This is part 1 of a 5-part series on the politics of preservation and power. In our field, what is often right in front of us is infrastructure. We treat it as stable, neutral, and purely technical. We act as if the servers, standards, and software we rely on are objective tools. But if you’ve […]
In April 1969, Physics Today published a photograph of the American Physical Society’s 1932 banquet at the Ambassador Hotel in Atlantic City. The striking group portrait, dense with faces, was paired with an open call to readers: How many diners can you name and locate? This was more than just a photo caption challenge. It […]
Traditional machine learning models for Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) rely on supervised training, requiring extensive manual annotations, and often produce errors due to the separation between layout and text processing. In contrast, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer a general approach to recognizing diverse handwriting styles without the need for model-specific training. The study benchmarks […]
In designing an introductory Digital Humanities class, I am often faced with the question of how best to incorporate linguistic diversity, particularly from the Global South, for a predominantly Anglophone student body. How do I invite students to critically examine the Anglophone bias underlying much of DH theory and practice without necessarily depending on the […]
Scholars have provided various perspectives on how Europe historically perceived the Orient, such as Said (1978) with his ground-breaking work Orientalism, as well as Ballaster (2005) and Osterhammel (2018). Moreover, despite this enormous literature on Orientalism, most studies remain limited to specific, well-known texts such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Baktır 2014; Lowe 1991). Additionally, […]
[My project is] turning all the State Library of Victoria’s digitised maps into data. I’ve just created a workflow that uses AllMaps and IIIF to georeference the SLV’s digitised maps. There’s some technical details below, but the idea is pretty simple. A userscript links the SLV image viewer to Allmaps – so you just click […]
In July 2025, AIP started an initiative to improve the documentation and contributions of women in the physical sciences. With the help of the Henry Luce Foundation, the project is underway and I will be working as the newly minted Archives Fellow. As the fellow, I am tasked with improving the historical record of women […]
Meredith Martin, Professor of English and CDH Faculty Director, and Wouter Haverals, CDH Postdoctoral Research Associate, have published a pre-print revealing a striking pattern: both humans and AI systems show strong bias based on perceived authorship rather than actual content quality. The researchers built a dataset of stylistic rewrites inspired by Raymond Queneau’s “Exercises in […]
Emotions are complex. They are not feelings nor are they desires. I’ll define emotions as a biopsychological process that happens inside the body and is an information-processing tool. I heard emotions being opposed to rationality—by some coincidence, pretty often in a sexist logic. But it’s quite the opposite, and emotions matter in effective decision-making. The […]
For the past several months, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around why AI-writing loves lists. Here is what I mean by lists, as a human might write them: My favorite fruits are concord grapes, ruby red plums, raspberries, nectarines, and mangos…AI writing does something similar—sorta, kinda, almost, somewhat—to this but it doesn’t feel […]
