Category: Visualization

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.

Rewiring the Humanities: Notes from the DH Winter School 2025

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.

Michael Sinatra drew my attention to this post about the DH Winter School at IIT Delhi that I contributed to. See,  Rewiring the Humanities: Notes from the DH Winter School 2025.

Constellate Sunset

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.

It sounds like this sort of analytical support is best supported in universities by courses, workshops etc. Constellate developed cool notebooks (available in GitHub), courses built on the notebooks, and webinar recordings.

South Korea faces deepfake porn ’emergency’

The president has addressed the growing epidemic after Telegram users were found exchanging doctored photos of underage girls.

Once again, deepfake porn is in the news as South Korea faces deepfake porn ’emergency’. Teenagers have been posting deepfake porn images of people they know, including minors, on sites like Telegram.

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.

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.

Musée d’Orsay’s Van Gogh Exhibition Breaks Historic Attendance Record

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?

Group hopes to resurrect 128-year-old Cyclorama of Jerusalem, near Quebec City

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…

Good News! A Group hopes to resurrect 128-year-old Cyclorama of Jerusalem, near Quebec City. The Cyclorama of Jerusalem is the last/only cyclorama still standing in Canada. I visited and blogged about it back in 2004 when I was able to visit it. Then it closed and now they are trying to restore it and sell it.

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.

The Alt-Right Manipulated My Comic. Then A.I. Claimed It. 

AI generated comic in style of Sarah Andersen

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.

Issues around AI text to art generators

A new art-generating AI system called Stable Diffusion can create convincing deepfakes, including of celebrities.

TechCrunch has a nice discussion of Deepfakes for all: Uncensored AI art model prompts ethics questions. The relatively sudden availability of AI text to art generators has provoked discussion on the ethics of creation and of large machine learning models. Here are some interesting links:

It is worth identifying some of the potential issues:

  • These art generating AIs may have violated copyright in scraping millions of images. Could artists whose work has been exploited sue for compensation?
  • The AIs are black boxes that are hard to query. You can’t tell if copyrighted images were used.
  • These AIs could change the economics of illustration. People who used to commission and pay for custom art for things like magazines, book covers, and posters, could start just using these AIs to save money. Just as Flickr changed the economics of photography, MidJourney could put commercial illustrators out of work.
  • We could see a lot more “original” art in situations where before people could not afford it. Perhaps poster stores could offer to generate a custom image for you and print it. Get your portrait done as a cyberpunk astronaut.
  • The AIs could reinforce visual bias in our visual literacy. Systems that always see Philosophers as old white guys with beards could limit our imagination of what could be.
  • These could be used to create pornographic deepfakes with people’s faces on them or other toxic imagery.