In the The Public Domain Review I came across a collection of Covers from Cerîde-i Adliye, a Turkish Law Journal (1924–26). The covers include some extraordinary visualizations. Check it out.
Yesterday I led a workshop at DH2026 on “Multilingual Skins for Digital Humanities Tools: Translating Voyant and Beyond.” The workshop was designed by Ayushi Khemka and Arun Ghosh and I taught it with help from John Bradley. You can see the materials we developed at Multilingual Voyant. Here is our abstract for the workshop:
While many DH tools are designed and implemented in English, their uptake remains limited due to linguistic barriers. As the Multilingual DH SIG of ADHO states, DH scholarship itself has often been questioned for being Anglo-centric and thus, culturally and technologically biased. There are consistent attempts being made to address the linguistic hegemony of English in DH, for instance, the ADHO Multilingual DH SIG (Special Interest Group) and DARIAH Working Group on Multilingual DH. As a team of collaborators working on Voyant Tools, we are offering a hands-on workshop to explore the processes, challenges, and opportunities of translating interfaces of DH tools, with Voyant Tools as a primary case study, as Voyant has had success in creating international language interfaces (of which there are currently 16).
Translating interfaces is not just a technical task of translating strings. Instead, it is a methodological intervention into multilingual representation, diversity, equity, and sustainability of the tool(s). Our workshop is in alignment with the sub-theme of “Translating | Translinguality in the Era of AI” of the conference. Our workshop invites participants from all career stages to collaboratively translate sections of Voyant’s interface into multiple languages that they are familiar with, including Korean, the language of the host institution. The workshop will introduce participants to a broader translation workflow and tool management workflow. The workshop will be an opportunity to discuss and experiment with different ways to brainstorm such translations, including trying AI-assisted translation practices.
One thing that became clear in the workshop is that we need to run more workshops for people who want to use Voyant and teach with it.
Anil Seth, who wrote Being You, a great and accessible book about the study of consciousness, has an opinion in The Guardian on Once again we are told AI may be conscious – I study consciousness, and I have my doubts. He makes a couple of interesting points in response to recent Anthropic research claiming they have found something like (consciousness) workspace using new techniques for looking into LLMs like Claude.
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:
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:
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.”
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.
Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah was one of the respondents on Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica humanitas. (You can see my blog post here.) His remarks have been posted on the Anthropic site. Unlike some accelerationists who don’t want to listen to anyone outside the magic circle, he is humble and invites dialogue. Some of the points he makes:
He names three questions where the Church’s discernment is needed. For that matter, he is clear that these discussion are not just for the engineers or Church, but for all.
I would like to ask how a dialogue that goes beyond those in and with power could take place? Many just wait and hope they don’t lose their jobs or end up managed by a machine.
Ross Douthat has an opinion piece on Leo’s encyclical that is interesting. He says, “the core idea that we need to treat the A.I. future as a fundamentally political sphere, requiring democratic deliberation and political constraint, seems essential and correct.”
Pope Leo the XIV just released an encyclical on artificial intelligence, Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. The encyclical was released on the 135th anniversary of the encyclical Rerum Novarum: On Capital and Human Labor by his namesake pope, Leo XIII.
The two are clearly meant to be connected. Magnifica humanitas, or “magnificent humanity” doesn’t paint AI as either good or bad, or for that matter, neutral. It is about humans making choices that safeguard (or not) our dignity (and magnificence.) I rather like the emphasis on our magnificence and the suggestion and AI could be one of our great deeds.
The encyclical identifies 5 principles that are not the usual principles for AI as they are principles of Social Doctrine with application to AI:
The encyclical is long and deals with a number of issues including the need for dialogue. You can read a summary on the Vatican news web site here. The New York Times has an article on Main Takeaways From Pope Leo’s Encyclical on A.I. and one on how At the Epicenter of A.I., Pope Leo’s Warnings Are Dismissed. This last article captures the attitude of some that “no one outside of Silicon Valley understands AI and therefore we don’t need to listen to them.” No need for dialogue with others when you think you are magnificent.
The Portrait of Edward de Belamy is a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) ink print created by the art group Obvious.
The name “Belamy” is a joke on the name of the developer of GAN, Ian Goodfellow.
The print was bought at auction for $432,500 (USD), a first for AI generated art.
I learned about this from a talk on “Alternative Histories of genAI” by Lauren Tilton. She talked about the institutions involve in authorizing art. Is it art because it was bought for a lot of money?
This talk was part of a conference in Nice and Cannes, Colloque “Créativités artificielles: Approches critiques de l’IA” @ Nice that I also presented at. My talk was on “Thinking-Through Trust in AI”.
Professor Ronald Deibert, Director of the Citizen Lab at U of Toronto, appeared before the House of Commons’ Subcommittee on International Human Rights of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development (SDIR) on March 23rd, 2026, to testify on transnational repression. His brief included a discussion of artificial intelligence and its potential use for repression. He also had a clear recommendation that the government should regulate AI. Here is the recommendation from the text of his testimony:
Regulate AI. The government must squarely and soberly address the huge potential for widespread harm associated with LLMs and AI systems, as well as social media
platforms which are connected to them. Although there are many potential economic and other benefits associated with these systems, the current political and economic context all but assures there will also be major harms emanating from their use and abuse. The government should cease any cooperation with governments on AI that are known perpetrators of TNR and DTR. It should engage in meaningful public consultation with affected communities on how these systems have begun to negatively affect peoples’lives, as called for by the People’s Consultation on AI. And it should find ways to regulateAI uses, particularly among public agencies, to mitigate harms and ensure equitable outcomes. Part of this regulation must include independent due diligence audits of all tech platforms in a transparent and accountable manner consistent with Charter of Human Rights protections on freedom of speech and access to information.
I read about this in a story in the Globe and Mail.
The Norwegian Consumer Council has released a punchy video about enshittification. If you go to the web site at the end you get to a page about Breaking Free. This has a link to a report on Breaking Free: Pathways to a Fair Technological Future (PDF) which argues that generative AI is the next frontier to enshittification. They point to how AI can generate large quantities of slop now sloshing around the internet.
The neologism enshittification was coined by Cory Doctorow. His web site has links to his book on it and videos of him talking about it.
The good news is, as Doctorow puts it in his book on the subject, “A new, good internet is possible. More than that, it is essential.” The final section 5 of the Norwegian report offers advice on how we can break free.
For me, it is essential that we resist the network effect, and just drop services that become unacceptably shitty. When they change the privacy settings, just drop it. It may be painful and it may feel as if your social life won’t recover, but that is what they want you to believe.