Prof. Stephen Davis will be giving a public lecture on Thursday, February 26th on his ongoing Bitter Aloe project.
This lecture will be held at the Sarah Fine Institute, University of Pittsburgh, and online at Iyatsiba Lab as part of New Archival Visions at the CHR. This lecture is in partnership between the Sarah Fine Institute, Pitt Cyber, the Department of English and the Digital Narrative and Interactive Design Program (Pittsburgh), and the New Archival Visions.
Date:
Friday February 27
Time:
7:30pm
Venue:
Iyatsiba Lab,
66 Greatmore Street, Woodstock
(enter via Regent St)
Synopsis:
The introduction of AI into human rights research is yielding new insights into the origins, practice and legacy of political violence. This talk will describe the work of Bitter Aloe, an AI humanities research group that applies advanced machine learning methods to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) archive. The advent of machine learning allows us to ask an old humanistic question in a new way: what does it mean to establish “as complete a picture as possible” of past political violence by now rendering it as data?
Bio:
Stephen Davis is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Kentucky. He is the Principal Investigator of two AI projects; Bitter Aloe and The Personal Writes the Political. He is also author of the ANC’s War Against Apartheid: Umkhonto we Sizwe and the Liberation of South Africa (Indiana University Press, 2018).