EVENTS

Culture, Data and the Humanities in the Age of AI

7 March 2025, 12:00 – 16:30
Conway Lecture Theatre, University College Dublin

The use of machine learning to study patterns of cultural and social change has developed very rapidly in the last decade and the insights from this kind of research are urgently needed in a context where AI tools are rapidly proliferating, raising issues of ethics, trust and epistemology. In this context, this half day colloquium reflected on the experience of collaborative research between data science and the humanities and the potential it offers for new insights, resources and methodologies. The audience heard from researchers on two milestone projects, reflecting on the nature of their collaboration, lessons for future research and reflecting with Irish researchers on the collaborative path forward.

The Ed Ruscha Streets of Los Angeles Archive at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles brought together an international team of art historians, media analysts, architects, urban planners, information specialists and software engineers with Getty staff to document, interpret, and debate the Streets of Los Angeles Archive, which was created by the artist Ed Ruscha beginning in 1965 and continuing over the subsequent fifty years.

Living with Machines was a flagship collaborative humanities and science research initiative at the Alan Turing Institute, bringing together historians, data scientists, geographers, computational linguists, library professionals, and curators to examine the human impact of industrial revolution. Developing new tools, methods and resources it exemplifies the capacity to analyse at scale and produce new insights and analysis through such collaboration.

Speakers

Katie McDonough is Lecturer in Digital Humanities in the Department of History at Lancaster University and a Senior Research Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute. Formerly a member of the Living with Machines (LwM) project, she was also the UK PI of Machines Reading Maps and more recently a Co-I on the LwM follow-on project Data/Culture and PI on a project to create and analyse datasets about historical environments for UK National Parks. Katie was trained as a historian of eighteenth-century France, and now works on the history of infrastructure across both early modern and modern French and British history. She has led the development of MapReader, one of the major strands of work within LwM, and recently co-edited (with Valeria Vitale) a Forum in Imago Mundi about the use of MapReader for computational research with maps.

Emily Pugh is a Principal Research Specialist at the Getty Research Institute, where she oversees the GRI’s Digital Art History program. Emily’s expertise within digital art history centers on the digital media of art and architectural history research, in particular imaging technologies such as 3-D scanning and computer vision. Emily served as the co-lead of the “Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles” project and is co-editor, with Zanna Gilbert, of the forthcoming publication Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles: Artist, Image, Archive, City (2025).

Eric Rodenbeck founded Stamen Design in 2001. Stamen is an internationally recognized data visualization design studio based in San Francisco, California. They develop projects for a broad range of clients locally, nationally and internationally, including National Geographic, The Audubon Society, and The Dalai Lama. They average 50 projects a year, and are recognized as having helped to define the emerging medium of interactive data visualization and online cartography. Their work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and Cooper Hewit / Smithsonian Museums, and we have exhibited nationally and internationally in museums and galleries worldwide, from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to the Art Institute of Chicago to the Design Museum and Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Stamen is a recipient of the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Interaction Design. Eric attended and was expelled from the Cooper Union in New York City, attended the Borough of Manhattan Community College and graduated from The New School for Social Research with a Bachelor of Arts in History and Philosophy of Technology in 1993. Eric is a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, teaching a “Re-imagining the Archive” course in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Mark Shiel is Professor of Film, Media, and Urban Studies at King’s College London. He has published five books and dozens of book chapters and journal articles on media and cities, including Architectures of Revolt: The Cinematic City circa 1968 (2018) and Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles (2014). His research and teaching are also concerned with the relationship between media, architecture, urban planning, and their methods, including data visualization, cartography, filmmaking, and photography. His most recent film is the thirty-minute documentary Madingley (2024), about the architecture and landscape of war memorials. Mark is also co-director of MediaUrbanism, a boutique consulting firm and design studio focused on media industries and creative cities in Europe and the United States.

Daniel Wilson is a historian of science and technology with a focus on Britain in the nineteenth century. His work combines traditional close-reading and archival study with computational techniques, and he is currently a Turing Research Fellow at the UK’s national centre for data science and AI. Daniel held research and teaching posts in Paris and Cambridge before joining the Turing to work on the ‘Living with Machines’ project. His research interests include data provenance and machines, new approaches to large collections of historical maps and texts, and *Pandaemonium*.

Funding: This event was part of a project that has received funding from Research Ireland to the Insight Centre for Data Analytics under grant No 12/RC/2289_P2 and the European Research Council (ERC) under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 884951).