Beyond Digital Humanities: Weaving Humanities Research Software Engineering and AI

This is a re-recording of Beyond Digital Humanities: Weaving Humanities Research Software Engineering and AI, invited talk 15 March 2023 to open the University of Georgia's in Athens inaugural Humanities Festival. A YouTube version is available for casual watching.

Join David from The Alan Turing Institute's Research Engineering Group, the UK's national institute for data science and artificial intelligence, on an interdisciplinary journey showcasing cutting-edge digital humanities scholarship and the leading role of research software engineers in the Living with Machines project. The project is a flagship research initiative that aims to rethink the impact of technology on the lives of ordinary people during the Industrial Revolution (1780-1920), bringing together historians, geographers, linguists and curators, alongside research software engineers and research data scientists.
 
Through wrangling 109 billion words of newspapers, 129 thousand sheets of maps, and 180 million census entries, David will demonstrate how the research team has brought new insights while maximizing collaboration. He will also discuss the responsible use of AI, the challenges of navigating intellectual property rights and processing sources securely, and how data science has a lot to learn about representativeness and bias from the humanities.
 
Finally, David will look towards the future of digital research infrastructure in the UK. Can he resolve his identity: digital humanaut, software scribe or research wrangler?