Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 35, No. 401. Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne Hosted by DH-Cologne www.dhhumanist.org Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org [1] From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk> Subject: long-lingering problem fixed! (24) [2] From: Fishwick, Paul <Paul.Fishwick@utdallas.edu> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 35.302: A Biography of the Pixel (with review & commentary) (108) [3] From: Flanders, Julia <j.flanders@northeastern.edu> Subject: Call for participation: Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist (55) [4] From: Robin Douglas Burke <Robin.Burke@Colorado.EDU> Subject: Re: 35.116: an oppositional artificial intelligence (46) [5] From: AEOLIAN Project <Aeolian@lboro.ac.uk> Subject: AEOLIAN Network Workshop Programme and Speaker Abstracts (276) [6] From: David Zeitlyn <david.zeitlyn@anthro.ox.ac.uk> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 35.2: low-level nittygritty (36) --[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: 2021-12-10 06:53:14+00:00 From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk> Subject: long-lingering problem fixed! My thanks to Kai Niebes (Köln) for finding and fixing the lurking problem in Humanist software responsible for emptying messages of their contents. Some of you will have received requests from me to resend affected messages to me directly; some may quite rightly have begun to suspect that some malevolent person had formed a dislike of them... :-) No such thing. Just faulty software. What if...? Yes, I know. There's software involved in processing applications from prisoners for parole and worse. Apart from that, the lesson here is that if something unexpected happens to your posting, please let me know! Following this message are those that Kai managed to rescue from the bin into which said software had tossed them. Other, time-sensitive ones I am not passing on.Apologies for the following miscellany, through which I very much hope you comb for still relevant postings. All best, WM -- Willard McCarty, Professor emeritus, King's College London; Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews; Humanist www.mccarty.org.uk --[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: 2021-10-17 17:42:08+00:00 From: Fishwick, Paul <Paul.Fishwick@utdallas.edu> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 35.302: A Biography of the Pixel (with review & commentary) Alasdair makes an excellent point. I am centered in computer and information science (CS) but very interested in the digital humanities--especially, creative practice in the arts. I agree that getting the opportunity to study a humanities-related topic is something we are all interested in. Here are 2 approaches (#1 and #2): 1. The tool approach suggests that the DH scholar is the consumer and the product is created by CS. This has been shown very useful and can work effectively. 2. The knowledge approach where discussions centered on the humanities can be a way for CS (Education) to be brought to the forefront. When I was in Exeter a few years ago, my goal was to get computer scientists interested in learning from the arts and humanities. For example, see that medieval bridge or Roman wall? Model these with a JSON structure or any other data structure. Make a computer program to synthesize the wall. #1 is not really up my alley. #2 is where I spend all of my time. There are significant hurdles. The main one being the culture of computer science on utility and vocation. Modeling the medieval bridge in JSON is not practical and does not solve "a problem." Who cares about these things? Most CSers do implicitly operate like this, but not all. I am glass-half-full and wanting to bolster #2. -paul Paul Fishwick, PhD Distinguished University Chair of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication Professor of Computer Science Director, Creative Automata Laboratory The University of Texas at Dallas Arts & Technology 800 West Campbell Road, AT10 Richardson, TX 75080-3021 Home: utdallas.edu/atec/fishwick Media: medium.com/@metaphorz Modeling: digest.sigsim.org Twitter: @PaulFishwick ONLINE: Webex,Collaborate, TEAMS, Zoom, Skype, Hangout Date: 2021-10-16 07:25:33+00:00 From: Alasdair Ekpenyong <kekpenyo@syr.edu> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 35.300: pubs: A Biography of the Pixel (with review & commentary) Dr. McCarty, In response to your question about how to get digital humanities scholarship to focus more on the mechanics of how computing works, in addition to the current focus on social impact, I think the solution would be to get more data science, computer science, etc. scholars to be interested in the digital humanities. We as a community do a lot of work to introduce English students, history students, etc. to the idea of using coding or programming to visualize their work, but I don’t know that we do as strong of a job helping technically-trained students feel comfortable and welcome joining into humanities conversations. I’m in a Big Data Analytics course right now in a masters program, and when given the chance to choose a topic, my team of classmates quickly chose an analysis of healthcare industry data. I had the option to explain to them that we have the option of studying a humanities-related subject and that this, too, could be considered Big Data, but I didn’t feel comfortable investing the energy to try and start that conversation and probably get the idea shot down. In their 2006 account of one of the first DH projects, "Sorting things in: Feminist knowledge representation and changing modes