The 8th Digital Humanities Utah Symposium (DHU8) was held on February 23 & 24, 2024 at The University of Utah.
DHU welcomes humanities scholars from across the Intermountain West and beyond. We especially invite early career scholars, graduate students, newcomers to the digital humanities (DH), and members of traditionally underrepresented groups to join us.
DHU 8 Keynote
Mark Sample, Chair and Professor of Digital Studies at Davison College
Almost AI: The Pleasure and Poetics of Staying Human in an Age of Machines
When machines can write like humans, should humans try writing like machines? What would that even look like? How asymptotically close can human writing approach machine writing while still remaining human? This talk explores my creative practice, which toggles between writing and coding, and frames it as a response—if not an antidote—to machine-generated procedural writing. I first highlight the long history of collaborating with computers to write poetry and prose. Then I make a case that despite large-language models like ChatGPT getting all the attention, there is a distinct pleasure and power in building your own small-language models, by which I mean bespoke miniature models of human language. Tiny grammars. I will show how these small, handcrafted language models can reveal insights, challenge assumptions, and even provoke arguments, all while grounded in a profound appreciation for human creativity
DHU8 Organizing Committee:
Kaylee Alexander (chair), Rebekah Cummings, Anna Neatrour, Elizabeth Callaway, Brandon Render, Elpitha Tsoutsounakis, Nathan Wainstein, Meekyung MacMurdie, Aniello de Santo, and Mike Bigler
Land Acknowledgement
We acknowledge that this land, which is named for the Ute Tribe, is the traditional and ancestral homeland of the Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, and Ute Tribes. The University of Utah recognizes and respects the enduring relationship that exists between many Indigenous peoples and their traditional homelands. We respect the sovereign relationship between tribes, states, and the federal government, and we affirm the University of Utah’s commitment to a partnership with Native Nations and Urban Indian communities through research, education, and community outreach activities.
