Digital studies and new media scholar to speak on Oct. 27

Mark Sample will give a lecture titled “Bots of Conviction” at Grinnell College that will explore how bots — small automated programs — can be used for protest and resistance.

The event is free and open to the public and will begin at 4 p.m. Friday, Oct. 27, in the first-floor lounge of Burling Library, 1111 Sixth Ave., Grinnell.

Bots index websites, edit Wikipedia entries, spam users, scrape data from pages, launch denial of service attacks, and other assorted activities, both mundane and nefarious. On Twitter bots are mostly spam, but they can also be creative endeavors.

Sample is an associate professor of digital studies at Davidson College. His teaching and research focus on contemporary literature, new media and video games. His examination of the representation of torture in video games appeared in Game Studies, and his critique of the digital humanities’ approach to contemporary literature is a chapter in Debates in the Digital Humanities. He also has work published in Hacking the Academy, a crowdsourced scholarly book.

He is a regular contributor to “ProfHacker,” a feature in the Chronicle for Higher Education, and writes for “Play the Past,” a collaboratively edited scholarly blog that explores the intersection of cultural heritage and games. He received George Mason University's 2010 Teaching Excellence Award.

Grinnell College’s Digital Bridge for Humanistic Inquiry and the Digital Liberal Arts Collective are sponsoring this event.