King's College London Digital Humanities

Event organised by the Computational Humanities research group.

To register to the seminar, please fill in this form by Friday 22 March 2024.

27 March 2024 – 5pm GMT

In person – King’s College London (Macadam Building MB-2.1)

Remote – Via Microsoft Teams

Giovanni Quattrone (Middlesex University London), Diversity and Inclusion in the Sharing Economy: An Airbnb Case Study

Abstract

The sharing economy model is a contested concept: on one hand, its proponents have praised it to be enabler of fair marketplaces, with all participants receiving equal opportunities; on the other hand, its detractors have criticised it for actually exacerbating preexisting societal inequalities. In this paper, we propose a scalable quantitative method to measure participants’ diversity and inclusion in such marketplaces, with the aim to offer evidence to ground this debate. We apply the method to the case of the Airbnb hospitality service for the city of London, UK. Our findings reveal that diversity is high for gender, but not so for age and ethnicity. As for inclusion, we find strong signals of homophily both in terms of gender, age and ethnicity, thus suggesting that under-represented groups have significantly fewer opportunities to gain from this market model. Interestingly, the sentiment associated to same-group (homophilic) interactions is just as positive as that associated to heterophilic ones, even after controlling for Airbnb property’s type, price and location. This suggests that increased diversity and inclusion are desirable not only for moral but also for economic and market reasons.

Bio

Dr Giovanni Quattrone is a prominent researcher and expert in the fields of Social Data Science and Urban Science. With a strong background in data-driven analysis and interdisciplinary research, Giovanni has made significant contributions to advancing our understanding of complex social phenomena and urban dynamics.

Giovanni’s expertise lies in leveraging computational methods, such as machine learning and network analysis to gain insights into social interactions and human behaviour across both online and offline domains. Giovanni’s research also encompasses the analysis of urban data, driving the development of data-driven solutions to enhance urban planning, sustainability, and livability. To date, Giovanni has published more than 80 peer-reviewed publications, with over 1900 citations collectively (Source: Google Scholar).

Event organised by the Computational Humanities research group.

To register to the seminar, please fill in this form by Tuesday 20 February 2024.

27 February 2024 – 3pm GMT

In person – King’s College London

Remote – Via Microsoft Teams

Teresa Paccosi (University of Trento / Fondazione Bruno Kessler), Exploring Changes in Sensory Descriptions Over Time: A Frame-Based Approach to the Study of Smelling and Tasting

Abstract

The world in which we live is mediated by our senses, so it is not surprising that every language has specialized words to describe our perceptual experience. Previous research has revealed a dominance of sight in the usage of sensory words and in the composition of the sensory lexicon in Western European languages. This often results in taste and smell being expressed with a more limited vocabulary in these languages. Existing works on olfactory and gustatory language focus on contemporary language and the specific words employed in these sensory vocabularies. This seminar aims to offer a quantitative exploration of the evolution of English olfactory and gustatory language over time, adopting a FrameNet-like approach for the analysis of sensory descriptions in textual data. The frame-based approach is designed to effectively capture sensory events, i.e., more complex structures involving different participants, rather than focusing solely on the occurrences of single terms in texts. This approach serves as the basis for a system for the automatic extraction of gustatory references from texts. During the seminar, a preliminary version of this system will be presented.

Bio

Teresa Paccosi is a PhD student in Cognitive Science at the University of Trento, holding a scholarship funded by the Digital Humanities group of Fondazione Bruno Kessler. The primary focus of her PhD project is the examination of sensory descriptions in textual data and how their linguistic encoding has evolved over time. Throughout her PhD, she actively collaborated within the H20 project ‘Odeuropa’. The goal of the project is to demonstrate that critically engaging with our sense of smell and exploring our scent heritage is an important and viable means of connecting and promoting Europe’s tangible and intangible cultural heritage.

Event organised by the Computational Humanities research group.

To register to the seminar and obtain the link to the call, please fill in this form by Monday 18 March 2024.

