King's College London Digital Humanities – Page 9 – critical inquiry with and about the digital

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 “collective 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 “folders 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.

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.

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

Corpse Roads and the Origins of the Right to Roam – online talk with Stuart Dunn

Image Credit: Corpse path near St Michael and All Angels Church, North Otterington, North Yorkshire. Photo: 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

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

Tuesday 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.

Call for Papers: Times of Surveillance

The Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London is delighted to host workshop “Times of Surveillance” in early April 2023, welcoming keynote speaker Sun-Ha Hong, author of Technologies of Speculation: The Limits of Knowledge in a Data-Driven Society (NYU Press 2020).

Please send paper proposals (including a title, 300-word abstract and short biography, using your name as the file title) to kate.davis@kcl.ac.uk by 16th January 2023. It is intended that the workshop will also lead directly to the publication of an edited volume.

Call for abstracts: New Directions in Museum Analytics

Programme: Museum Analytics: Registration and programme

Call for abstracts

Data science has the capacity to revitalise our understanding of the museum sector, through reframing the history of museum development, charting museum geographies, and highlighting new data relationships in innovative and dynamic ways (e.g. Ballatore & Candlin, 2022). It can also illuminate broader relationships between museums, society, and the wider Creative and Cultural Industries (e.g. Me|Mind, 2021), to help produce more joined-up cultural policy and strategy (Centre for Cultural Value, 2022).

The application of data analytics presents growing opportunities for institutions and researchers across the cultural sector. While museums often use data to develop visitor profiles and drive income generation, there is tremendous scope to leverage data in ways that reimagine the cultural work of the museum and knowledge of the museum sector. Within museums, work has taken place to use data to enhance curatorial decision-making (Tate, 2016), to personalise collections databases (Noehrer et al., 2022), and to enrich and improve visitor experiences (e.g. Villaespesa & Murphy, 2021).

Stemming from the Mapping Museums project (http://www.mappingmuseums.org), this one-day conference seeks to draw together museum studies scholars, data scientists, cultural policymakers, and geographers to discuss and debate the role and scope of museum analytics and to frame the development of this area of research and practice. We seek presentations of 15 minutes that examine new directions and applications for museum analytics. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

Applications of data analytics in new areas of museum practice
Innovative data collection methods in museums
Social media analytics and user-generated content
New methods for audience analytics and profiling
Data-driven museum marketing
Artificial intelligence (AI) and museums
Ethical considerations surrounding data practices and datafication in museums
Innovative data applications in digital museum contexts
Museum analytics and cultural policy
Data science to study collections
Data vocabularies and linked data for museums
Data infrastructures and capacity across the museum sector
Quantitative geographies and histories of museums
History of data science methods to study museums