Category: Conference

CSDH Conference 2026

The CSDH-SCHN 2026 conference was held this year at the Université de Montreal.

The Bridging Divides team had a number of papers at the conference that I was part of:

  • “Platformed Racism: Anti-South Asian Immigration Narratives in Canadian Telegram Networks” was presented by Ayushi Khemka. (I was a co-author, along with Leonardo Nascimento and Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Yasmeen).
  • “From Black Boxes to Glass Boxes: Auditable Voyant Workflows (with Bounded LLM Assistance) for Evidence-Based Distant Reading” was presented by Augustine Farinola. (John Bradley and I were co-authors.)
  • “Abstract Rhetorics of Algorithmic Governance: A Bilingual Corpus Study of Canadian AIA” was presented by Augustine Farinola and Ralph Padilla. (Yasmeen Abu-Laban and I were co-authors.)

We also had a panel which was introduced by Yasmeen Abu-Laban and moderated by me on “Critical Digital Humanities and Immigration Research.” The participants were Sawafta, Eleyan; Le, Huong; Alzubaidi, Abdullah; Farinola, Augustine; Khemka, Ayushi; and Padilla, Ralph.

Then we had two posters:

  • “Constellation Word2Vec Viewer in Voyant” was presented by Ryan Chartier.
  • “Making AI Legible: Visual workflows for Critical Reflexivity and Ethical LLM Use in the Social Sciences and Humanities” was presented by Abhik Hasnain.

Congratulations also to Ayushi Khemka for her own paper on “Misnaming in the Machine: Epistemic Injustice, Digital Translation, and the Racialisation of “Indian””, and Augustine Farinola who had a paper on “Untranslatable Lived Experience: Persona‑Driven RAG for Digital Humanities Pedagogy in Immigration Systems.”

Immigration Research at CPSA

I’m at the 2026 Canadian Political Science Association annual conference in Ottawa. The lab I and Yasmeen Abu-Laban run on advanced digital technology and immigration has a number of papers and a round table that I’m involved in.

  • “Rebordering North America: The Political Economy and Migration Implications of Canada’s Strong Border and Strengthening Canada’s Immigration System and Borders Acts” was presented by Huong Le. Huong used Voyant and close reading to look at speeches and media discourse around bills C-2 and C-12. A major dynamic is the rebordering that is happening due to US pressure on Canada.
  • “Borders, Surveillance, Human Rights, and the 2026 FIFA World Cup” was presented by Abdullah Alzubaidi. Abdullah looked at the differences between the USA, Canada and Mexico when it comes to visitors for the 2026 World Cup. The World Cup is a major international sporting event which is supposed to celebrate human rights and international cooperation, but the differing border regulations belie that ideal.
  • “Roundtable: Procuring Digital Policy? Private Vendors, Advanced Digital Technology, and the Immigration Sector” is a roundtable organized by sasha skaidra, with Geoffrey Rockwell (me), Kuba Jablonowski, and Louisa Taylor. We discussed the challenges faced by necomers and the immigrant sector as jurisdictions like Canada and the UK automate their interfaces.

Colloque CRIHN 2025 en l’honneur de Stéfan Sinclair

Stéfan Sinclair
Stéfan Sinclair

L’herméneutique en pratique : hommage au travail et à l’héritage de Stéfan Sinclair – Une conférence sur l’analyse de texte, la création d’outils et les humanités numériques critiques Université de Montréal, 10-12 septembre 2025 Conférencières plénières : Servanne Monjour (Sorbonne Université) et Lauren Tilton (Richmond University) Programme Mercredi 10 septembre 2025 (Atelier optionnel) 9h30-12h30 Atelier « Introduction to […]

I’m at a colloquium in honour of Stéfan Sinclair, Colloque CRIHN 2025 en l’honneur de Stéfan Sinclair. I ran a workshop on Spyral and later gave a talk about “Epistemologica in Practice: Replication and Knowledge in Spyral.”

The colloquium had a number of great talks, but one I particularly liked was by Parham Aledavood (U de Montréal)  titled “Viral Intelligence: Contagion, Mutation, and the Spread of LLMs.” He talked about how the release of ChatGPT in 2022 was discussed as if it were a viral event infecting us with AI. He walked through the “formulaic plot” from infection to containment. I was reminded of other stories of influence(za) like the story at the end of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura.

Humanitext Antiqua

Here at DH 2025 in Lisbon, Portugal, I heard a paper about a neat Japanese projects, Humanitext Antiqua – ヒューマニテクスト. They allow you to identify an ancient philosophy subcorpus (eg. Plato) and then ask questions of that. I was able to get all sorts of interesting results since they have trained their system on Greek and Roman philosophers like Aristotle and Cicero.

Here is a reference to the project:

Naoya Iwata, Ikko Tanaka, Jun Ogawa, ‘Improving Semantic Search Accuracy of Classical Texts through Context- Oriented Translation’, Proceedings of IPSJ SIG Computers and the Humanities Symposium. Download link: https://researchmap.jp/n.iwata/published_papers/48448512

Feminist Data Manifest-No

Hannah L. Jacobs presented a great paper on “Critical Refusal, Slowness, and Openness: Possibilities and Challenges in Community-Oriented Digital Archival Initiatives” at DH 2025. She talked about refusing to complete a project once they realized they didn’t really have community approval to share their data. She also pointed to this Feminist Data Manifest-No.

