We are collaborating with Shazeda Ahmed (Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, UCLA Center on Race and Digital Justice) to organize a series of seminars around the applications of AI to both studying AI as an object of inquiry and discerning the inherent trade-offs in uses of machine learning in research.
Talk by Emily Hogdson Anderson, University of South California titled Ghostwriting: A Secret History of the No Bodies Who Write
What is ghostwriting? Understood broadly as the act of one person writing in another person’s name, the practice has—according to many ghostwriters—been around since written language itself. And yet the implementation, and acknowledgment, of this practice have varied greatly over time. Who are these invisible figures? Why do they do what they do? And why do they remain disembodied—behind the scenes?
In part a cultural history of this mysterious and intuitively captivating profession, in part an exposé of how contemporary professional ghostwriting works, this public lecture uses ghostwriting to animate the questions posed by the No Body Problem inaugural event.
This May we will hold an inaugural workshop to kick off a new project, “The No-Body-Problem,” developed by Sarah Tindal Kareem (UCLA) and Sean Silver (Rutgers). “The No-Body Problem” names a cluster of concerns that emerge from the proliferation, in the eighteenth century, of new forms of remote media–epistles, periodicals, novels–the very forms of which engaged the question: how do utterances operate differently when there is nobody there to utter them?
