DDH Seminar Series – Spring 2025

This is the schedule for our Digital Humanities Department Seminar Series, Spring 2025. All Seminars are at 5pm in the Safta Lecture Theatre on Wednesdays. Usually the events are followed by a drinks reception.

Links to the details and registration pages will be updated on this page throughout the year. Please contact Alfie with questions if you need more information further in advance about a session.

22nd January
Guest: Rachel Clarke (LCC)
Title: Drinking Camomile in Palestine: Dischronotopic Land-based Ecologies
Host: Güneş Tavmen
Click here for full event details and registration page.

29th January
Guest: Carolina Bandinelli (The University of Warwick, Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies)
Love after Love: postromantic cultures in digital societies
Host: Alfie Bown

5th February
Guest: Dr Jendrzej Niklas
Title: Data Ecopolitics
Host: Jelena Dzakula

12th February
Guest: Leon Brenner
Title: Don’t Test my Reality: Reality Testing and the Adaptation to Artificial Reality
Host: Alfie Bown

26th Feb
GDC series
TBC

5th March
GDC series
TBC

12th March
Guest: Katherine Everitt
Title: Digitized Spirit: Hegel in Cyberspace
Host: Alfie Bown

19th March
GDC series
TBC

26th March
Guest: Niall Docherty
Title: Social media, and discourses of wellbeing and ‘healthy users’
Host: David Young

Crossing Boundaries: Celebrating Linguistic Diversity at King’s

Event organised by Andrea Farina and Barbara McGillivray.

To register for the event, please visit King’s official webpage.

Join us for “Crossing Boundaries: Celebrating Linguistic Diversity at King’s”, an exciting initiative designed to explore the vibrant world of languages and how they shape our understanding of motion and space. In today’s global city of London, where many languages are at risk of disappearing, it has become more important than ever to celebrate linguistic diversity. At King’s, we are committed to promoting inclusivity by valuing the many languages spoken by our students and staff.

This event offers participants the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of linguistic diversity by exploring how different languages express motion through space. By comparing motion verbs across a variety of ancient and modern languages, we will highlight the cultural and linguistic contexts that shape how we perceive movement and space. A key aspect of this event is the active involvement of students, which plays a crucial role in promoting and preserving the languages that define our communities. By engaging in this project, you will contribute to keeping these languages alive and fostering a more inclusive, culturally aware environment, both at King’s and beyond.

What to expect

During this engaging event, participants will have the opportunity to explore and contribute to an interactive digital tool designed to compare motion verbs across various languages. This resource will offer insights into how different languages express movement and spatial relationships, providing examples from both ancient and modern languages. By examining the diverse ways in which languages encode direction and motion, participants will gain a deeper understanding of how language structures influence thought and cultural perspectives. The day will also include a hands-on, collaborative workshop where participants will actively contribute to the creation of the “Paths of Motion” art installation — a visual representation of linguistic diversity. This is an exciting opportunity to leave a tangible mark on the artwork, as the installation will be co-designed and co-created by the participants, making them a key part of this dynamic and creative project. Lunch will be provided during the break to ensure a comfortable and enjoyable experience throughout the day.

Who can attend

This event is open to undergraduate and postgraduate students from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at King’s College London, especially those from the departments of Classics, Digital Humanities, English, Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Education, Communication & Society, and the King’s Language Centre. As spaces are limited to 25 participants, we ask interested students to complete a registration form. We kindly request that only those who are confident they can attend register for the event. To ensure the workshop celebrates and reflects linguistic diversity, we will ask participants to share their native language(s) and/or any other languages you speak as part of the form. This information will help us create a balanced group representing a variety of linguistic and cultural perspectives.

Please don’t worry if others share your language – we aim to include everyone fairly while maintaining diversity. Whether you’re fluent in multiple languages or just one, your participation and unique perspective are valued and welcome!

Only registered participants will be able to attend the event.

Important dates

  • Registration deadline: 28th February 2025.
  • Notification of acceptance: 7th March 2025.
  • Event: 31st March 2025.

‘Gather, explore, collaborate’ – new toolkit to enrich digital culture research at King’s

KingsCAT is a cross-faculty initiative coordinated by the Digital Future Institute’s Centre for Digital Culture and the Department of Digital Humanities in collaboration with e-Research and colleagues from multiple institutes, centres, departments and schools at King’s.

Audience at the KingsCAT launch event
Audience at the KingsCAT launch event and workshop on 21 November 2024. Photo: Iryna Rodina
Continue reading “‘Gather, explore, collaborate’ – new toolkit to enrich digital culture research at King’s”

Imaginative Digital Futures: a symposium, 27 November 2024

241127 imaginative digital futures

What will our future look like? Will it have to be digital? What role will biotech, screen media and AI play in it? Can we imagine better futures with and around digital technology? Can we design those futures in a collaborative way?

Hosted by the Department of Digital Humanities and the Centre for Attention Studies (part of the Digital Futures Institute) at King’s College London, the symposium will discuss these questions while celebrating the launch of our new online Digital Futures MA.

Continue reading “Imaginative Digital Futures: a symposium, 27 November 2024”

Hello #AoIR2024! 👋🏼

Several members of King College London’s Department of Digital Humanities and Centre for Digital Culture are presenting at the Association of Internet Researchers AoIR 2024 conference over the coming days. If you’re there you can see:

Dr Nick Srnicek awarded Honorary Professorship from the University of Buenos Aires

During his first visit to Argentina, Dr Nick Srnicek delivered a lecture on the relationship between political economy and new technology.