There was a great question about whether one can mention in a grant that one wants to go slow and that the community may refuse to be studied. Our grant system rewards and supports innovation, not slow research. I’m reminded of The Slow Professor. Perhaps it is tenure that makes slowness possible, not grants.

Reviews in Digital Humanities

Home page for Reviews in Digital Humanities, a journal edited by Dr. Jennifer Guiliano and Dr. Roopika Risam

Listening to a great talk by Paul Spence and Maria Jose Afanador-Llach (and others) on “Evaluation models, global diversity and DH” I learned about the Reviews in Digital Humanities. This looks like a really useful resource for students.

More generally their paper highlighted the importance of local evaluation models that are appropriate to the community.

It is clear that the MLA Guidelines that I worked on, back in the day (and have been updated), are influential, but they need to be adapted.

CSDH/SCHN Congress 2025: Reframing Togetherness

These last few days I have been at the CSDH/SCHN conference that is part of the Congress 2025. With colleagues and graduate research assistants I was part of a number of papers and panels. See CSDH/SCHN Congress 2025: Reframing Togetherness. The programme is here. Some of the papers I was involved in included:

  • Exploring the Deceptive Patterns of Chinook: Visualization and Storytelling Approaches Critical Software Study – Roya Sharifi; Ralph Padilla; Zahra Farhangfar; Yasmeen Abu-Laban; Eleyan Sawafta; and Geoffrey Rockwell
  • Building a Consortium: An Approach to Sustainability – Geoffrey Martin Rockwell; Michael Sinatra; Susan Brown; John Bradley; Ayushi Khemka; and Andrew MacDonald
  • Integrating Large Language Models with Spyral Notebooks – Sean Lis and Geoffrey Rockwell
  • AI-Driven Textual Analysis to Decode Canadian Immigration Social Media Discourse – Augustine Farinola & Geoffrey Martin Rockwell
  • The List in Text Analysis – Geoffrey Martin Rockwell; Ryan Chartier; and Andrew MacDonald

I was also part of a panel on Generative AI, LLMs, and Knowledge Structures organized by Ray Siemens. My paper was on Forging Interpretations with Generative AI. Here is the abstract:

Using large language models we can now generate fairly sophisticated interpretations of documents using natural language prompts. We can ask for classifications, summaries, visualizations, or specific content to be extracted. In short we can automate content analysis of the sort we used to count as research. As we play with the forging of interpretations at scale we need to consider the ethics of using generative AI in our research. We need to ask how we can use these models with respect for sources, care for transparency, and attention to positionality.

Responsible AI Lecture in Delhi

A couple of days ago I gave an Institute Lecture on What is Responsible About Responsible AI at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India. In it I looked at how AI ethics governance is discussed in Canada under the rubric of Responsible AI and AI Safety. I talked about the emergence of AI Safety Institutes like CAISI (Canadian AI Safety Institute.) Just when it seemed that “safety” was the emergent international approach to ethics governance, Vice President JD Lance’s speech at the Paris Summit made it clear that the Trump administration in not interested,

The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety. (Vance)

DH 2024: Visualization Ethics and Text Analysis Infrastructure

This week I’m at DH 2024 at George Mason in Washington DC. I presented as part of two sessions. 

On Wednesday I presented a short paper with Lauren Klein on work a group of us are doing on Visualization Ethics: A Case Study Approach. We met at a Dagstuhl on Visualization and the Humanities: Towards a Shared Research Agenda. We developed case studies for teaching visualization ethics and that’s what our short presentation was about. The link above is to a Google Drive with drafts of our cases.

Thursday morning I was part of a panel on Text Analysis Tools and Infrastructure in 2024 and Beyond. (The link, again, takes you to a web page where you can download the short papers we wrote for this “flipped” session.) This panel brought together a bunch of text analysis projects like WordCruncher and Lexos to talk about how we can maintain and evolve our infrastructure.

Canadian AI 2024 Conference

I’m at the Canadian AI 2024 Conference where I will be on a panel about “The Future of Responsible AI and AI for Social Good in Canada” on Thursday. This panel is timely given that we seem to be seeing a sea-change in AI regulation. If initially there was a lot of talk about the dangers (to innovation) of regulation, we now have large players like China, the US and the EU introducing regulations.

  • President Biden has issued an “Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.” It is unlikely that Biden can get legislation through Congress so he is issuing executive orders.
  • The EU recently passed their AI Act which is risk-based.
  • The Canadian AI and Data Act (AIDA) is coming and is similarly risk-based.

In light of AIDA I would imagine that the short-term future for Responsible AI in Canada might include the following:

  • Debate about AIDA and amendments to align it with other jurisdictions and to respond to industry concerns. Will there be a more inclusive consultation?
  • Attempts to better define what are high-impact AIs so as to better anticipate what will need onerous documentation and assessment.
  • Elaboration of how to best run an impact assessment.
  • Discussions around responsibility and how to assign it in different situations.

I hope there will also be a critical exploration of the assumptions and limits of responsible AI.