This past week, I was invited to chair a keynote session at the “AI Meets Humanities” workshop at Nanyang Technological University (NTU). I am sharing the program here in hopes of it serving as a quick reference of scholars who are pushing the boundaries by developing new vocabularies and framings to think about and with AI, grounded in the collective knowledge base in the humanities and in rejection of the premises and assumptions of how Silicon Valley wants us to understand and participate in the age of AI.

This was one of the most intellectually stimulating and gratifying meetings of the minds, and I hope we get to cultivate such grounds at SUTD also.

The workshop brought together scholars from NTU, King’s College London, and Australian National University. NTU’s new dean Jon Wilson participated in discussions throughout.

Here are my rough notes from the two-day events, highlighting some of the scholars and their writings I would love to come back to for closer reading. I am sharing these just in case they might be of your interests also:

  • Thao Phan — feminist STS approach; on lost opportunities of playfulness in the original Turing test; how AI is making us work more, not less
  • Katherine Bode — dialectics in humanities and computing; see her monograph and the special issue she edited for Duke University’s journal Critical AI, “Data Worlds”
  • Lisa Winstanley — emerging discourse on image generation, copyrights, and design literacy education
  • Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan — the commons, structuralism, latency, and creativity to think beyond the human/AI dichotomy
  • Tobias Rees — AI redefining the historical characterization of machines; creative and speculative potentials of small models

AI Meets Humanities Workshop

A group picture before we headed over to dinner in the city center. Especially grateful to the main organizers Li Nguyen and Thao Phan (seen here in matching outfits in the center), as well as a team of graduate students, for nourishing our bodyminds. Image shared here in courtesy of NTU.

p.s.

The occasion coincided with the launch of a new Master’s Program in Digital Humanities at NTU. Their DH program adopts a holistic definition of what DH has to offer: combining computational humanities with humanistic inquiries of computing methods and other digital phenomena. This opens up a great opportunity for our DH Minor undergraduate students at SUTD to continue pursuing their intellectual curiosity locally. Congratulations!

Post by Setsuko