Cambridge Digital Humanities returns to the Cambridge Festival, which runs from 13-28 March this year, to deliver a variety of events that engage with the four themes of the festival: Discovery, Environment, Health and Society. Peruse our fascinating programme below.
Am I Normal?
Friday 15 March, 11am-5pm, GR04 in the Faculty of English
Dreamy Cops (2021), Tristan Dot and Mathieu Rita
‘Am I Normal?’ and ‘Dreamy Cops’ are two art installations by Tristan Dot which investigate notions of AI, including Computer Vision, surveillance, the human body and normativity. In this interactive experience, spectators’ poses are analysed live, before being projected onto a wall. The idea is to expose what is usually hidden: the increasingly common monitoring of human poses and actions through machine learning.
Faust Shop: discover your artificial double
Saturday 16 March, 3-5pm, Cambridge Central Library
Photo by Faruk Kara
Technology offers us the world – but what does it take away? Faust Shop 2.0 transposes two scenes from Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Faust story into an AI Winter. It explores the impending collapse of the current AI hype as an opportunity to re-imagine machine learning. Staged in the Cambridge Central Library, a place dedicated to public knowledge and learning, this mixed-reality production invites participants to discover their artificial double.
Walking with Constable: The Cambridge Edition
Wednesday 20 March, 1-4pm, Cambridge University Library
Photo by Andy Corrigan
‘Walking with Constable’ is a university-wide research project led by Cambridge Digital Humanities, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Cambridge University Library, which has been exploring how we can use digital technologies to take archive material out of museums and libraries and interact with it in the landscape. Walkers should meet their guide on the steps of the University Library, ready to depart at 1pm.
Share your expertise: a Wikipedia edit-a-thon
Saturday 23 March, 10:30am-12:30pm, S2, Alison Richard Building
Photo by Jacob Lund
How do we learn about the world around us and what sources do we trust for information? We may turn to teachers and books, but we also turn to collective knowledge online. This edit-a-thon gives you a chance to share information about topics that you know and care about. We seek to provide an accessible space to help new and returning Wikipedians share their expertise.
Monstrous Archives: Colonialism and the emergence of data
Thursday 28 March, 7:30-8:45pm, Francopan Hall, Jesus College
Dr Siddharth Soni locates the birth of data in colonial attitudes to the archive in this talk co-hosted by the Cambridge Festival and the Intellectual Forum. Dr Soni will discuss his upcoming book Monstrous Archives, the winner of the 2023 Ideas Prize for Non-Fiction, which tells the story of the industrial transformation of the archive into a large and inscrutable monster. He will take us on a journey through the technologies that underpin the archive, whether card catalogues in a colonial library, or computer bots scraping and assembling bytes in a data centre, to illuminate the anxieties and ideologies that underpin the archive today.
