Affect, Archive and AI: Hamburg-Leeds Lecture Series

Staff are invited to join us for the Hamburg-Leeds lecture series, dedicated to the conditions of accessing, researching and representing cultural artefacts in the course of the latest developments in digitalisation.

Through their digitisation, cultural artefacts are becoming more visible and accessible to a wider public. Digitisation also brings with it a drive towards standardisation, which is at odds with the individual characteristics of digitised objects and the individual interests and needs of users. The use of generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) offers new possibilities of access and potentially new insights into the structures and mechanisms of objects and related practices, including the affect of users interacting with digital data. At the same time, born digital artefacts such as data on floppy discs, CD ROMs and hard drives are increasingly entering the archives, potentially requiring new research practices.

The sessions are online, hosted by the Universities of Hamburg and Leeds (3pm UK time, 4pm CET) and will run for approx. 1 hour 30 mins.

You can find more details and how to join here.

Sessions will comprise of two paper presentations followed by discussion.  There are three sessions in the series:

February 26th:

• Born-digital artefacts: multimodeling & computational analysis: Julia Nantke and Frank Steinicke (University of Hamburg)
• Inside the Congruence Engine: digital reconstruction of cultural heritage: Simon Popple (University of Leeds)
• Moderator: Dibyadyuti Roy (University of Leeds)

March 3rd:

• Language history, language attitudes and everyday communication in the context of multilingualism in Early Modern Europe: insights into the FSL-project: Kerstin Roth (University of Hamburg), Luise Borek (TU Darmstadt), Lisa Scharrer (TU Darmstadt) and Natalia Filatkina (University of Hamburg)
• Europeana: the geopolitics of digital heritage aggregation at Scale: Liz Stainforth (University of Leeds)
• Moderator: Dibyadyuti Roy (University of Leeds)

April 2nd:

• Affect in digital spaces: qualitative and quantitative approaches: Heike Zinsmeister (University of Hamburg)
• Feeling the archive: relations of affect and algorithms in digitality: Dibyadyuti Roy (University of Leeds)
• Moderator: Julia Nantke (University of Hamburg)