of scholarly production," the scholars talk about how a collaborative team approaches to DH involves bringing together humanities scholars and STEM scholars. (Link: https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedir ect.com%2Fscience%2Farticle%2Fabs%2Fpii%2FS0277539506000215&data=04%7C01%7Cp aul.fishwick%40utdallas.edu%7C66039a741a4e4a5c01d508d9914757e3%7C8d281d1d9c4d4bf 7b16e032d15de9f6c%7C0%7C0%7C637700557887178088%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiM C4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=rEJaj fywfPXaksgyNhSaS0zwBtVqbSYafKBCbb2Uha8%3D&reserved=0). I definitely see more room for opportunity for bringing STEM scholars feel invited to the DH table and if necessary empowering the junior STEM scholars to feel confident and capable of joining humanities conversations. I wonder if the serious humanities seem as intimidating to some STEM scholars as the idea of learning Python sometimes seems to some humanities scholars. Alasdair Envoyé de mon iPhone Le 16 oct. 2021 à 00:48, Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> a écrit : Not only are most of us undereducated in mathematics, hardware and software engineering and so on, but the sources of instruction one turns to tend to be written for people within the technical disciplines, so it is an uphill battle. A student recently complained to me that her lack of training on the digital side of digital humanities made the path I was laying out close to impossible. Is this not a problem we need to fix? Comments? --[3]------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: 2021-09-20 17:46:21+00:00 From: Flanders, Julia <j.flanders@northeastern.edu> Subject: Call for participation: Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist Dear all, Applications are invited for participation in the final event in a series of advanced institutes on text analysis, sponsored by the Northeastern University Women Writers Project with generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. These institutes introduce teachers and researchers at varied levels of expertise to the text analysis methods and interpretive questions arising from word embedding models, which represent connections between words as computable spatial relationships. The full program includes four institutes, three of which have already taken place in 2019 and 2021. On May 16–20, 2022 we will hold the final event in the series, an intensive seminar focused on pedagogical uses of word vectors. This five-day virtual event will run from 12:30–5pm Eastern and will offer a thorough, well-scaffolded introduction to working with word vectors in R and RStudio through commented code samples that can be adapted for use in participants’ own teaching. Participants will learn how to build corpora and train models of their own, and will also explore the challenges of teaching command-line tools in a humanities context. Each event is followed by a period of virtual discussion, consultation, and support. Participants will be encouraged to share research and teaching outcomes (syllabi, assignments, blog posts, research papers) and will be given the opportunity to post preliminary results and work in progress on the WWP blog. For information on how to apply please visit: https://www.wwp.northeastern.edu/outreach/seminars/neh_wem.html and https://www.wwp.northeastern.edu/outreach/seminars/neh_wem_application.html. Application deadline: January 31, 2022 Participants notified by: February 25, 2022 Preliminary schedule: https://wwp.northeastern.edu/outreach/seminars/wem_2022-05/ The previous institutes in the series are: • An introductory institute focused on research applications of word vectors, using the WWP’s web-based Women Writers Vector Toolkit (July 17–19, 2019; https://wwp.northeastern.edu/outreach/seminars/wem_2019-07/) • An introductory institute focused on pedagogical applications of word vectors, using the WWP’s web-based Women Writers Vector Toolkit (May 24–28, 2021; https://wwp.northeastern.edu/outreach/seminars/wem_2021-05/) • An intensive institute focused on research applications of word vectors, using R and RStudio (July 12–16, 2021; https://wwp.northeastern.edu/outreach/seminars/wem_2021-07/) Please contact wwp@northeastern.edu with any questions. Thanks and all our best, Julia and Sarah Julia Flanders, Director Sarah Connell, Assistant Director Women Writers Project Northeastern University --[4]------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: 2021-07-05 22:25:01+00:00 From: Robin Douglas Burke <Robin.Burke@Colorado.EDU> Subject: Re: 35.116: an oppositional artificial intelligence Re: the idea of an opposition artificial intelligence, I offer the following thread of recent research in music information retrieval and recommendation. The authors in these works have been seeking to build systems that can spur musical creativity through "oppositional" suggestions / recommendations: Collins, N. (2010). Contrary Motion: An Oppositional Interactive Music System. In NIME (pp. 125-129). http://www.educ.dab.uts.edu.au/nime/PROCEEDINGS/papers/Paper%20F1-F5/P125_Collin s.pdf Knees, P., Andersen, K., & Tkalcic, M. (2015). " I'd like it to do the opposite": Music-Making Between Recommendation and Obstruction. In DMRS (pp. 9-16). http://www.cp.jku.at/people/knees/publications/knees_etal_dmrs_2015.pdf Knees, Peter, and Kristina Andersen. "A Prototype for Exploration of Computational Strangeness in the Context of Rhythm Variation." UMAP (Extended Proceedings). 2016. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1618/SOAP_paper3.pdf Bauer, C., & Schedl, M. (2017, July). Introducing surprise and opposition by design in recommender systems. In Adjunct Publication of the 25th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (pp. 350-353). https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3099023.3099099 Some of these papers appeared in the two SOAP workshops (Surprise, Opposition, and Obstruction in Adaptive and Personalized Systems) from 2016 and 2017: https://soapworkshop2016.wordpress.com/ https://soapworkshop2017.wordpress.com/ These workshops were a bit broader as the title implies. I think the music- related work is closest to the spirit of the term "oppositional". Enjoy, Robin ————————————————————————————— Robin Burke (he/his), Professor, Chair Department of Information Science Department of Computer Science (by courtesy) University of Colorado, Boulder robin.burke@colorado.edu I may send email outside of working hours; I do not expect you to. --[5]------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: 2021-06-02 07:25:10+00:00 From: AEOLIAN Project <Aeolian@lboro.ac.uk> Subject: AEOLIAN Network Workshop Programme and Speaker Abstracts Dear all, The AEOLIAN Network (Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Organisations), a project funded by the New Directions for Digital Scholarship grant from the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), is hosting their first online workshop on Wednesday 7th July, 12:00 to 17:30 GMT. Please see below for our updated Programme and Speaker Abstracts and Bios. There is still time to apply for a place to attend the workshop, but applications will need to be received by 18th June 2021. Please see our website for more details: https://www.aeolian-network.net/events/workshop-1-employing- machine-learning-and-artificial-intelligence-in-cultural-institutions/ AEOLIAN is designed to investigate the role that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can play to make born-digital and digitised cultural records more accessible to users. The project will make a ground-breaking contribution to this field through carefully-structured workshops, innovative research outputs, and the creation of an international network of theorists and practitioners working with born-digital and digitised archives. Please visit https://www.aeolian- network.net for more information. Thank you, Katie Aske Research Assistant for AEOLIAN Twitter: @AeolianNetwork Email: aeolian@lboro.ac.uk AEOLIAN Network’s Online Workshop 1: Employing Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in Cultural Institutions Programme Wednesday 7th July from 12:00 to 17:30 GMT 12:00 – 12:10: Welcome from Dr Lise Jaillant (Loughborough University) and Dr Annalina Caputo (Dublin City University). 12:10 – 13.30: Panel 1. Chair: Dr Maria Castrillo (Imperial War Museums) Dr Giles Bergel (University of Oxford / National Library of Scotland) Title: Visual AI and printed chapbook illustrations at the National Library of Scotland Einion Gruffudd (National Library of Wales) Title: Describing the Welsh National Broadcast Archive John Stack (Science Museum) Title: Machine Learning and Cultural Heritage: What Is It Good Enough For? Followed by Q&A 13:30 – 14:30: Lunch Break (1 hour) 14:30 – 15:10: Panel 2. Chair: TBC María R. Estorino (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries) Title: Rabbit Heart: Archives + the Machine John McQuaid (Frick Collection), Vardan Papyan (University of Toronto), and X.Y. Han (Cornell University) Title: AI and the Photoarchive Followed by Q&A 15:10 – 15:30: Interactive Session This session is designed to generate casual discussion, share research interests, and get to know other members of the network. Attendees will have the option to attend one of 4 breakout rooms: Room 1: Digital Management in Cultural Organisations Room 2: Machine Learning and AI Projects Room 3: Working Across Disciplines Room 4: Developing International Projects 15:30 – 16:00: Comfort Break (30 min) 16:00 – 17:00: Keynote Presentation. Chair: TBC Thomas Padilla (Center for Research Libraries) Title: Keep True: Three Strategies to Guide AI Engagement Followed by Q&A. 17:00 – 17:30: Roundtable. Chair: Dr Katherine Aske (Loughborough University). Roundtable discussion with the AEOLIAN Project Team: Dr Lise Jaillant, Dr Annalina Caputo, Glen Worthy (University of Illinois), Prof. Claire Warwick (Durham University), Prof. J. Stephen Downie (University of Illinois), Dr Paul Gooding (Glasgow University), and Ryan Dubnicek (University of Illinois). Followed by Q&A. –––– Time Conversions (US) (GMT-5) East Coast: 7:00–12:30 (break 8:30–9:30) (GMT-6) Central: 6:00–11:30 (7:30–8:30) (GMT-8) West Coast: 4:00¬–9:30 (5:30–6:30) Speaker Abstracts and Biographies Dr Giles Bergel (University of Oxford / National Library of Scotland) Dr Giles Bergel is based in the Visual Geometry Group in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, where he works on the application of visual AI to cultural heritage datasets. He has personal research interests in book history, particularly cheap printed forms such as broadside ballads and chapbooks, and has worked on a number of digitisation and accompanying digital scholarship research projects on these forms. He is also interested in the development of reproducibility standards for AI in cultural heritage. Title: Visual AI and printed chapbook illustrations at the National Library of Scotland Abstract: This presentation describes a project undertaken within the National Librarian of Scotland’s Fellowship in Digital Scholarship programme for 2020-1. The National Library of Scotland’s Data Foundry repository was created to encourage the application of digital research methods to the collections: it includes a large dataset of images, metadata