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: […]
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has created both opportunities and challenges for assessment design and academic integrity. The AI Assessment Scale (AIAS), developed by Perkins, Furze, Roe, and MacVaugh, provides a practical framework to guide educators in making purposeful, evidence-based decisions about appropriate AI use in assessments. Rather than treating AI as a threat to be […]
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 […]
