This March, Black Beyond Data joined researchers, artists, activists, students, and teachers from across the African diaspora in Puerto Rico for the Cumbre Internacional de Afrodescendencia (Cumbre Afro), the International Afro-Summit. See full post.
The University of Zululand recently played host to a dynamic and impactful two-day Corpus Creation and Linguistic Text Processing Tools Workshop, held at its KwaDlangezwa campus on 17–18 March 2026. Facilitated by SADiLaR’s Project Manager and Unisa Node, Ms Marissa Griesel, under the ESCALATOR programme, the workshop brought together Computer Science students and academic staff […]
Imagine a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper. That’s effectively what’s begun happening online in the last few months. The Internet Archive—the world’s largest digital library—has preserved newspapers since it went online in the mid-1990s. The Archive’s mission is to preserve the web and make it […]
Interested in learning more about what’s new in the Library of Congress digital collections? The Signal shares regular updates to our digital collections and we love showing off our colleagues’ hard work from across the Library. Read on for a sample of recent additions and a few favorite highlights. See full post.
I recently traveled to Kenya for a journalism and AI conference. While I was there, I really wanted to meet with Michael Geoffrey Asia, the secretary general of the Data Labelers Association. Data Labeling is a huge job in Kenya. Data labelers are the people who train AI, and who also work on ensuring the […]
It is difficult to exaggerate the impact of AI on academia in general and on scholarly publishing in particular. Tools such as ChatGPT and Claude have made it possible for anyone to turn free-floating information into what looks like knowledge using a combination of real and artificial intelligence. There are many open questions and knotty […]
How do researchers, journalists, and artists work with archived pages from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine? What kinds of tools, methods, and approaches do they use? What other kinds of tools might support critical and creative repurposing of archived web materials? As web archives have come to play an increasingly important role in understanding, reporting […]
The 5th Hundzula NLP and Linguistics Retreat took place from 3–7 February 2026 at North-West University’s Mahikeng Campus, South Africa. The retreat aims to establish a networking and collaboration platform for both humanities and computer science researchers and enthusiasts through learning, teaching and supporting each other. Computer scientists and linguists from various higher education institutions […]
In January 2026, Princeton University’s Center for Digital Humanities (CDH) began serving as publisher of the Journal of Cultural Analytics (JCA), a leading open-access publication in computational approaches to culture. Today, CDH announces JCA’s vision for expanding cultural analytics scholarship amid rapid technological change and the launch of a new website, supported by Schmidt Sciences’ […]
This is a write-up of a talk I gave at CESTA on January 29, 2026, with an epilogue covering the last few weeks. The talk wasn’t recorded, and since I wrote this up later, it’s less off-the-cuff and probably a bit better than the original. As we confront this moment of great institutional and societal […]