and transcripts of Chapbooks Printed in Scotland. Chapbooks are small, cheap books sold by travelling pedlars, or chapmen, which comprise one of the most innovative and widely-known forms of popular printed literature of their heyday (c.1700-1900). They are frequently illustrated with relief (woodblock or stereotype) prints, which can aid in printer attribution as well as providing evidence of popular visual culture. This project employed both a variety of computer vision methods to aid in the analysis of the chapbook illustrations. Object detection, using a pretrained classifier retrained on a small sample of the chapbooks, was employed to identify the illustrated pages and to extract the illustrations from the corpus. Next, the illustrations were matched using a visual search algorithm, clustered, and made browsable per visual match and by means of the Library’s structured metadata. Candidate matches were registered to provide a means of verification of the closeness of the match, providing also a means of sequencing the printed impressions, and chronological order of publication. Last, an image classifier was applied to the extracted illustrations in order to explore intra-class relationships and similarity to other relevant data. The presentation will describe several forthcoming outcomes of the research, including a methodological article; a machine learning model; and a dataset of annotated images to encourage improvement of image-detection classifiers. Last, the presentation will offer some reflections on the value of curated data within AI workflows in cultural heritage, and the necessity of further curatorial oversight of their outputs. Einion Gruffudd (National Library of Wales) Einion Gruffudd started his career as a video librarian at Barcud television resources company in north Wales, before returning to Aberystwyth in 1992 to work at the National Library of Wales where he has served in the Manuscripts, IT and Unique Collections departments. His work has included managing Library systems, business continuity, setting up NLW’s digital archive, and successfully leading a HLF funded project to digitise all 1,200 tithe maps of Wales. He has been managing the NLHF funded project to establish a Broadcast Archive at NLW since 2017. Title: Describing the Welsh National Broadcast Archive Abstract: This talk will describe how the National Library of Wales is establishing a National Broadcast Archive, a National Lottery Heritage Fund supported project involving acquiring a large corpus of digitised audiovisual material from Welsh broadcasters. This collection which will be made available to the people of Wales for research purposes at various locations across the country. The project includes a focus on making the collection more discoverable, applying Artificial Intelligence technologies to Welsh Language voice2text and keyword generation. These activities to improve how the collection is described will include volunteer participation in the correction of machine learning output, among many other activities to promote the use of the archive. Issues raised by the ownership and clearance of rights affect all activities including AI activities, and the project’s approach to these obstacles will be explained. The talk will examine how the location of the Broadcast Archive within NLW brings different use cases for archive use, and opportunities to take advantage of other digitisation activities and technologies developed at the Library. A key focus for the end of the project, which will be described, is to develop a "linked data experience" to help people understand the relationships between broadcasting and other historical sources from the wide range of holdings at NLW. John Stack (Science Museum) John Stack is Digital Director of the Science Museum Group. The Science Museum Group encompasses five museums: Science Museum, London; National Science and Media Museum, Bradford; National Railway Museum, York; Science and Industry Museum, Manchester; and Locomotion, Shildon. He joined in 2015 and is responsible for setting and delivering the Group's digital strategy. He manages the Digital department which encompasses the museums’ websites, digitised collections, apps, games and on gallery digital media. Prior to joining the Science Museum Group, he was Head of Digital at Tate for ten years. Title: Machine Learning and Cultural Heritage: What Is It Good Enough For? Abstract: Funded through the AHRC’s Towards a National Collection Programme, the Science Museum Group (SMG) is collaborating with the V&A and School of Advanced Study, University of London, on a two-year project entitled “Heritage Connector: Transforming text into data to extract meaning and make connections”. As with almost all data, museum collection catalogues are largely unstructured, variable in consistency and overwhelmingly composed of thin records. The form of these catalogues means that the potential for new forms of research, access and scholarly enquiry that range across multiple collections and related datasets remains dormant. The Heritage Connector project is deploying a range of machine learning-based techniques to extract information from the SMG collection catalogue, link it to third-party sources – primarily Wikidata and the V&A’s collection – will then create a set of prototypes that demonstrate and explore the affordances of the resulting dataset. Rather than attempting to deploy machine learning to create a perfect linked data model, Heritage Connector asks what’s “good enough” to provide useful functionality to different audiences. María R. Estorino (Associate University Librarian for Special Collections