An ongoing debate is the epistemological stakes of computational methods in humanistic inquiry. What kind of evidence is a word embedding or face detection and what can it tell us? How do we account for nuances across cultural, temporal, and geographical frames when engaging in pattern recognition and identifying outliers? To what degree does the […]
If you dream of reading the original screenplay that kicked off the “Jurassic Park” film franchise — leading to this summer’s blockbuster “Jurassic World Rebirth” 32 years later — look no further than Box 1, Folder 15, of the David Koepp Papers. That precious bit of movie history is safeguarded by UW–Madison’s Wisconsin Center for […]
Do you know individuals who seem to focus on one thing for their whole life? I’m on the opposite side of the scale. Inspired by Alli Torban’s “How I’ve spent my time” viz, a course on Domestika from Stefanie Posavec and my interest in doing datavis together with others, I made a workshop to reflect […]
Since fall 2024, the Center for Digital Humanities has led the “Humanities for AI” initiative through a series of events, projects, and conversations. We explore how humanistic values and approaches are crucial to developing, using, and interpreting the field of AI. As part of this effort, we publish a Q&A series with our guest speakers […]
The university has long been understood as a site of contestation between different modes of knowledge production and institutional authority (Becher and Trowler 2001; Collini 2012; Readings 1996). Yet I want to explore whether we are on the cusp of a transformation in this struggle that recalls, for me, the quarrel of the ancients and […]
For many humanities researchers, managing the structured data collected or produced as part of their research projects is a technical challenge. In the past, the services of external service providers have been heavily relied upon for this purpose, resulting not only in high costs but also in a large number of isolated data silos scattered […]
Much of the study of cookbooks relies on guesswork and reading between the lines that are written down—the type of guesswork that requires cookbooks be read alongside other types of texts rather than standing on their own. This article presents a novel method for analyzing and reading food stains in historical manuscripts using infrared spectroscopy, […]
I’m very excited to be the new Creative Technologist-in-Residence at the SLV LAB. For the next few months I get to play around with metadata and images, think about online access, experiment with different technologies, and build things to help people to explore the State Library’s collections. In other words, I get to be in […]
After the launch of ChatGPT sparked the generative AI boom in Silicon Valley in late 2022, it was mere months before OpenAI turned to selling the software as an automation product for businesses. (It was first called Team, then Enterprise.) And it wasn’t long after that before it became clear that the jobs managers were […]
Nowadays, Artificial Intelligence is revealing itself as an essential tool for many tasks pertaining to any kind of field. When it comes to historical studies, AI might be trained for the purpose of automatic recognition of texts. Pursuing such a goal, Isabelle Marthot-Santaniello applied Deep Learning-based methodologies to papyri. In the D-scribes project she worked […]
