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), rational therapy conceptualized emotion as manageable through scientific self-narration. The article examines how Ellis’s immersion in media techniques and forms accessible to a general aud…
The emotional context of information privacy
Why are ongoing legal, design, and policy debates around information privacy often divorced from the lived experience of everyday digital media use? This article argues that human emotion is a critical but undertheorized element in users' subjective sense of information privacy. The piece advocates for a greater attention to the phenomenology of feeling and to the concept of “visceral” design in information privacy scholarship, policy, and design…
Artificial intelligence and the conjectural sciences
Drawing on prior work in the history and philosophy of statistics, I argue that in many cases analyses powered by artificial-intelligence (AI) techniques such as machine learning (ML) are fundamentally 'conjectural': reliant on ex post facto abductive logics often misinterpreted in contemporary machine-learning systems as reliably reproducible truth. Here I relate what Carlo Ginzburg calls 'the conjectural sciences' as a historical category to th…
(Un)stable diffusions
Generative AI is a uniquely public technology. The large language models behind ChatGPT and other tools that generate text and images is a major develop in publicity as much as technology. Without public data and public participation, these large models could not be trained. Without the attention, hype, and hope around these technologies, the big AI firms probably could not afford the computational costs to train these models. Our special issue q…
Breaking Up (with) AI Ethics
The ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) have become a matter of public concern. According to a recent Stanford report, the number of research papers in the area given at major conferences such as the annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems has increased fivefold since 2014, and ethics officers now abound at global technology firms (Moss and Metcalf 2020). Such major institutions as the US government, the United Nations, and …
The Conservatism of Emoji
This piece examines emoji as conduits for affective labor in the social networks of informational capitalism. Emoji, ubiquitous digital images that can appear in text messages, emails, and social media chat platforms, are rich in social, cultural, and economic significance. This article examines emoji as historical, social, and cultural objects, and as examples of skeuomorphism and of technical standardization. Now superseded as explicitly moneti…
The emotional context of information privacy
Why are ongoing legal, design, and policy debates around information privacy often divorced from the lived experience of everyday digital media use? This article argues that human emotion is a critical but undertheorized element in users' subjective sense of information privacy. The piece advocates for a greater attention to the phenomenology of feeling and to the concept of “visceral” design in information privacy scholarship, policy, and design…
Albert Ellis, rational therapy and the media of ‘modern’ emotional management
This article explores the development of therapeutic psychological techniques for emotional management as exemplified by Albert Ellis’s development of rational therapy (RT) in the 1950s and 1960s. A precursor to contemporary Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), rational therapy conceptualized emotion as manageable through scientific self-narration. The article examines how Ellis’s immersion in media techniques and forms accessible to a general aud…
Facial recognition, emotion and race in animated social media
Facial recognition systems are increasingly common components of commercial smart phones such as the iPhone X and the Samsung Galaxy S9. These technologies are also increasingly being put to use in consumer-facing social media video-sharing applications, such as Apple’s animoji and memoji, Facebook Messenger’s masks and filters and Samsung’s AR Emoji. These animations serve as technical phenomena translating moments of affective and emotional exp…
Algorithmic psychometrics and the scalable subject
Recent public controversies, ranging from the 2014 Facebook 'emotional contagion' study to psychographic data profiling by Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 American presidential election, Brexit referendum and elsewhere, signal watershed moments in which the intersecting trajectories of psychology and computer science have become matters of public concern. The entangled history of these two fields grounds the application of applied psychological t…
The surveillant consumer
We argue that modern technical and social infrastructures of surveillance have brought a novel subject position to prominence: the surveillant consumer. Surveillance has become a normalized mode of interpersonal relation that urges the person as consumer to manage others around her using surveillant products and services. We explore two configurations of this model: the consumer as observer, effectuated through products for use in the supervision…
Better, Nicer, Clearer, Fairer
This paper uses frame analysis to examine recent high-profile values statements endorsing ethical design for artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML). Guided by insights from values in design and the sociology of business ethics, we uncover the grounding assumptions and terms of debate that make some conversations about ethical design possible while forestalling alternative visions. Vision statements for ethical AI/ML co-opt the langu…
Data Is the New What? Popular Metaphors & Professional Ethics in Emerging Data Culture
A growing list of high-profile controversies involving the social impacts of ar- tificial intelligence systems (AI), digital data collection and algorithmic analy- sis have forced difficult conversations around the ethics of data-intensive digi- tal technologies and so-called “big data” research.These incidents are directly relevant to newly coalescing cultures of “data science,” an emergent field which seeks both to interpret and capitalize on t…
The Work of Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Problematic use of data, patterns of bias emerging in AI systems, and the role of platforms like Facebook and Twitter during elections have thrown the issue of data ethics into sharp relief. Yet the focus of conversations about data ethics has centered on computer scientists, engineers, and designers, with far less attention paid to the digital practices of artists and others in the cultural sector. Artists have historically deployed new technolo…
Desanctifying the charisma of numbers
In 1890, the British psychologist and statistician Sir Francis Galton was asked to contribute to an article in the journal Mind. That article, written by American psychologist James McKeen Cattell
Measurement of the Equality of the Drug Welfare Induction Level of Chinese Patients With Chronic Diseases in Gansu, Sichuan, Hebei, and Zhejiang Based on the Bivariate Theil-T Index Method
Objectives: This study aimed to measure the induction level of drug welfare in Chinese patients with chronic diseases using a bivariate Theil index. Design: The bivariate Theil-T index was used to hierarchically decompose the relevant survey data, and the contribution rate of the intragroup gap and the intergroup gap to the total gap was investigated to better understand the current drug welfare induction level of Chinese patients with chronic di…
The emotive politics of digital mood tracking
Through a values in design (VID) analysis, this article assesses two mood-tracking apps (Moodscope and MoodPanda) to argue the particular interface design choices of these applications serve to influence their users’ sense of sociality and self-fashioning. The design features of these artifacts signal a broader shift in the sociotechnical definitions and discourses of the feeling of an individual, enabling an emergent emotive politics at work acr…
Artificial intelligence and the conjectural sciences
Drawing on prior work in the history and philosophy of statistics, I argue that in many cases analyses powered by artificial-intelligence (AI) techniques such as machine learning (ML) are fundamentally 'conjectural': reliant on ex post facto abductive logics often misinterpreted in contemporary machine-learning systems as reliably reproducible truth. Here I relate what Carlo Ginzburg calls 'the conjectural sciences' as a historical category to th…
Breaking Up (with) AI Ethics
The ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) have become a matter of public concern. According to a recent Stanford report, the number of research papers in the area given at major conferences such as the annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems has increased fivefold since 2014, and ethics officers now abound at global technology firms (Moss and Metcalf 2020). Such major institutions as the US government, the United Nations, and …
(Un)stable diffusions
Generative AI is a uniquely public technology. The large language models behind ChatGPT and other tools that generate text and images is a major develop in publicity as much as technology. Without public data and public participation, these large models could not be trained. Without the attention, hype, and hope around these technologies, the big AI firms probably could not afford the computational costs to train these models. Our special issue q…
A Conversation About Generative Artificial Intelligence
This is a wide-ranging conversation on the ways that generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) is changing history and historical disciplines. Topics covered include the impact of gen AI on historical practice, its effects on archival research, the ethics of its use, strategies for combating biases, and inclusivity. The participants are Canadian scholars chosen based on their prior publications about AI and history. They represent a range of di…
Sociology (10 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Political science (6 works) · Engineering (4 works) · Engineering ethics (4 works) · Big data (3 works) · Cognitive psychology (3 works) · Epistemology (3 works)