DDH Research Associate Rachel Pistol on Channel 5’s “No Place Like Home”

Dr. Rachel Pistol, Research Associate at the Department of Digital Humanities and UK National Coordinator of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) has contributed to the latest series of Channel 5’s “No Place Like Home”.

In the episode, Rachel discusses Second World War internment camp, Warth Mills, in Bury, as Journalist and News Broadcaster Victoria Derbyshire discovers more about the historical origins of her hometown, Greater Manchester.

As Rachel says:

In May 1940 there was a real fear Britain would be invaded and their could be spies and saboteurs hiding in the UK. This led to calls for mass internment and up to 28,000 Germans, Austrians and Italians were rounded up. There wasn’t enough accommodation to house all these individuals so temporary camps were created including Warth Mills, which was by far the worst of all the camps.

Many internees were sent to Canada and Australia but sadly the second ship to set sail, the Arandora Star was torpedoed and sank with the loss of over 700 lives. Many of the men on board the Arandora Star endured the terrible conditions at Warth Mills before setting sail on that fateful journey. A memorial now stands at the site to commemorate this tragic loss.

Victoria Derbyshire commented:

They were people who had escaped persecution in their own country, come here for asylum, and then suddenly they end being looked at in a different way and they’re not refugees any more they’re people to be suspected as spies
it’s really distressing.

Africa Week/DH Event: African languages and technological transformations (8 March, online)

The Department of Digital Humanities’ ‘Going Global’ seminar series is holding an online event as part of KCL’s annual Africa Week on ‘African languages and technological transformations: debating knowledge, rights and power on a digital continent’. Join Nanjala Nyabola (tech activist and researcher), Mohamed Abdimalik (data journalist); and Pete Chonka (lecturer in global digital cultures) on Zoom on Wednesday 8th March 2023 (4pm UK). The registration link is here.

Event details

As elsewhere in the world, African societies are grappling with the many implications of digital transformations in areas relating to the economy, media, politics and cultural expression.

Citizens, activists and researchers on the continent are increasingly interested in the power and value of data in different fields, but also in the many challenges related to digital harms, digital rights, surveillance and global power imbalances in technology development. Interlinked with these debates, digital transformations are also raising big questions about the future of languages on continent characterised by huge linguistic diversity.

  • Can people engage in debates about digitisation using indigenous languages?
  • How does linguistic colonialism manifest itself in digital technologies?
  • What are the implications of digital platform use for the future of African languages?

This Africa Week event (held in conjunction with the Department of Digital Humanities’ Going Global research seminar series) brings together researchers, activists and practitioners who are engaging with these questions. In particular, it will showcase work that has been underway in different African contexts to develop indigenous language lexicons to inform, stimulate and open up discussions around issues of digital rights and transformations to wider groups of stakeholders.

This event is part of the African Leadership Centre’s – Africa Week 2023 – taking place 6-10 March 2023.

This event is online only.

Speakers

  • Moderator: Dr Peter Chonka, Lecturer in global digital cultures at King’s Department of Digital Humanities
  • Nanjala Nyabola, Writer, analyst and activist
  • Mohamed Abdimalik, Data Journalist

Introducing forestscapes and open call for forest sounds

The forestscapes project is a collaboration between the Department of Digital Humanities, the Department of Geography and the Centre for Digital Culture at King’s College London, together with the Public Data Lab. It is supported by the National Environmental Research Council.

Soundscapes as method

How can soundscapes be used as a way to attend to forest life and the many different ways that we narrate and relate to forests, forest issues and forest protection and restoration efforts?

Forests and their wider ecologies are presented not only as sites of conservation and relaxation, but also as crucial infrastructures in addressing and building resilience against the effects of climate change; habitats for endangered species; hotspots of biodiversity; part of poverty alleviation programmes; sites for ecotourism, health and wellbeing; scenes of neocolonial afforestation; backdrops for corporate greenwashing; landscapes of danger, violence, destruction and resource conflicts; and places where different kinds of planetary futures may emerge. Forests are involved in collective life in many ways.

In this context, the forestscapes project will explore, document and demonstrate generative arts-based methods for recomposing collections of sound materials to support â€œcollective inquiry” into forests as living cultural landscapes. It aims to facilitate interdisciplinary exchanges between natural scientists, social scientists, arts and humanities researchers, artists and public-spirited organisations and institutions working on forest issues.

While many previous works have explored sound as a medium for sensory immersion, (e.g. field recordings), forestscapes explores how recomposing sound material may explore forests as mediatised and contested cultural landscapes: diverse sites of many different (and marginalised) kinds of beings, relations, histories and representations. As part of the project we will co-create new sound works, as well as generative composition techniques using open source software and hardware.

Research on visual methods has explored how to work with â€œfolders of images”, including formats for the re-arrangement of images for collective interpretation. Forestscapes will explore generative methods and techniques for working with “folders of sound” – whether folders of site-based recordings or collections of sounds associated with a particular place gathered from the web and social media.

Further details and materials from the project will be added here.

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Shannon Mattern: “Modeling Doubt, Coding Humility: A Speculative Syllabus”

We’re pleased to announce that we’ll be hosting Shannon Mattern talk on “Modeling Doubt, Coding Humility: A Speculative Syllabus” on Thursday 11th May 2023, as part of a series of King’s Public Lectures in Digital Humanities. Further details are copied below and you can register here.

Modeling Doubt, Coding Humility: A Speculative Syllabus

At a time of increasing artificial intelligence and proliferating conspiracy, faith in ubiquitous data capture and mistrust of public institutions, the ascendance of STEM and declining support for the arts and humanities, we might wonder what kind of epistemological world we’re creating. Prevalent ways of knowing have tended to weaponize uncertainty or ambiguity, as we’ve seen in relation to COVID vaccines, elections, climate, and myriad political scandals. In this talk I’ll sketch out a speculative syllabus for a future class about the place of humility and doubt in various fields of study and practice. We’ll examine how we might use a range of methods and tools — diverse writing styles, modes of visualization and sonification, ways of structuring virtual conversations, etc — to express uncertainty and invite more thoughtful, reflective engagement with our professional and public audiences and interlocutors.

