Registration for Friday Frontiers Autumn Series 2025 Now Open!

Sébastien Plutniak (PhD in sociology, Master in archaeology) is a full-time research scientist at the CITERES lab (Tours, France) and a former member of the French School in Rome. His research revolves around computational methods in the humanities and the social sciences, which he investigates: 1) in a sociohistorical perspective, 2) in a practical way, developing methods and software tools for archaeological research.

Élisa Caron-Laviolette is a postdoctoral researcher in archaeology at the TEMPS lab (Nanterre, France), specialising in the spatial analysis of prehistoric domestic spaces. Her work combines field recording, GIS, and other digital and computational tools to investigate the organisation and use of space in hunter-gatherer campsites, with particular attention to material culture such as stone tools. She also engages with comparative perspectives, including occasional studies of sedentary groups.

Friday 7th November 2025, 10.30 WET / 11.30 CET / 12.30 EET

Title: Retrieving Context, Re-centering Interpretation: AI Hermeneutics and the Democratization of Reading

Speaker: Prof. Jenny Kwok, Hong Kong Baptist University

Registration details: https://dariah.zoom.us/meeting/register/BvhAgdWHTh2eA0xODMpVnQ

Abstract

In digital humanities, retrieval technologies have always mediated how we read, from concordances to search engines. With the advent of large language model and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) which was made available by the former, interpretation itself becomes procedural: machines now arguably perform a version of the critic’s movement between evidence and hypothesis, inviting debates and questions on the way (literary) reading might have been changed or even challenged. This talk introduces AI hermeneutics, an approach that treats RAG not as automation but as interpretive infrastructure, opening up an opportunity to integrate AI into the existing reading experience.

Drawing on experiments with the Conflict Archive on the Internet and conflict-era poetry, the project explores how retrieval systems can surface overlooked cultural memory while foregrounding the ethical boundaries of machine reading. It demonstrates how model “(mis-)readings” reveal the biases and expectations embedded in both human and computational interpretation.

The talk also considers questions of accessibility and sustainability— how lighter, discipline-specific models and transparent documentation can democratize advanced AI methods for scholars without extensive computing resources and its challenges. By reframing retrieval as a human-machine dialogue, AI hermeneutics invites the digital humanities community to see algorithmic mediation not as a threat to interpretation but as an opportunity to make the labor of reading visible and rewarded again.

About the speaker

Prof. Kwok is Assistant Professor at the Academy of Language and Culture, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU). She was awarded a CDH Visiting Fellowship at the University of Cambridge (2025) and will be a Gale Digital Scholar at the University of Oxford, 2026.

Prior to joining HKBU, she was Postdoctoral Fellow and later Research Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Arts, University of Hong Kong (HKU), where she also served as Lab Coordinator of the Arts Technology Lab. At HKU and HKBU, she contributed to the development of Digital Humanities teaching programs, including Introduction to digital humanities theories, tools, and methodologies, and advanced computational literary studies.

Her research explores how large language models can augment humanities inquiry, focusing on the intersection of AI and creative interpretation. She works on the application of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for contextualized reading of Irish Troubles poetry and on the design of AI workflows and agent-based systems for literary analysis. Her broader interests include creativity, generative AI, and the epistemic challenges posed by computational methods in the humanities. She has been invited to speak and deliver keynotes internationally, contributing perspectives on how computational advancements both challenge and renew humanistic practice. She also currently serves as a reviewer for several journals, including AI & Society and the Journal of Cultural Analytics, and as guest editor for the ongoing Journal of Open Humanities Data special collection on benchmarking in digital humanities.

Friday 5th December 2025, 10.30 WET / 11.30 CET / 12.30 EET

Title: Building corpora of digital early music editions: challenges and opportunities.

Speakers: Esperanza Rodríguez (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Frans Wiering (Utrecht University), David Lewis (University of Oxford), Anna Plaksin (Paderborn University).

Registration details: https://dariah.zoom.us/meeting/register/oCEylbMgSPW4yMEF5qezCw

Abstract

This presentation shows results from the project CORSICA (Creation of Early Music Corpora). This initiative, growing from the COST action EarlyMuse, is directed by Frans Wiering (Universiteit Utrecht), with the participation of researchers from Spain, the Netherlands, the UK, Germany, Austria, and Sweden. The project sprang from the need to create a large corpus of early music data, coherently encoded and curated data that could be used for computer analysis, facilitating big-data studies. Hence, the research aims to improve the number of available corpora of Renaissance music by devising protocols to create collections of digital editions and, equally important, to facilitate the reuse of a sizable number of editions produced by a myriad of “citizen scientists” without much systematisation.

About the speakers

Esperanza Rodríguez is a “Ramón y Cajal” researcher at the Music Department of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She received a PhD at The University of Manchester (2010). Since then, she has worked at research institutions in the UK, Portugal, and France. Primarily a cultural musicologist specialising in Renaissance music, she has added an interest in digital musicology, especially in the field of musical analysis (CRIM-Project) and the recreation and dissemination of musical heritage (project ‘Experiencing Historical Soundscapes: the Royal Entries of Emperor Charles V in Iberian Cities’).

Frans Wiering is an Associate Professor at the Music Information Computing group of the Department of Information and Computing Sciences of Utrecht University (Netherlands). He received a Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands) in 1995 for his dissertation “The Language of the Modes” on the richness and variety of modality in 16th- and 17th-century music. The three main areas of his current research are music information retrieval, computational musicology, and interactive technologies, which he combines in his ongoing work on the use and acceptance of new technologies in musicological research. He is the founder of the Thesaurus Musicarum Italicarum, a corpus of online music treatises by Gioseffo Zarlino and his contemporaries (https://tmiweb.science.uu.nl/). He co-chairs the International Musicological Society’s Study Group on Digital Musicology.

David Lewis is a researcher at the University of Oxford e-Research Centre in Oxford and Lecturer in Computer Science at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he teaches Digital Humanities. He studied historical musicology at King’s College London and has since worked on a wide range of digital musicology and digital humanities projects, including lute tablatures, medieval and early modern music treatises, arrangements of concert works for domestic settings, and composer work catalogues.

Anna Plaksin is currently a professor of Digital Methods in Music and Media Editing at KreativInstitut.OWL (Paderborn University). After studying musicology, media education, and philosophy in Mainz (Germany), was awarded her PhD in 2020 by the Technical University of Darmstadt for her dissertation “Models for the computational analysis of mensural music traditions. Empirical text studies in the context of phylogenetic methods”. She worked previously on the research projects “Interpreting the Mensural Notation of Music” (Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, Birmingham City University), “Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae” (Max Weber Foundation, Bonn), and “Virtual Research Infrastructure for the Humanities” (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz). Her research focuses on music encoding, corpus building, the development of software tools for interactive music scores, and the development of analytical methods for musical corpora.