20 March 2024 – 12pm GMT

Remote – Via Microsoft Teams

Alberto Acerbi (University of Trento), Large language models show human-like content biases in transmission chain experiments

Abstract

As the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) grows, it is important to examine if they exhibit biases in their output. Research in Cultural Evolution, using transmission chain experiments, demonstrates that humans have biases to attend to, remember, and transmit some types of content over others. In five pre-registered experiments with the same methodology, we find that the LLM ChatGPT-3 replicates human results, showing biases for content that is gender-stereotype consistent (Exp 1), negative (Exp 2), social (Exp 3), threat-related (Exp 4), and biologically counterintuitive (Exp 5), over other content. The presence of these biases in LLM output suggests that such content is widespread in its training data, and could have consequential downstream effects, by magnifying pre-existing human tendencies for cognitively appealing, and not necessarily informative, or valuable, content.

Bio

I am a researcher in the field of cultural evolution. My work is at the interface of psychology, anthropology, and sociology. I am interested in particular to contemporary cultural phenomena, and I use a naturalistic, quantitative, and evolutionary approach with different methodologies, especially individual-based models and quantitative analysis of large-scale cultural data. Currently, I focus on using a cultural evolutionary framework to study the effects of digital technologies, and I wrote a book for Oxford University Press: Cultural evolution in the digital age.
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento, and member of the C2S2 – Centre for Computational Social Science and Human Dynamics.

Event organised by the Computational Humanities research group.

To register to the seminar and obtain the link to the call, please fill in this form by Monday 29 January 2024.

31 January 2024 – 5pm GMT

In person – King’s College London, Bush House Lecture Theatre 3 BH(NE)0.01

Remote – Microsoft Teams

Daniele Quercia (Nokia Bell Labs / King’s College London, United Kingdom), Empowering Cities: Health, Culture, Knowledge, and Resiliency

Abstract

The future of the city is, first and foremost, about people, and those people are increasingly producing a variety of digital breadcrumbs. We will see how a creative use of four datasets can tackle hitherto unanswered research questions. We will see how to:

1. Track people’s well-being at scale from aggregate records of food purchases
   https://goodcitylife.org/food/project.php
2. Quantify the cultural capital of neighbourhoods from geo-referenced pictures
   https://goodcitylife.org/cultural-analytics/project.php
3. Predict the innovation success of cities from online records of “who works where”
   http://goodcitylife.org/cities4innovation/
4. Profile the psychological resiliency of US regions to COVID-19 from tweets
   http://social-dynamics.net/EpidemicPsychology/

Bio

Daniele Quercia is Director of Responsible AI at Nokia Bell Labs Cambridge (UK) and Professor of Urban Informatics at the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) at King’s College London. He has been named one of Fortune magazine’s 2014 Data All-Stars, and spoke about “happy maps” at TED. He was Research Scientist at Yahoo Labs, a Horizon senior researcher at the University of Cambridge, and Postdoctoral Associate at the department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. He received his PhD from UC London.

web: researchswinger.org

Event organised by the Computational Humanities research group

To register to the seminar and obtain the link to the call, please fill in this form by Friday 9 February 2024.

13 February 2024 – 3pm GMT

Remote – Microsoft Teams

Mila Oiva (Tallinn University, Estonia), Studying Temporal Changes in Long-Term Audiovisual Data

Abstract

Digitized audiovisual heritage data is seldomly studied in long temporal continuum even though a long temporal perspective could help to explain both specificities of our time, and to reveal longer term continuities as well as short-term caprices. Drawing examples from my studies on Soviet and Estonian newsreels, in this presentation I will talk about the different ways my collaborators and I have been studying temporal changes in audiovisual data computationally.

Bio

Dr. Mila Oiva is a Senior Research Fellow at the ERA Chair for Cultural Data Analytics project at the CUDAN Open Lab at Tallinn University. She holds a PhD from Cultural History with a specialization on the history of Russia and Poland and digital research methods. Currently she runs a project dedicated to studying Soviet and Estonian newsreels in 1922-1997 computationally. Earlier she has been studying the 19^th century global news flows, circulation of fake historical narratives in the Russian language internet forum discussions, and the Cold War era transnational information circulation.