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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
A broad literature discusses the role of digital platforms in crisis situations. Over more than ten years we have seen a wide range of cases where social media supported different forms of crisis-related mobilization and increasing scope for participation in response to various types of threats. The notion of generativity (Zittrain, 2006) highlights how crisis situations offer an opportunity for the acceleration of innovation beyond the visible range of functions of specific digital tools. That said, we also see that some factors may potentially restrict generativity and innovation in a crisis, and specifically the role of digital platforms in crisis-related mobilization.
Please join us to discuss AI and how to research it from a humanities point of view. We will present new research in progress from the much hyped text-to-image systems and the ‘calculation of meaning’ to trustworthiness in AI, so join Kate Devlin, Daniel Chavez Heras and Mercedes Bunz in this upcoming event hosted by The Digital Humanities Lecture series.
Daniel Chavez Heras: Computational Ekphrasis This talk will be using Computational Ekphrasis as a way to analyse text-to-image systems such as DALL·E 2 and Stable Diffusion, this talk will tease out some of the broader implications of describing images into existence for visual culture and society.
Mercedes Bunz: On the Calculation of Meaning Machine learning systems enter the human dimension of meaning by calculating it. How does their computational approach towards meaning work and in what way is this approach shifting human epistemologies?
Kate Devlin: AI and Trust This talk will deliver an overview of the Trusted Autonomous Systems Hub. Can we develop socially beneficial autonomous systems that are both trustworthy in principle and trusted in practice by individuals, society and government?
