Seeing, Reading, and Hearing Images: Expanding Distant Viewing Through Multimodal AI
Prof. Lauren Tilton
E. Claiborne Robins Professor of Liberal Arts and Digital Humanities at the University of Richmond (USA)
About the talk:
How do computers interpret visual information? How can we extend distant viewing capabilities by integrating diverse forms of media such as photography and TV? What kinds of humanities insights are possible by analyzing computationally image, text, and sound?
This talk will introduce the foundational concepts and theory behind distant viewing, then demonstrate how multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) expand our ability to interpret large-scale visual datasets and meaningful insights that inform research questions in media and visual culture studies. The presentation will conclude by showcasing the Distant Viewing Explorer—an open-access interface designed to facilitate multimodal distant viewing research and discovery.
About the speaker:
Lauren Tilton is the E. Claiborne Robins Professor of Liberal Arts and Digital Humanities at the University of Richmond (USA). 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.
Stacked Databases – Decolonizing Methodology From Colonial-Era Encyclopaedias to Contemporary AI Chia Wei HSU
Chia Wei HSU
Artist, filmmaker, and curator
About the talk:
This presentation focuses on the issue of artificial intelligence in the information society through the conceptual framework of the database. It introduces several different notions of databases — including the encyclopedic databases of the colonial era, material-based databases in archaeology, the technological databases of film history, and the databases of artificial intelligence — and examines these through the lens of the artist’s own research and creative practice. By tracing the historical development of databases, the presentation aims to explore the contemporary possibilities of the database as both concept and methodology.
A central component of the research is the Eye Filmmuseum’s archive of approximately 1,500 documentaries from the Dutch East Indies, produced between 1913 and 1945. These materials—ranging from family films to corporate and governmental records—provide diverse perspectives on filmmaking history, colonial life, and natural science.
From this archive, Hsu selected 250 copyright-free films and worked with engineers to train an AI model on this material. The AI segmented the footage into more than 30,000 individual shots and generated textual descriptions for each. These images and descriptions were then assembled into a dedicated database used to train a new model—an AI that “learns” from the visual culture of the Dutch East Indies.
This project approaches AI critically. The research also delves into the microstructure of AI hardware, particularly the properties of the CoWoS chip, a key technology in modern AI computing that enables chip stacking. Through this technology, the study proposes a new concept: the “stacked database.”
Beyond the physical stacking of chips, AI computation operates within an abstract high-dimensional mathematical space, in which all entities are decomposed into smaller units called tokens. Through a process known as embedding, these tokens are transformed into complex numerical vectors in multidimensional space. From this moment, the meanings and relationships of language are translated into positions and distances within mathematical space. The interpretive frameworks once structured by human keywords are thus dismantled, allowing heterogeneous databases to collide, merge, confront, and coexist — leading to a networked perspective on the multiplicity of databases.
About the speaker:
Chia Wei Hsu is an artist, filmmaker, and curator. He assimilates the languages of cinema and contemporary art to interrogate the intricate mechanisms of image production. His work centers on the material and performative dimensions of the cinematic production process, treating the act of filming as an event in its own right. This approach enables him to forge connections among people, materials, and sites that have been marginalized or excluded from dominant historical narratives.
Hsu’s work critically examines media as a tool for constructing imaginaries of the world. He explores how technologies of image-making operate not only as instruments of memory but also as vehicles for projecting cosmological perspectives. By reactivating historical documents and colonial-era films, Hsu generates contemporary reflections on the past, recontextualizing archival materials to produce new layers of meaning in the present.
His works also presented in group shows such as Machine Love at Mori Art Museum (2025; Japan), Untranquil Now at Hamburger Kunsthalle (2024;Germany), Thailand Biennale Chiangrai (2023;Thailand), Aichi Triennale (2022; Japan), Asia Pacific Triennale (2021; Australia), Singapore Biennale (2019), A Tale of Hidden Histories at Eye Filmmuseum (2019; Netherlands), the Biennials of Shanghai, Gwangju, Busan and Sydney (2018), 2 or 3 Tigers at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2017; Berlin, Germany) and Taiwan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2013; Italy).
He was the finalist in the HUGO BOSS ASIA ART Award in 2013 and won the Annual Grand Prize at the 15th Taishin Arts Award in 2017. In 2024, he won the 10th Eye Art & Film Prize. He is also the curator of Asian Art Biennial at National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (2019; Taichung, Taiwan), Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition at Hong-Gah Museum (2018; Taipei, Taiwan), and THAITAI: A Measure of Understanding at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (2012; Bangkok, Thailand).
The Stories We Live By: Modeling Collective Narratives
Prof. Andrew Piper
Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University
About the talk:
Stories don’t just describe the world, they actively shape it. From the myths that define national identity to the fragments of news and social media that shape public opinion, collective narratives organize how societies make sense of change. Yet in an era of algorithmic feeds and large-scale information flow, these narratives form and evolve faster and more diversely than we can comprehend them. This talk explores new methods for detecting and modeling collective storytelling across massive, multimodal datasets. Drawing on advances in large language models and classical narratology, I introduce a framework for tracing the actors, events, and values that coalesce into shared social stories: how they rise, transform, and stick around. By bringing narrative theory into conversation with computational modeling, “The Stories We Live By” offers a vision for how the humanities and AI together can illuminate the architectures of meaning that govern collective life.
About the speaker:
Andrew Piper is Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University. His work focuses on using AI to study the nature of human storytelling. He is the director of .txtlab, a laboratory for cultural analytics, and founding editor of the Journal of Cultural Analytics. He directs “Citizen Readers,” a large-scale citizen science initiative that brings readers and AI together to uncover why humans tell stories. His publications include Enumerations: Data and Literary Study (Chicago 2018), Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times (Chicago 2012), and most recently, Can We Be Wrong? The Problem of Textual Evidence in a Time of Data (Cambridge 2020). He has a new book forthcoming from Johns Hopkins titled: Why you should read more fiction.