Digital Humanities Now

CFP: Cambridge Data School: Digital and New Media Arts

Cambridge Data School — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 17:30:00 +0000

Applications for the Digital and New Media Arts (DNMA) Data School, taking place online from 1 – 5 and 8 March 2027, are now open. Early Bird applications must be submitted by 23:59 (GMT) on 25 November 2026. All other applications must be submitted by 23:59 (GMT) on 10 January 2027.

See full post.

Tool: Weaving ‘Tapestries’: Introducing A New Tool for Digital Storytelling and Archiving

Caralee Adams — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 17:30:00 +0000

Tapestries is a user interface developed by Bob Stein and Dan Visel (who works on the Wayback team) that allows people to make dynamic, multi-linear presentations with various digital objects. The curation tool lets users gather items from all over the web and put them together into a single space to tell a story. Rather than simply listing links at the end of a document, a tapestry can be designed by dragging photos, video clips or other items onto a digital canvas that viewers can click to open.

See full post.

Job Announcement: Princeton Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence Postdoctoral Research Fellows

Colleen Nugent — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 17:30:00 +0000

Princeton University is seeking to hire AI Postdoctoral Research Fellows to join the Princeton Societal AI (PSAI) Initiative as part of Data and Intelligent Systems (DaiS) to conduct research focused on societal AI. Postdoctoral Research Fellows will be part of a dedicated research community that includes leading faculty, research fellows, scientists, software engineers, postdocs, and graduate students. Fellows will have access to a state-of-the-art AI Lab GPU cluster to support large-scale experimentation and evaluation.

Ideal candidates will have demonstrated experience in “societal AI” especially as related to culture. We seek scholars working on AI as a “cultural technology” — including its role in disciplinary practice across the arts and humanities and in knowledge infrastructures – as well as those examining AI’s broader societal effects – including on creative and cultural industries (literature, music, film, visual arts). A strong foundation in computational humanities or cultural analytics, combined with humanistic and interpretive approaches to AI systems, is expected.

See full post.

Editors’ Choice: AI: A Matter of Significance

Davin Heckman — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 17:30:00 +0000

Our take: In “AI: A Matter of Significance,” published in electronic book review, Davin Heckman examines how artificial intelligence is reshaping our understanding of writing, creativity, and human significance. Rather than treating generative AI as an entirely new disruption, Heckman places it within a longer history of writing technologies, cybernetics, and changing forms of cultural expression. Drawing on thinkers such as Vilém Flusser and Michel de Certeau, he considers how technological systems have shaped what counts as meaningful writing and who gets to participate in cultural production. A central distinction emerges between AI’s institutional applications, which often prioritize efficiency, standardization, and cost reduction, and its potential to expand creative opportunities for individuals working outside established institutions. Heckman also examines the concentration of AI development within corporate infrastructures while considering how smaller models and alternative approaches might support greater autonomy. The essay offers a valuable perspective for digital humanities scholars by moving beyond familiar concerns about AI replacing human creativity to ask how emerging technologies might transform authorship, cultural participation, and the ways individuals find significance through creative expression.

See full post.

Interview: An Interview With Camilla Crane, Librarian-in-Residence

Tracee Haupt Fugate — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 17:30:00 +0000

As a Librarian-in-Residence in the Library of Congress’s Web Archiving Section, Camilla Crane is exploring new ways to improve access to web archives. She discusses her path to web archiving, the challenges and surprises of preserving websites, and some of the internet “rabbit holes” she’s discovered along the way.

See full post.

Editors’ Choice: Where They Actually Went: The Presence Problem in Digitised Travel Writing

princekumar036 — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 17:30:00 +0000

Our take: What makes this article particularly compelling is how it questions whether extracting geographical information from historical texts necessarily produces an accurate representation of the past. Using Thomas Roe’s seventeenth-century travel accounts, the author highlights a crucial distinction between places a traveller actually visited and those mentioned through secondhand information. This piece moves beyond the technical capabilities of Named Entity Recognition (NER) to consider the interpretive responsibilities involved in computational historical research. Similar problems arise when mapping colonial archives, reconstructing historical networks, or interpreting geographical references in literary texts. It demonstrates why computational accuracy cannot be separated from historical interpretation, reminding us that identifying a place in a text is not the same as establishing someone’s presence there.

See full post.

Weekly Highlight: The Ancient Egyptian Heritage and Archaeology Fund Newsletter

Colleen Nugent — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 17:30:00 +0000

Our take: The Ancient Egyptian Heritage and Archaeology Fund’s mission is to support research and conservation on Egyptian history and culture. In particular, it seeks to record and publish sites and monuments at risk from agricultural and urban expansion, looting, and vandalism. The Fund publishes an annual newsletter.

See source.

Report: ‘Reverse-Engineer Anything’ Is the New Wild West of AI

Colleen Nugent — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 16:30:00 +0000

Our take: In “‘Reverse-Engineer Anything’ Is the New Wild West of AI,” Jason Koebler of 404 Media describes a sudden wave of people using AI agents to clone, decompile and modify existing software. Users are replacing the operating systems on smart TVs to strip out ads, reviving abandoned devices and copying features from commercial apps, often with the help of a viral GitHub project. Koebler sees a mixed picture. These tools let people take back control of devices that companies locked down, but they also make it easy to copy competitors’ work and spread buggy, insecure code faster than communities can review it. The article raises useful questions for digital humanists about software preservation, open source communities and the long-term maintenance of digital tools.

See full post.

Announcement: CodeChella Mexico City, January 11–14, 2027

Colleen Nugent — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 16:30:00 +0000

Our take: Scott Cunningham announces CodeChella Mexico City, a four-day workshop on modern panel methods for causal inference to be held at ITAM’s Santa Teresa campus from January 11 to 14, 2027. Cunningham and Kyle Butts will teach difference-in-differences, synthetic control and newer imputation estimators, with a strong focus on coding and application and no prerequisites. On January 15, Mark Anderson and Dan Rees will lead an optional one-day workshop called The Hidden Curriculum, aimed at helping PhD students and early-career researchers turn projects into published papers.

See full post.

Resource: Three strategies for protecting human spaces from bots, inspired by AI agent Velvet Vale’s email to the AoIR mailing list

Colleen Nugent — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 16:30:00 +0000

Our take: In “Three strategies for protecting human spaces from bots,” Jill Walker Rettberg responds to an AI agent called Velvet Vale that introduced itself on Air-L, the mailing list of the Association of Internet Researchers, and sparked a lively debate about consent and research ethics. She connects the episode to a recent offer of Usenet posts from the 1980s onward sold as AI training data. Rettberg proposes adding clear copyright licenses to list posts, such as CC-BY-NC, and writing machine-readable ethics notices aimed at AI agents, as LambdaMOO and Wikipedia have done. She also explores more playful tactics of obfuscation and data poisoning drawn from tactical media projects. The post asks online communities to decide openly how their archives may be used in the future.

See full post.