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 […]
The project is Safeguarding Research & Culture…The concept is simple: download public datasets that are at risk of being lost, and replicate them as widely as possible to make them hard to destroy, though obviously there’s a lot of complexity buried in that statement. When the Trump administration first took power, there were a lot […]
It’s not the first time that universities have gotten tangled up with developments that would later come to haunt them, explains Olivia Guest, computational cognitive scientist at Radboud University and lead author of the paper. ‘From combustion engines to tobacco, universities have been used in the past to whitewash now-controversial products. For a long time, […]
Digital archives that cover extended historical periods can create a misleading impression of comprehensiveness while in truth providing access to only a part of what survives. While completeness may be a tall order, researchers at least require that digital archives be representative, that is, have the same distribution of items as whatever they are used […]
Italian Giallo Films seem to be having a little resurgence recently. I first was exposed to them when the Criterion Channel app had a collection of them for Halloween a few years ago and now watch a few of them around this time of year mixed in with other spooky season movies. They are terrible […]
For decades, the scholarly publishing system has rightly been critiqued for perpetuating inequity, pricing out the public and the underfunded, and enshrining rigid formats that often exclude innovation and marginalized voices. While open access (OA) once promised to democratize scholarly communication, it has, in many cases, become as commercialized as traditional publishing: a pay-to-publish system […]
The phenomenological mediation of the screen can make it very hard to tell these different kinds of connector apart. In a recent post, the historian of belief Francis Young makes an intriguing argument which expands on this. Young argues that the reception of AI, across the public and the scholarly spheres, has shifted society towards […]
The field of Syriac Digital Humanities continues to advance rapidly, moving from basic text recognition (as discussed in my previous posts on OCR/HTR, particularly our launch of the first public Syriac HTR model on Transkribus: From Vienna to the World…) into the realm of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). Today’s post explores a powerful new possibility: […]
