- Research
Two new research chairs at INRS to analyze the impact of digital technology on culture and knowledge.
The Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) is launching two individual institutional research chairs to better understand how digital technology and artificial intelligence are shaping our ways of creating, consuming, and disseminating culture, knowledge, and information in a context of linguistic and cultural diversity.
Led respectively by Professor Nathalie Casemajor and Professor Romuald Jamet, both based at INRS’s Urbanisation Culture Société Research Centre, these chairs will focus on interdisciplinarity to share and expand knowledge on social and cultural realities.
Chair in Digital Commons
With over 56 million articles in 328 languages, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is a textbook example of digital commons—freely reusable and democratically governed resources accessible on the Internet. The Chair in Digital Commons headed by Professor Nathalie Casemajor aims to understand how politics, culture, and economics influence the production and management of these collective resources.
“It’s essential to understand the mechanisms at work to ensure representativeness of different groups and fair, equitable, and inclusive access to knowledge in a context of cultural and linguistic diversity.”
Nathalie Casemajor, Professor, INRS
More specifically, the Chair focuses on the linguistic and cultural plurality that exists in these collaborative projects, where several groups express different points of view and realities. The program also examines the impact of artificial intelligence, which uses large volumes of open data (texts, images, etc.) to train and improve. The goal is to study how the exploitation of this data by AI leads to building new relationships between the collectives that manage digital commons, digital companies, and public players.
Chair in Data Industries and Cultural and Creative Industries
Through content production, data collection, and use of increasingly sophisticated technologies, data industries—particularly AI—are revolutionizing the way we create, consume, and spread culture.
In Québec, where language and culture play an essential role, these changes raise crucial questions about cultural and linguistic sovereignty. The Québec government, which has been supporting creation in French since the 1960s, is also increasingly supporting companies specializing in the application of AI to cultural environments. This situation creates a tension between the desire to preserve cultural sovereignty and the need to adapt to the global dynamics of technological innovation.
Awarded to Romuald Jamet, Professor at INRS’s Centre Urbanisation Culture Société Research Centre, the Chair in Data Industries and Cultural and Creative Industries (ID2C) aims to 1) map how technologies from data industries fit into the cultural sector and 2) meet with artists and organizations from different sectors (music, video games, cinema, etc.) who use or reject these tools.
“This approach is part of a broader reflection: How can we preserve creative freedom and cultural vitality, while taking advantage of technological advances?”
Romuald Jamet, Professor, INRS
These two new research programs set up by the INRS Executive Committee will not only advance knowledge through conceptual research and field investigation, but also foster collaboration between academia, the cultural sector, digital organizations, and the general public. They thus take part in INRS’s mission to contribute to Québec’s economic, cultural, and social development through directed research and training.
