The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals awarded the Field Development Grant to our project ‘Multimodal AI, Image Analysis, and the Illustrated Periodical Press. ’ 🥳

We will apply state-of-the-art multimodal machine learning to explore the illustrated world(s) of the nineteenth-century press!

Excited to work on this project with @pfyfe , Ben Lee, and Julia Thomas!

More info in the RSVP newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/58ec34fce829/research-society-for-victorian-periodicals-april-newsletter-13851062?e=5666c1d78f

#VictorianPeriodicals #MediaHistory #digitalhumanities

I’m glad to have the last chapter of *Going the Rounds*—that will appear as an online draft, at least—“Editing a Paper,” up on the Manifold Scholar site.

This chapter triangulates between multiple sources—such as the digitized newspapers in the Viral Texts corpora, the LoC’s US newspaper directory, and C19 attempts to document newspaper production, to model some fundamental questions like:

+ how many newspapers even were there in the C19 US?
+ in what ways can we consider digitized collections “representative” of C19 papers?
+ what did “newspaper” even mean over the century—in terms of length, format, frequency, &c?
+ how much of papers was reprinted vs. original?

These questions underlie all the work researchers do with digitized historical newspapers but are hard to answer, given the unevenness of preservation & digitization, & are often bypassed, making it hard to contextualize DH findings

https://manifold.umn.edu/read/editing-a-paper/section/fc0597a3-5fe1-439c-86f8-0e47e8a55208

This is one of the best articles I’ve encountered in the current AI discourse.

The article reads 21st-century debates over AI art through the lens of the long 19th-century debate about the creative status of photography. The author doesn’t anachronistically conflate the two moments, but draws useful parallels—the piece is a model of how media histories can inform our responses to contemporary media shift.

I also like how the article reframes key aspects of the AI debate, noting how worries expressed as about automation—“will AI take over X job?”—are perhaps proxies for anxiety over lost worker protections.

“An understanding of the technology as one that separates human from machine into distinct categories leaves little room for the messier ways we often fit together with our tools.”

https://www.noemamag.com/what-is-ai-doing-to-art/

It's a big day for @LivingWithMachines - the book I wrote with Ruth Ahnert, Emma Griffin and Giorgia Tolfo launches today! https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/collaborative-historical-research-in-the-age-of-big-data/839C422CCAA6C1699DE8D353B3A1960D

And we've released 50 newspaper titles on the The British Library research repository. Post by Giorgia here: https://livingwithmachines.ac.uk/over-half-of-a-million-pages-of-historical-newspapers-now-openly-available/