This online talk was recorded at BEK’s symposium The Only Lasting Truth is Change on 17 November 2023.

Sentiment analysis entails the widespread surveillance of users’ posts and actions to determine how they feel. This talk outlines the importance of early and mid-20th century studies of women workers and Japanese and Japanese American internees in U.S. WWII internment camps to the rise of sentiment analysis.

WENDY HUI KYONG CHUN

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media, Professor in the School of Communication, and Director of the Digital Democracies Institute. At the Institute, she leads the Mellon-funded Data Fluencies Project, which combines the interpretative traditions of the arts and humanities with critical work in the data sciences to express, imagine and create innovative engagements with (and resistances to) our data-filled world.She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her research on digital media. She is the author of many books, including: Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT 2016), and Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition (2021, MIT Press). She has been Professor and Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she worked for almost two decades and is currently a Visiting Professor. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and has also held fellowships from: the Guggenheim, ACLS, American Academy of Berlin, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.