Nick Srnicek and Emiliano Yacobitti, University of Buenos AiresLeft to right: Emiliano Yacobitti, Vice-Rector of the University of Buenos Aires, and Dr Nick Srnicek, Senior Lecturer in Digital Economy at King’s College London. Photo credit: Guillermo Llamos

Dr Nick Srnicek, Senior Lecturer in Digital Economy, became an Honorary Professor of the University of Buenos Aires. He was awarded the title by Vice-Rector Emiliano Yacobitti at a ceremony in the Faculty of Economic Sciences.

Continue reading “Dr Nick Srnicek awarded Honorary Professorship from the University of Buenos Aires”

Professor Dame Janet (Jinty) Nelson DBE FRHistS FBA 1942-2024

Professor Dame Janet Nelson, 2019. Image: John Deehan for the Royal Historical Society

Jinty, as she was known, was a distinguished medieval history scholar of international standing as well as an inspirational colleague and teacher. Her life and career will be celebrated by her colleagues in the Department of History – see their tribute  here – where she spent almost her entire academic career from 1970 until her retirement in 2007, and very widely elsewhere.  It is highly appropriate, however, to add our own tribute from the field of Digital Humanities – previously ‘humanities computing’, which was its description for most of Jinty’s time at King’s.

We remember Jinty for many things, starting with her unwavering support for what we were doing, going back to 1989 when she collaborated with Susan Kruse to set up and co-teach a non-credit ‘History and Computing’ course for second year History students. It was remarkable and far from common that such a well-established scholar would take such a keen interest in the possibilities offered by this relatively new area of activity.

Continue reading “Professor Dame Janet (Jinty) Nelson DBE FRHistS FBA 1942-2024”

troubling AI: a call for screenshots 📸

How can screenshots trouble our understanding of AI?

To explore this, researchers in the Department of Digital Humanities are launching a call for screenshots as part of a collaboration with the Digital Futures Institute’s Centre for Digital Culture and Centre for Attention Studies at King’s College London, the médialab at Sciences Po, Paris and the Public Data Lab.

Further details can be found copied below. You can find the submission details here: https://troubling-ai.glitch.me

Continue reading “troubling AI: a call for screenshots 📸”

Welcome to Marta Arisi, visiting PhD at the Department of Digital Humanities ✨

We are delighted to announce that Marta Arisi will be joining us from Sciences Po as a visiting PhD researcher at the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London.

During her stay she will be working with Jonathan Gray and exploring collaborations with researchers in the department and the Centre for Digital Culture.

Marta comments:

“Through my visit, I wish to share and explore research collaborations around my doctoral research on genealogies of ‘openness’ in AI. This project aims to situate AI openness in relation to other histories and practices of openness in digital culture, and to interrogate the implied universality of openness by refocusing on the structural inequalities and power asymmetries that data-driven systems can create and reproduce. In doing so, I reflect upon the values and concepts which are invoked to guide us to more hopeful digital futures.

More about her research can be found here.

Seminar | Part-of-Speech Tagging & Lemmatisation in Unedited Greek: Simple Tasks, Complex Challenges?

Event organised by the Computational Humanities research group.

To register to the seminar, please fill in this form by 1 December 2024.

10 December 2024 – 1.10pm GMT

Remote – Via Microsoft Teams.

Colin Swaelens (Ghent University), Part-of-Speech Tagging & Lemmatisation in Unedited Greek: Simple Tasks, Complex Challenges? 

Abstract

In today’s landscape of language technology, dominated by large language models, tasks like part-of-speech tagging and lemmatisation receive less attention in current NLP research. However, these tasks still pose significant challenges, especially for under-resourced, morphologically rich languages like Ancient Greek. Our project focuses on the verbatim transcriptions of Byzantine marginal poetry stored in the Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams (DBBE). Due to the highly interconnected nature of the poems, we aim to eventually perform similarity detection across the corpus. As a first step, we sought to annotate the DBBE with part-of-speech tags, morphological analyses, and lemmas. Although research on these tasks dates back to more straightforward rule-based systems from the 1970s, current taggers struggle with these unedited texts. The inconsistent orthography —largely due to itacism— adds to this complexity. To mitigate these issues, we trained a transformer-based language model encompassing classical, medieval, and modern Greek. Our experiments, however, revealed that fine-tuning the model for each annotation task was not always fruitful. There is a growing tendency to address such challenges with a multi-task head, allowing the model to process multiple annotations concurrently, drawing inspiration from cognitive psychology. This raises the question: will this more intricate solution outshine the seemingly more transparent methods of the past?

Bio

Colin Swaelens is a PhD student at the Language & Translation Technology Team (LT3) and the Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams (DBBE) at Ghent University, under supervision of dr. Ilse De Vos (Flanders AI Academy) and prof. Els Lefever (LT3). His PhD project is embedded in the project Interconnected texts: a graph-based computational approach to Byzantine paratexts as nodes between textual transmission and cultural and linguistic developments. Within this project, he is developing an annotation pipeline to provide all texts in DBBE with a part-of-speech tag, morphological analysis and lemma. This linguistic information will, in a next stage, be used within the development of a tool to detect similar verses in this corpus, serving the other subprojects on manuscript culture and formulaicity.