What are the challenges of born-digital data for historical research and archival sciences? How to deal with digital memory technologies like SIM cards as material evidence of the digital age? How to decolonize archival meta-data and descriptions when translating analogue collections into digital repositories?
Although I am a computer scientist and I don’t have a background on historical studies, I do often think about history in a broad sense. By day, I am an AI researcher and it is due to (or thanks to) that position that I see the bias which I tend to regard to history.
Since 1950s, nuclear power and nuclear weapons have been a topic of heated debate and understanding the discourse surrounding these topics becomes increasingly important. Much has been written, especially in newspapers, but how do we make sense of such a large collection of newspaper articles? One approach is by performing text mining strategies, specifically topic modeling.
Working interdisciplinarily is both exciting and challenging, as I’ve experienced firsthand in DTUs and various projects. Recently, my colleagues and I (we are from different disciplines) debated whether we practice digital or computational archaeology. This confusion led me to explore the history of “one of the hottest fields in the galaxy of disciplines focusing on the study of the past.”
Gabor Toth recounts the recent C2Dh conference Exploring Epistemic Virtues and Vices, sharing with us the promises and challenges of doing digital history.
Jader Martins of the D4H explains his new article the “Proceedings of the 1st Worskhop on Towards Ethical and Inclusive Conversational AI” and invites us to recognize the continued limits of AI chatbots in historical translation.
In celebration of International Women’s Day, let’s highlight a few recent historical works that analyze the role of women in digital technology and see how digital methods can also highlight gender and women’s history.