Cross-Cultural Harlem reveals a dynamic of exchange that provokes a rethinking of spaces such as Black Harlem, El Barrio, and Italian Harlem. Cross-cultural encounters among African Americans, West Indians, Puerto Ricans, Jews, and Italians provide a story of multiplicity that challenges the framework of territorial enclaves. Shukla illuminates the historical processes that have shaped the diversity of Harlem, examining the many dimensions of its Blackness—Southern, African, Caribbean, Puerto Rican, and more—as well as how white ethnicities have been constructed.

In Code, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan reconstructs how Progressive Era technocracy as well as crises of industrial democracy and colonialism shaped early accounts of cybernetics and digital media by theorists including Norbert Wiener, Warren Weaver, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Luce Irigaray.

For many commentators, user-friendly generative AI technologies, such as DALL-E and ChatGPT, herald an onslaught of unreal, informatic simulacra. Media theorist Matthew Kirschenbaum, for example, has predicted a “textpocalypse” in which human-authored texts will be lost in a sea of machine-generated facsimiles. But is the situation really so simple and well-defined, such that we can speak of an inhuman informatic that stands opposite the supposed agency, originality, and critical spirit of human readers and writers?

The Rap Lab at UVA presents a listening event to commemorate publication and release of Owning My Masters (Mastered): The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions by Dr. A.D. Carson, associate professor of Hip Hop & the Global South (University of Virginia), with University of Michigan Press. The event will feature remarks by Carson, a roundtable discussion with Chicago Urban Historian Sherman “Dilla” Thomas, album collaborators, Marcus “Truth” Fitzgerald (producer/emcee) and Blake “Preme” Wallace (producer/emcee), scholar Alonya Castillo, and scholar/D.J.

The ongoing Nakba is a historiographic framework that names the structural condition and protracted temporality of Palestinian expulsion, dispossession, and fragmentation since 1948. This talk examines ongoing Nakba as conceived in critical law scholarship, history, and artistic production to challenge the colonial contours of the international protection of persons.

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.

Quick online information session for students enrolled in the DH Certificate

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