Bilkent University Institutional Repository (BUIR)

Bilkent University Institutional Repository (BUIR), a service of Bilkent University Libraries, collects, preserves, and distributes the intellectual output of Bilkent University. Faculty, staff, and students are invited to deposit their research and scholarship. Departments, administrative units, programs, and centers are invited to use the Institutional Repository to distribute their working papers, technical reports, conference proceedings, and other research material. For assistance in depositing documents. For more information, please contact us.

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Shared secrets: (Re)writing urban mysteries in nineteenth-century İstanbul

(Edinburgh University Press, 2022-12-31) Şimşek, Şehnaz Şişmanoğlu; Charrière, Etienne; Booth, Marilyn; Savina, Claire

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Open Access

Artificial intelligence in ancient Rome: classical Roman philosophy on legal subjectivity

(De Gruyter, 2023-08-21) Deibel, Talya Uçaryılmaz; Deibel, E.; Hagengruber, Ruth Edith

Conceiving of technology in its relation to modern society in terms of power imbalances dates back to antiquity. Particularly the understanding that there are 'instruments' of 'instruments' has its roots in the Aristotelian conception of slavery as a morally unacceptable institution both historically and today. In antiquity, slaves were seen as tools in symbioses: The prosthetic extensions of others, simultaneously persons and things. When we conceive of digital technology as a communicative artefact that is an extension of technological reason we face the same dilemma today. This paper seeks to draw historical connections between cybernetics and slavery around the general question: will AI technology result in a new type of slavery? As such this requires us to rethink the intricate concepts of humanness, subjectivity and sovereignty in Roman philosophy in order to apply them to the contempaorary ethical questions on artificial agents and digitization of technology.

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Open Access

Gender segregation in parliamentary committees of Turkey: intermediary spaces of women's political representation

(Elsevier, 2023-02-15) Uçaray-Mangıtlı, Burcu; Yıldırım, Senem

Do the Turkish parliamentary committees exhibit gendered appointment practices? If so, what are the driving factors behind women's limited representation in some committees? Previous studies find a division of labor in committees based on the perceived gender roles: women legislators are over-represented in low-prestige committees with “feminine” themes such as family, health, and education, whereas they are under-represented in strategically key policymaking committees. These studies —mostly on Western democracies— explain this gender bias with the appointment practices of the conservative right-wing parties. Using an original dataset of appointments between 2002 and 2020, this paper examines the partisan effects on the under- and over-representation of women on certain committees in the Turkish context. We find that all parties except the small left-wing Peoples' Democratic Party (PDP) perform in a similarly biased way. We argue that parliamentary committees are gendered institutional spaces greatly affected by the institutional culture of political parties. Even though institutional culture is mostly shaped by ideological stances, political parties are still among institutional spaces where ideologies of masculinity are effectively shaping power relations. We conclude that institutionalizing mechanisms that enhance agential capacities and practices at the party level are vital for gender equality within the political sphere.

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Open Access

A corpus-based approach to define Turkish soundscapes attributes

(Acoustical Soc Amer Amer Inst Physics, 2023-03) Yılmazer, Semiha; Dalirnaghadeh, Donya; Fasllija, Ela; Alimadhi, Enkela; Şahin, Zekiye; Mercan, Elif

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Open Access

A vector classifier for sound similarity classification based on audio features

(Acoustical Soc Amer Amer Inst Physics, 2023-03) Yılmazer, Cengiz; Yılmazer, Semiha