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.
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”
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:
During his first visit to Argentina, Dr Nick Srnicek delivered a lecture on the relationship between political economy and new technology.
Left 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 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”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 📸”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.
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.
Event organised by the Computational Humanities research group.
To register to the seminar, please fill in this form by 3 November 2024.
12 November 2024 – 1.10pm GMT
Remote – Via Microsoft Teams.
Miguel Escobar (NUS Singapore), Computational theatre research: leveraging large datasets and AI for the performing arts
Abstract
Computational methods can better help us understand the history and current landscape of the performing arts. For example, we can use network analysis and simulations to study how collaborations within theatre companies develop over time, and how specific management decisions lead to different collaborative patterns. For this, we can take advantage of the records of theatre productions, which are increasingly available in digitized form. Recent advances in open-source AI models can also be used to extract detailed information from videos and texts. For example, we can fine-tune action segmentation models to identify culturally-specific performing conventions in video recordings of performances, and determine how their usage has changed over time.
Bio
Miguel Escobar Varela is Associate Professor at the department of English, Linguistics, and Theatre Studies (ELTS) and deputy director of the Centre for Computational Social Science and Humanities (CSSH) at the National University of Singapore. In his research, he uses digital tools to document and study cultural heritage in Southeast Asia. He is the author of Theater as data (University of Michigan Press, 2021) and has written several articles on digital humanities and Indonesian theatre. A full list of his publications and digital projects is available at https://miguelescobar.com. He is also Associate Editor of the newly established journal Computational Humanities Research (Cambridge University Press).
Event organised by the Computational Humanities research group.
To register to the seminar, please fill in this form by 18 October 2024.
22 October 2024 – 3pm BST
In person – King’s College London, Bush House (SE)1.10 (FOR KCL STAFF AND STUDENTS ONLY)
Remote – Via Microsoft Teams
Luca Marinelli (Queen Mary University of London), Gender-Coded Sound: Analysing the Gendering of Music in Toy Commercials via Multi-Task Learning
Abstract
Music can convey ideological stances, and gender is just one of them. Evidence from musicology and psychology research shows that gender-loaded messages can be reliably encoded and decoded via musical sounds. However, much of this evidence comes from examining music in isolation, while studies of the gendering of music within multimodal communicative events are sparse. In this paper, we outline a method to automatically analyse how music in TV advertising aimed at children may be deliberately used to reinforce traditional gender roles. Our dataset of 606 commercials included music-focused mid-level perceptual features, multimodal aesthetic emotions, and content analytical items. Despite its limited size, and because of the extreme gender polarisation inherent in toy advertisements, we obtained noteworthy results by leveraging multi-task transfer learning on our densely annotated dataset. The models were trained to categorise commercials based on their intended target audience, specifically distinguishing between masculine, feminine, and mixed audiences. Additionally, to provide explainability for the classification in gender targets, the models were jointly trained to perform regressions on emotion ratings across six scales, and on mid-level musical perceptual attributes across twelve scales. Standing in the context of MIR, computational social studies and critical analysis, this study may benefit not only music scholars but also advertisers, policymakers, and broadcasters.
Bio
Luca is a PhD student at the UKRI CDT in Artificial Intelligence and Music at the Centre for Digital Music (C4DM), Queen Mary University of London, under the co-supervision of Dr C. Saitis, G. Fazekas, and Prof. P. Lucht (Center for Interdisciplinary Women’s and Gender Studies, Technical University of Berlin). His PhD project sits at the intersection of music data science, gender and media studies, aiming at implementing machine learning techniques to aid the critical analysis of gendered markers in large corpora of television adverts.
