November 2022 – medieninitiative

Video: Mads Thomsen, “Adjusting to the Age of Automated Writing” (Intermediations, Nov. 16, 2022)

Video from the inaugural event of INTERMEDIATIONS, a new workshop and lecture series foregrounding issues of intermediality and interdisciplinarity: Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, “Adjusting to the Age of Automated Writing” from November 16, 2022.

Abstract:

Writing was for at least six to seven thousand years a humanly hand-crafted product. Now we encounter several kinds of technologies that change the production of text profoundly. Chatbots, automated translation, grammar assistants, and large language models are examples of how text generation permeates writing from many angles. In this presentation, Professor Mads Thomsen sketches out key issues of the rapid developments in text generation and the interdisciplinary collaboration needed to understand these, before turning to how GPT-3 “reads” William Carlos Williams’ poem “The Red Wheelbarrow.”

Bio:

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen is Professor of Comparative Literature at Aarhus University, Denmark. He has published in the fields of literary historiography, modernist literature, world literature, digital humanities, and posthumanism. His most recently submitted publication is a short book on the concept and history of text.

He is the author of Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures (2008),The New Human in Literature: Posthuman Visions of Changes in Body, Mind and Society after 1900 (2013), a co-author with Stefan Helgesson ofLiterature and the World (2019), and the editor of fourteen books, includingWorld Literature: A Reader (2012), The Posthuman Condition: Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics of Biotechnological Challenges (2012),Danish Literature as World Literature (2017), Literature: An Introduction to Theory and Analysis (2017), and The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism (2020).

In Conversation: Jean Ma and Tung-Hui Hu at Digital Aesthetics Workshop (December 2)

Please join us for the Digital Aesthetics Workshop’s next event, “In Conversation: Jean Ma & Tung-Hui Hu.” The two authors will discuss their recently released books—Jean Ma’s At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators and Tung-Hui Hu’s Digital Lethargy—before moving into a more synthetic conversation. A version of this event was originally scheduled in 2020 as a discussion of work in Jean Ma’s book-to-be, but was cancelled due to the pandemic. We are *thrilled* to bring the event back as, in part, a celebration of the book’s launch : )

The meeting will be held December 2nd, 10am-12, in McMurtry 370. Breakfast will be provided !

Zoom registration if unable to attend in-person: tinyurl.com/3nujuzkr

Jean Ma is the Victoria and Roger Sant Professor in Art in Stanford’s Department of Art & Art History. She has published books on the temporal poetics of Chinese cinema (Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema), singing women on film (Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema), and the relationship of cinema and photography (Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography). She is the coeditor of “Music, Sound, and Media,” a book series at the University of California Press. Her writing has appeared in Camera Obscura, Criticism, Film Quarterly, Grey Room, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and October. Her new book At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators is the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writer Book Grant. To access the open-source digital edition, please visit: luminosoa.org/site/books/m/10.1525/luminos.132/

Tung-Hui Hu is a poet and scholar of digital media. The winner of a Rome Prize and a NEA fellowship for literature, Hu has also received an American Academy in Berlin Prize for his research. He is the author of A Prehistory of the Cloud (MIT Press, 2015), described by The New Yorker as “mesmerizing… absorbing [in] its playful speculations”. His research has been featured on CBS News, BBC Radio 4, Boston Globe, New Scientist, Art in America, and Rhizome.org, among other venues. His brand-new book, an exploration of burnout, isolation, and disempowerment in the digital underclass, is Digital Lethargy (MIT Press, October 2022).

“Patterns of Text / Patterns of Analysis,” Mark Algee-Hewitt at Digital Aesthetics Workshop (Nov. 15)

The next event of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop will be next Tuesday, November 15, from 5-7pm with Mark Algee-Hewitt. Find below a brief description of his talk, “Patterns of Text / Patterns of Anaysis,” and we hope to see you there!

This hybrid event will take place in the Board Room of the Stanford Humanities Center, with online option via Zoom: https://tinyurl.com/36z56wuk (registration link)

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At first glance, the study of aesthetics and computational analysis would seem to be antithetical to each other. The former focuses, among other things, on the interplay between the formal features of the text, its larger social context and its reception; while the later largely aggregates formal features. However, the patterns produced by such computational work can not only shed new light on the specifics of how words produce aesthetic effects, but in and of themselves, they reveal a new set of aesthetic conditions that can only be visualized and explored through these methods. In this talk, I’ll toggle between large and small scales of analysis, using examples of quantitative analysis to demonstrate the ways that cultural analytics operates across scales to reveal new aspects of both poetics and our understanding of the interrelations between genres and periods of literature.

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Mark Algee-Hewitt’s research focuses on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England and Germany and seeks to combine literary criticism with digital and quantitative analyses of literary texts. In particular he is interested in the history of aesthetic theory and the development and transmission of aesthetic and philosophic concepts during the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. He is also interested in the relationship between aesthetic theory and the poetry of the long eighteenth century. Although his primary background is in English literature, he also has a degree in computer science. As the director of the Stanford Literary Lab, he is working to bring his interests in quantitative analysis, digital humanities and eighteenth-century literature to bear on a number of new collaborative projects. His current book project, The Afterlife of the Sublime, explores the history of the sublime by tracing its discursive patterns through over 11,000 texts from the long eighteenth century, seeking clues to the disappearance of the term at the end of the Romantic period. As a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University, working with the Interacting with Print Research group, Dr. Algee-Hewitt was also involved in a variety of projects that combine literary interpretation with quantitative analysis. He is a co-coordinator of the Book History BiblioGraph, a new dynamic online resource and recommendation engine that visualizes connections between contemporary resources on Book History using statistical methods. He is also working with Andrew Piper on the Werther Topologies: a project that seeks to identify lexical patterns that will aid in tracing the impact of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther on the nineteenth-century development of the German novel. Dr. Algee-Hewitt has taught a variety of courses in literary history and theory in both the English and German departments at McGill University, Rutgers University and New York University where he received his PhD in 2008.

Intermediations: Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, “Adjusting to the Age of Automated Writing” (Nov. 16)

As the inaugural event of INTERMEDIATIONS, a new workshop and lecture series foregrounding issues of intermediality and interdisciplinarity, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen will be giving a talk titled “Adjusting to the Age of Automated Writing” on November 16, 2022 (4pm in the Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall room 426).

Abstract:

Writing was for at least six to seven thousand years a humanly hand-crafted product. Now we encounter several kinds of technologies that change the production of text profoundly. Chatbots, automated translation, grammar assistants, and large language models are examples of how text generation permeates writing from many angles. In this presentation, Professor Mads Thomsen will sketch out key issues of the rapid developments in text generation and the interdisciplinary collaboration needed to understand these, before turning to how GPT-3 “reads” William Carlos Williams’ poem “The Red Wheelbarrow.”

Bio:

Thomsen has been director of the Digital Arts Initiative (2017-21) and the research program Human Futures (2016-22), both at Aarhus University. Thomsen was co-director of the research project Posthuman Aesthetics (2014-18), and he is the PI of the VELUX FONDEN-funded project Fabula-NET which investigates literary preferences and quality using digital methods (2021-25).

He is a co-editor of Orbis Litterarum, an advisory board member of the book series Literatures as World Literature(Bloomsbury Academic), and a member of the editorial board of Journal of World Literature. Thomsen is a member of the Academia Europaea (2010-), the advisory board of The Institute for World Literature (2010-13, 2018-22), and the general assembly of DARIAH (2022-).

Thomsen was a visiting scholar at Stanford University four times between 2001-2015.