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 […]
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.
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.
The Digital Humanities Winter School, a unique initiative by the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IIT Delhi), was held in February 2025. Its primary goal was to bridge the gap for scholars and students from the humanities, social sciences, and other non-STEM disciplines in India, providing them with a hands-on introduction to computational tools and digital scholarship methods. This introduction aimed to foster algorithmic thinking, conceptualize data-centric research projects, encourage collaborative ventures, and instill critical approaches toward algorithms. The DH Winter School, with its promise of a low learning curve, was designed to boost the confidence of participants who came with little or no exposure to digital applications or programming. By addressing the limited opportunities for students of the humanities and social sciences in India to learn these methods, the DH Winter School aimed to impact the academic landscape significantly.
The neat ITHAKA Constellate project is being shut down. It sounds like it was not financially sustainable.
As of November 2024, ITHAKA made the decision to sunset Constellate on July 1, 2025. While we’re proud of the meaningful impact Constellate has had on individuals and institutions, helping advance computational literacy and text analysis skills across academia, we have concluded that continuing to support the platform and classes is not sustainable for ITHAKA in the long term. As a nonprofit organization, we need to focus our resources on initiatives that can achieve broad-scale impact aligned with our mission. Despite Constellate’s success with its participating institutions, we haven’t found a path to achieve this broader impact.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Tuesday instructed authorities to “thoroughly investigate and address these digital sex crimes to eradicate them”.
This has gone beyond a rare case in Spain or Winnipeg. In South Korea it has spread to hundreds of schools. Porn is proving to be a major use of AI.
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.
The Musée d’Orsay set a record attendance of 793,556 visitors to its exhibition ‘Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise’.
ARTnews has a story about how the Musée d’Orsay’s Van Gogh Exhibition Breaks Historic Attendance Record. The exhibit included a virtual reality component (Virtual Reality – Van Gogh’s Palette) where visitors could put on a headset and interact with the palette of Vincent van Gogh. You can see a 360 degree video of the experience here in French. It takes place in the room of Dr. Gachet who treated van Gogh. It starts with the piano at which his daughter Marguerite posed for a painting. Her character also narrates. Then you zoom in on a 3D rendered version of his palette where you hear about some of the paintings he did in the last 70 days of his life. They emerge from the palette.
It isn’t clear if the success of the show is due to the VR component or just the chance to see originals. We can only experience the 360 video which has limited interactivity. That said, I don’t find the video of the VR experience convincing. It is a creative documentary and it is hard to see how being immersed would make much of a difference. Was it just a gimmick to get more people to come to the show?
MONTREAL — The last cyclorama in Canada has been hidden from public view since it closed in 2018, but a small group of people are hoping to revive the unique…
Cycloramas are the virtual reality of the 19th century. Long paintings, sometimes with props, were mounted in the round in special buildings that allowed people to feel immersed in a painted space. These remind us of the variety of types of media that have surpassed – the forgotten types of media.
My drawings are a reflection of my soul. What happens when artificial intelligence — and anyone with access to it — can replicate them?
Webcomic artist Sarah Andersen has written a timely Opinion for the New York Times on how The Alt-Right Manipulated My Comic. Then A.I. Claimed It.She talks about being harassed by the Alt-Right who created a shadow version of her work full of violent, racist and nazi motifs. Now she could be haunted by an AI-generated shadow like the image above. Her essay nicely captures the feeling of helplessness that many artists who survive on their work must be feeling before the “research” trick of LAION, the nonprofit arm of Stability AI that scraped copyrighted material under the cover of academic research and then made available for commercialization as Stable Diffusion.
Andersen links to a useful article on AI Data Laundering which is a good term for what researchers seem to be doing intentionally or not. What is the solution? Datasets gathered with consent? Alas too many of us, including myself, have released images on Flickr and other sites. So, as the article author Andy Baio puts it, “Asking for permission slows technological progress, but it’s hard to take back something you’ve unconditionally released into the world.”
While artists like Andersen may have no legal recourse that doesn’t make it ethical. Perhaps the academics that are doing the laundering should be called out. Perhaps we should consider boycotting such tools and hiring live artists when we have graphic design work.
