The Greenhouse is co-organizing the 2023 Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries conference, "Sustainability: Environment, Community, Data" together with the university libraries at University of Oslo and University of Bergen. As part of the event, we are hosting the opening keynote of the conference which will be in person at UiS and online.
The Greenhouse is co-organizing the 2023 Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries conference, "Sustainability: Environment, Community, Data" (https://dhnb.eu/conferences/dhnb2023/) together with the university libraries at University of Oslo and University of Bergen. As part of the event, we are hosting the opening keynote of the conference. While the conference is online, the keynotes will be held in-person, one at each institution, and also streamed online.
To attend Swanstrom's keynote online, visit https://stavanger.zoom.us/j/62539217639...
Forecasting Sustainability: Speculative Ecologies at work in DH, EH, and AI
In the sixth book of the Old Testament, the prophet Joshua prays for a miracle to ensure that the Israelites will prevail. God grants his request, and a total eclipse of the sun ensues. In the sixth chapter of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a similar “miracle” occurs, which saves the hide of the novel’s narrator, Hank, who faces execution unless he can deliver on his promise of an eclipse. Although separated by large swaths of time and at farcical odds in terms of audience and intent, these two moments from literary history help illustrate an important lesson about Artificial Intelligence. In both works the performance of divination is captivating for its violation of natural law.
Similarly, discussions of AI’s ability to parse human communication, through Natural Language Processing (NLP) and its ilk often focus on what appears to be its miraculous capacity for prognostication. In point of fact, however, it is Twain’s narrator, shifty as he is, who provides a more accurate model for understanding such technology. His is a science of extrapolation that depends upon statistical analysis. This pedestrian assessment warrants consideration. Statistics do not merely anticipate outcomes. They also have the capacity to shape what they purport to measure. Considering the increasing demand for text-based forensic technology, it is worth our time to examine its appearance in the cultural imagination against technological reality. In this talk I discuss the importance of re-framing AI within the literary studies and the Digital Humanities in a way that confronts its statistical underpinnings.
Lisa Swanstrom is the author of Animal, Vegetable, Digital: Experiments in New Media Aesthetics and Environmental Poetics (U of Alabama Press 2016), an Associate Professor of English at the University of Utah, and a Co-Editor of Science Fiction Studies. Before joining the English Department at the U, she was an Assistant Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University, a post-doctoral researcher at Umeå University’s HUMlab in northern Sweden, and the Florence Levy Kay Fellow in the Digital Humanities in the English Department at Brandeis University. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Image generated by Finn Arne Jørgensen using OpenAI's Dall-E