This work-in-progress takes as its provocation the ways that image-generating AI systems struggle with typographical forms. Systems like DALL-E 3 generate images of letters--shapes in text-appropriate contexts--but some of them are shaped a good bit less like letters than others. How should we understand these typographical hallucinations? Is there something that DALL-E 3 "knows" about typography that we don't? Today's AI operates on data at Internet scale, and I approach these questions in part by invoking the universe of printed matter as a nineteenth-century analog.

This talk explores how machine learning, specifically transformer-based large language models (LLMs), can analyze an extensive collection of Russian historical diaries (1800-2018). LLMs enable computational methods like semantic text similarity and clustering by creating numerical representations of the texts. These methods can reveal significant topics and subjects within the diaries, such as prices and weather, offering new possibilities for digital scholarship.

Chatbots like ChatGPT have challenged human exceptionalism: we are no longer the only beings capable of generating language and ideas fluently. But is ChatGPT conscious? Or is it merely engaging in sophisticated mimicry? And what happens in the future if the claims to consciousness are more credible?

In The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood, James Boyle explores what these changes might do to our concept of personhood, to “the line” we believe separates our species from the rest of the world but that also separates “persons” with legal rights from objects.

Swimming, snorkling, massages and dancing!

Quick online information session for students enrolled in the DH Certificate

Agenda:

1. Calendar of events

2. Course requirements

    

Digital Humanities at Michigan State University is proud and thrilled to celebrate the 10th Global DH Symposium with a combination of virtual and in-person events over the course of April 2-8, 2025.

Building on the University of Oxford’s history of leadership in digital scholarship, its globally significant collections, and its diverse array of projects and practitioners, Digital Scholarship at Oxford (DiSc) is an initiative to explore, enhance, and enable work in this field. By building capacity, growing community, and enriching engagement with collections, the initiative will help to unlock the University’s latent potential to produce internationally significant, innovative and engaging digital research.

DiSc’s mission, therefore, encompasses