Bio

Shannon Mattern is the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Media Studies at Art History at the University of Pennsylvania. From 2004 to 2022, she served in the Department of Anthropology and the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York. Her writing and teaching focus on media architectures and infrastructures and spatial epistemologies. She has written books about libraries, maps, and urban intelligence, and she contributes a column about urban data and mediated spaces to Places Journal. You can find her at wordsinspace.net.

This event is co-organised by the King’s College London Department of Digital Humanities, the Centre for Digital Culture and the Digital Futures Institute.

As capacity is limited and there has been significant demand for this event, the talk will now also be live-streamed here.

Creative AI Lab position paper: ‘Creative—Critical—Constructive—Collaborative—Computational: Towards a C5 model in Creative AI’

The Creative AI Lab (a collaboration between Serpentine’s R&D Platform and Department of Digital Humanities) has the pleasure to announce the publication of a new position paper, ‘Creative—Critical—Constructive—Collaborative—Computational: Towards a C5 model in Creative AI’. 

The paper analyses creative activity enabled by machine learning and recognised under the banner of ‘Creative AI’. The theoretical discussion is anchored in critical reflection on the activities in which we have been involved as part of our Lab. The paper proposes a C5 model (‘Creative—Critical—Constructive—Collaborative—Computational’) bringing together technical research and conceptual inquiry, while shifting focus from artefacts to their wider contexts, processes and infrastructures. It also outlines directions for future research on creativity and AI.

The paper is open access and you can download it here.

New article: Staying with the trouble of networks

A new article on “Staying with the trouble of networks” co-authored Jonathan Gray and Liliana Bounegru at the Department of Digital Humanities together with Daniela van Geenen, Tommaso Venturini, Mathieu Jacomy and Axel Meunier has just been published in Frontiers in Big Data. It is available open access in html and PDF versions. Here’s the abstract:

Networks have risen to prominence as intellectual technologies and graphical representations, not only in science, but also in journalism, activism, policy, and online visual cultures. Inspired by approaches taking trouble as occasion to (re)consider and reflect on otherwise implicit knowledge practices, in this article we explore how problems with network practices can be taken as invitations to attend to the diverse settings and situations in which network graphs and maps are created and used in society. In doing so, we draw on cases from our research, engagement and teaching activities involving making networks, making sense of networks, making networks public, and making network tools. As a contribution to “critical data practice,” we conclude with some approaches for slowing down and caring for network practices and their associated troubles to elicit a richer picture of what is involved in making networks work as well as reconsidering their role in collective forms of inquiry.

Data Optics: Recognition, Events, Crises, 30th Jan 2023

Join us for a workshop on Data Optics: Recognition, Events, Crises co-organised by the Australian Cultural Data Engine, King’s Digital Lab and the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London.

You can register and find further details here. The event summary and schedule are also copied below.

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Toward a Minor Tech – public talks by Marloes de Valk & Tung-Hui Hu

As part of the Toward a Minor Tech workshop (18-20 Jan 2023), there will be public talks from Marloes de Valk on the damaged earth catalog and from Tung-Hui Hu on digital lethargy. Further details can be found here and copied below.

The workshop is organised by SHAPE Digital Citizenship & Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University and Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, London South Bank University, in collaboration with King’s College London, and transmediale festival for digital art & culture, Berlin.

picture of the workshop
photo credit: CSNI
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Corpse Roads and the Origins of the Right to Roam – online talk with Stuart Dunn

Stuart Dunn, Professor of Spatial Humanities at the Department of Digital Humanities, is giving a public online talk about his research on corpse roads and the origins of the right to roam, hosted by the Folklore Society. The talk will take place at 6pm (UK) on Tuesday 10th January 2023. All are welcome. You can read further details in the abstract (copied below) and on the registration page.

Gliding in the Churchway Paths: Corpse Roads and the Origins of the Right to Roam

Aï»ż Folklore Society online talk, by Professor Stuart Dunn (King’s College London)

Tï»żuesday 10 January 2023, 18:00

Burial of the dead posed a problem in the medieval and early modern countryside: getting the body from the place of death to consecrated ground, a requirement firmly enforced by the Church for worldly as well as spiritual reasons. Oftentimes, the family or community of the deceased had to bear the body over land, in some cases for many miles, in all weathers and across all terrains. In some local and regional traditions of folklore, this gave rise to the idea of the “corpse path”, often unofficial routeways which were associated with the passage of funeral parties. Corpse paths became focal points for stories and legends of their own, and some became sites of conflict between the rights of commoners to traverse private land and landowners, and have attracted attention from local historians and geographers, as well as from folklorists. This talk will give an update on the speaker’s own work on corpse paths, focusing in particular on well-known examples in Cumbria, Yorkshire and on Dartmoor. It will also offer some reflections on what the idea of the corpse path and its folklore can tell us about our own relationship with the countryside, and the social and economic inequalities which continue within it.

Call for Applications: Funded (LAHP) KCL & The National Archives Collaborative PhD Project

A fully funded PhD position is now available at King’s College London on the project “‘Lost for words’: semantic search in the Find Case Law service of The National Archives”, a Collaborative Doctoral Award received by King’s College London in collaboration with The National Archives and funded by the London Arts & Humanities Partnership (LAHP). This interdisciplinary project is an exciting opportunity to work in natural language processing (particularly computational semantics and information retrieval) applied to legal texts and digital humanities.

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