Talk: Distant Viewing: AI In Theory and Practice

The talk will introduce the concept of distant viewing, a theory and method for computer vision. After discussing how computers “view”, we will turn to how the method works through case studies about visual culture. Putting theory and method into practice, participants will then be able to experiment with distant viewing through a hands-on workshop. No coding experience is required, and all materials and data are open access.

Lauren Tilton is the E. Claiborne Robins Professor of Liberal Arts and Digital Humanities at the University of Richmond. She specializes in computational approaches to studying 20thand 21st century visual culture. Her most recent co-authored books include Distant Viewing: Computational Exploration of Digital Images (MIT Press), Humanities Data in R 2nd Edition (Springer), and Computational Humanities (University of Minnesota Press). Her award-winning scholarship has received funding from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Mellon. She is Editor-in-Chief of Computational Humanities, an open access journal with Cambridge University Press. She is President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), the scholarly association for digital humanities in the United States, and President-Elect of the Association of Digital Humanities Organization (ADHO), the global DH association. She earned her PhD in American Studies from Yale University.