Guest seminar: Alexandra Huang-Kokina
Welcome to the weekly IMS seminar!
This week's IMS seminar will host Alexandra Huang-Kokina, Researcher in Word and Music Studies at the University of Edinburgh, who will present: ""Intermediality and Digital Humanities".
About the seminar
This lecture explores the synergy between intermediality and Digital Humanities (DH) in four parts. It begins by defining Digital Humanities, highlighting the shift from traditional ‘close reading’ to ‘distant reading’, a method that involves quantitative analysis of texts. This shift, described as a move towards ‘Cultural Analytics’ by Andrew Piper, represents a paradigm shift towards viewing culture as a living social process, focusing on data curation rather than sheer volume. The second section demonstrates ‘distant reading’ through a web-based textual analysis tool, suggesting that digital methods should complement but not replace traditional cultural analysis methods. The third section presents a case study from the lecturer’s DH project on opera, showcasing how sentiment analysis can unveil hidden emotional profiles within opera’s multimodal storytelling. Finally, the lecture addresses the nexus of emotion, language, and AI through ‘Emotion AI’ (EAI), a sub-field in ‘affective computing’ that decodes human emotions through digital means. Despite scepticism about AI’s emotional literacy, the lecture encourages examining EAI via underlying conceptual models, theories, and proxy data that represent human emotions. Furthermore, it highlights opera’s vast emotional spectrum, covering physiological, expressive, and experiential dimensions of emotions, offering a potent medium for advancing critical and practical EAI research. It concludes with speculation on a ‘sci-fi opera’, envisioning a future where AI achieves a ‘theory of mind’ amid rising gen-AI technologies.
Suggested reading:
Eve, Martin Paul. The Digital Humanities and Literary Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. (Especially beneficial is the ‘Introduction’, pp. 1-27)
Kosinski, Michal. ‘Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models’. 11 Nov 2023. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2302.02083
Piper, Andrew. ‘There Will Be Numbers’. Journal of Cultural Analytics 1.1, 23 May 2016. DOI: 10.22148/16.006. DOI:10.22148/16.006
Rebora, Simone. ‘Sentiment Analysis in Literary Studies. A Critical Survey’. Digital Humanities Quarterly 17.2, 2023, pp. 1-17.
Stark, Luke, and Jesse Hoey. ‘The Ethics of Emotion in Artificial Intelligence Systems’. Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 2021, pp. 782-93.
Short bio:
Alexandra Huang-Kokina is an early-career academic working at the crossover of music, literature, and digital humanities. Her upcoming book with Palgrave Macmillan, The Musical Performativity of Twentieth-Century Piano Novels, explores piano playing in non-traditional settings as vehicles for socio-political activism. Her critical research on musical-literary relations informs her creative practice, revolving around experimental digital innovations in contemporary art music performance. Her latest project integrates AI methodologies into classical music performances, seeking to revolutionise audience engagement and immersion, thereby facilitating the genre’s adaptation into an increasingly AI-driven society.
How to attend the seminar
It is possible to attend the seminar from Dacke in Växjö and via Zoom. Contact us at ims@lnu.se if you want to participate via Zoom, or sign up for our external email list to receive automatic updates on our events (zoom link and additional information are sent out one week in advance).
Photo: 'Aurora - Connecting Senses’, Cristina Pop-Tiron & Signe Kjær Jensen