In Lebanon faculty, staff, and students across university campuses experienced multiple crises, of which COVID-19 was ironically the least to worry about. Ironically because the latter not only pungently exposed the infrastructural vulnerabilities in the health system on a colossal level and extenuated the digital divide in a developing society…[Read more]

This paper describes the function and genesis of IRSAAL-Urdu, a novel application of Google Sheets for the analysis of Urdu discourse online. This tool prioritizes openness, ease of use, and extensibility in its low technical bar for entry, robust documentation, and easily customized components. In particular, the paper details the postcolonial DH…[Read more]

This paper describes the function and genesis of IRSAAL-Urdu, a novel application of Google Sheets for the analysis of Urdu discourse online. This tool prioritizes openness, ease of use, and extensibility in its low technical bar for entry, robust documentation, and easily customized components. In particular, the paper details the postcolonial DH…[Read more]

Among the most biased aspects of history is the concept of memory. What do we remember? How do we remember? When do we forget? Should we forget? Remembering where we’ve come from, and complicating the past, is essential in continuing our journey through this world but the politics of commemoration often sidetracks our identity and attempts to i…[Read more]

Like many communities around the world, my own neighborhood was filled with murals and street art crafted by various artists, creators, and makers on brick and plywood. While made of various materials with different styles, these pieces of community-generated art all illustrate and amplify the important message that Black Lives Matter. In using…[Read more]

Reflections on artist Trevor Paglen’s (ab)use of the JAFFE dataset

Reflections on Trevor Paglen’s (ab)use of the JAFFE dataset

The article contains a historical account and commentary on Trevor Paglen and Kate Crawford’s unauthorized use of the JAFFE dataset.

Twenty-five years ago, my colleagues Miyuki Kamachi and Jiro Gyoba and I designed and photographed JAFFE, a set of facial expression images intended for use in a study of face perception. In 2019, without seeking permission or informing us, Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen exhibited JAFFE in two widely publicized art shows. In addition, they…[Read more]

This is the presentation I gave in Global DH Symposium 2021. It is about training a Handwritten Text Recognition Model for 18th and early 19th century Ottoman Turkish bureaucratic documents. I am using a platform called Transkribus for the training. The project is still in its early phases and I am happy to chat about it!

El Archivo de Mujeres nace como un proyecto al interior del Grupo de Investigación de Escritos de Mujeres, que tiene entre sus objetivos rescatar y publicar escritos de mujeres para comprender mejor la experiencia vital de las mujeres en el relato histórico. Así, el Archivo de Mujeres es un repositorio creado para la memoria de las mujeres, un lu…[Read more]

This presentation introduced the pedagogy behind the 2020 course Digital Publishing with Minimal Computing, designed by researchers from the University of Maryland (United States) and CONICET (Argentina) to teach minimal computing approaches to North and South American students. The class is part of the Global Classroom Initiative at the…[Read more]

The Black Panther film is the nexus between the what could be and the what could have been of Black futurity. Afrofuturism and its incarnations is reflective and invested in recovery and reclamation. The bibliography, then, is a technology for recovering Black artifacts and resituating those artifacts alongside contemporary entries in an attempt…[Read more]

This is a gut-reaction response to the recent article “The value of mass-digitised cultural heritage content in creative contexts” by Melissa Terras, et al, published in Big Data and Society on April 6, 2021, doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211006165. My main argument is that exploiting labor and appropriating cultural heritage are int…[Read more]

With Voyant Tools I studied a poetic corpus generated about the 1968 student movement and its culmination with the massacre of October 2, an important episode for the contemporary history of Mexico. Through the platform and the visualization of the information, it is possible to observe new routes of interpretation in the study of extensive sets…[Read more]

With Voyant Tools I studied a poetic corpus generated about the 1968 student movement and its culmination with the massacre of October 2, an important episode for the contemporary history of Mexico. Through the platform and the visualization of the information, it is possible to observe new routes of interpretation in the study of extensive sets…[Read more]

Over the past ten years, and due to many different reasons, we have witnessed the emergence of a global community interested in the Digital Humanities. But, what do we mean when we say ‘global’? Global and globalization belong to the same word family: the term ‘global’ refers both to the processes and to the results of globalization, and what we…[Read more]

Educational video games and their research and development became a thriving academic field in the past ten years, and by today numerous studies speak about the additional benefit of the immersion and emotional factors which they offer as added value as compared to traditional teaching. To discuss the chances and challenges of developing…[Read more]

As part of its Open Data Initiative, the Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS) at the American Philosophical Society creates publicly available datasets from library material. Our most recent project, Investigating Indentured Servitude, facilitates access to, and attempts to recover underrepresented voices from a record of over 5,000 indentured…[Read more]