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Showing posts from August, 2024

Maybe it is time to read sexuality against the grain of Foucault

  When discussing scientific theory I often make the joke that whilst foucault spent the major part of his life fleeing from Hegel, I have spent years trying to escape Foucault. For the past year I have been working on projects on sexuality heavily inspirered by him, which in then led my old supervisor to ask why my texts mainly have been confirmation of theories from the 1960’s rather than focusing on what in the empirical material that goes against Foucault. After this comment I came to re-read my material and focus on the differences between my empirical stuff and Foucault. What I actually learned was rather interesting. In the history of sexuality Foucaults primary notion is the idea that sex was not lacking during the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century. Instead he proposes that society was obsessed with the regulation of speech around sexuality and he also came to focus his analysis on these restrictions. In the subsequent tradition this has also been the f...

AI - nothing new under the sun?

 F or the past week I have worked alot with the history of AI for an upcoming course on AI and archives which I will be part of the teaching team during the next semester. This area have been rather tricky for me as a scholar in humanities to learn about, since most of the text is rather technical and does not really have historians as a point of departure. The texts that have been written as a way to popularize are also filled with technical terms such as "neural networks" which they seem to think is rather obvious terms for scholars from all fields. Yet I have read some technical courses at the university, and this have helped alot. I have even managed to read some of Alan Turings original writing, and apart from the math I found rather interesting.  What I however have come learn during this week is actually how complex the notion of AI really is. Basically the idea of living machines have been part of western culture since ancient greece with Heifastos golden robots and f...

Digital archives - solving the issue of de-abstracting history?

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 For the past years I have taught alot of history, ranging from large oversights to supervising thesis work. In the first part of teaching I early on realised that my background as an archivist would work to be a benefit, but it's first during the latest year I have actually developed a method for including primary sources fluently in my teaching. The perhaps hardest part of teaching large global history courses is that partly what to view as most important, and in many cases the course curriculums states both the need to learn about important actors, but also social structures. Since these courses also cover the development in vast geographic areas, it is also hard to actually give the students a way to make their work concrete. And in is here that digital archives many times have come to my rescue.  Starting with the obvious form of source critique, digital archives should never be the historians sole source of information if we have to do with transcribed material. Humans w...

The black box of code and AI in research

Y ou would have to be sleeping under a rock for the past year if you have not heard of the praise of AI in contemporary society. Basically, AI is described as a new tool in which we can process information faster than ever before, and utilize it to make informed decisions. Many of the proponents of AI believe that there does not exist a single factor in society which will not be affected by the so called AI revolution, and perhaps they are right. Still, AI also brings forth significant challenges to the scientific community which I do not believe that we have discussed at length yet. In this post I will highlight both how I utilize external AI (i.e. AI that is created solely for being AI and not included in common programmes such as Word or Chrome) and what I still would not trust it with.  As a scholar my main tool for work is the written word. Since english is not my native tongue, this however becomes complicated when working with the international scientific community. In my pu...