This article from the BBC by Jane Wakefield reports on a “psychopathic” algorithm created at MIT “as part of an experiment to see what training AI on data from ‘the dark corners of the net’ would do to its world view.” The algorithm is trained to interpret abstract shapes. Trained on images of people dying, Norman (named after Norman Bates)…
humanizing the digital
Responding to the Technophobes and the Technophiles
For our weekly meetings with Dr. Robertson, the DH fellows each find an interesting new post about digital humanities to share with the group. Over the course of the year, we’re supposed to track some sort of theme or trend. Last year, I focused on posts and projects that work to Indigenize and/or decolonize digital humanities. This year, I’ve followed…
DH Read: “Is Google Home a History Calculator?”
In this post, Sean Kheraj assesses his Google Home device’s performance as a “history calculator,” testing how well it can define historical terms and answer basic historical questions. He puts this in context with some history of digital history: In their 2005 article in First Monday, Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig recount the story of a remarkably prescient colleague,…
DH Read: “Just Google It: A Short History of a Newfound Verb”
This WIRED piece by Virginia Heffernan reminded me of something that Jessica Dauterive, the other 2016-2018 DH Fellow, has brought up in our weekly DH Fellow meetings—that there was something much more playful, open-ended, and less structured about digital history during its earliest phase in the 1990s and that this playfulness is no longer integral to how digital historians think about their work…