at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries) María R. Estorino serves as Associate University Librarian for Special Collections and Director of Wilson Library with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries. With degrees in public history and library science, she has spent 20 years in cultural heritage work, principally in academic special collections and local history museums. Title: Rabbit Heart: Archives + the Machine Abstract: From fear to fluency: considering the role of the archivist/special collections librarian in explorations of machine learning and artificial intelligence in our work. John McQuaid (Frick Collection) John McQuaid is Photoarchive Lead at the Frick Art Reference Library. He received a BA in Art History and Classics from Case Western Reserve and a MA in the History of Art from The Ohio State University. Vardan Papyan (University of Toronto) Vardan Papyan is an assistant professor in the department of Mathematics at the University of Toronto, cross-appointed with the department of Computer Science. He received his BSc, MSc, and PhD at the Technion and was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University. X.Y. Han (Cornell University) X.Y. Han is a PhD student in the department of Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell University. He received his BSE in Operations Research and Financial Engineering from Princeton University, and MS in Statistics from Stanford University. Title: AI and the Photoarchive Abstract: In this talk, we describe a collaborative project between art historians and staff at the Frick Art Reference Library (FARL) and researchers at Cornell, Stanford, and the University of Toronto to develop an algorithm that will apply a local classification system based on visual elements to the Library’s digitized Photoarchive—a study collection of 1.2 million reproductions of works of art. We leverage state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) systems to develop a classifier for the automatic annotation of digitized but not-yet-catalogued images in the FARL’s Photoarchive. This was achieved by engineering the syntax of the classification system into the training and predictive process of deep convolutional neural networks, the cornerstone of modern AI advancements. The classifier is integrated into a mobile and desktop application that allows Photoarchive staff to quickly validate or correct the decisions of the networks. We demonstrate promising performance metrics and offer informative scientific insights that have the potential to create a valuable tool for metadata creation and image retrieval. This project offers a useful model for effective interdisciplinary interaction. Thomas Padilla (Director of Information Systems and Technology Strategy at the Center for Research Libraries) Thomas Padilla is Director of Information Systems and Technology Strategy at the Center for Research Libraries. He is the author of the library community research agenda, Responsible Operations: Data Science Machine Learning, and AI in Libraries, Principal Investigator of Collections as Data: Part to Whole, and past Principal Investigator of Always Already Computational: Collections as Data. Thomas is Vice Chair, ACRL Research and Scholarly Environment Committee; Executive Committee Member, Association for Computers and the Humanities; and Technical Advisory Board Member, Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship. Title: Keep True: Three Strategies to Guide AI Engagement Abstract: Recurrent bouts of AI enthusiasm over decades suggest no sector is immune to losing itself in the face of potential. In the archipelago of varied sector actors implementing AI, GLAMs have an opportunity to distinguish themselves. While the component parts of this community are quite different and sometimes functionally opposed in approaches to similar work, we share in common a set of contemporary commitments that seek to advance equity in the communities we serve. In what follows I will present three strategies I believe strengthen our ability to realize these commitments: nonscalability imperative, avoiding neoliberal traps, and seeing maintenance as innovation. --[6]------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: 2021-05-07 08:51:39+00:00 From: David Zeitlyn <david.zeitlyn@anthro.ox.ac.uk> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 35.2: low-level nittygritty Dear all Tom Boellstorff gave an Oxdeg seminar about the following book which should be relevant Tom Boellstorff & Braxton Soderman Intelligent Visions: The Intellivision System, Video Games, and Society The talk (not recorded) was about suitably nittygritty issues of early programming problems... david -- David Zeitlyn, Professor of Social Anthropology (research). ORCID: 0000-0001-5853-7351 Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography University of Oxford, 51 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6PF, UK. http://www.isca.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-david-zeitlyn http://www.mambila.info/ The Virtual Institute of Mambila Studies http://users.ox.ac.uk/~wolf2728/ 2020 Monograph: Mambila Divination: Framing Questions, Constructing Answers (Routledge Studies in Anthropology) London: Routledge. ISBN 9780367199500 Vestiges: Traces of Record http://www.vestiges-journal.info/ Open Access Journal _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted List posts to: humanist@dhhumanist.org List info and archives at at: http://dhhumanist.org Listmember interface at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted/ Subscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/membership_form.php