model of chemical compound made of wool and knitting needles

Events

 

Bringing people together to share their work and discuss projects is always a pleasure: we love to see the sparks of new ideas emerging and to help new collaborative relationships bloom. We were thrilled to be able to host our annual lecture in person for the very first time this year, and to showcase the work of our community by staging two new data-led artistic performances as part of the EFI events programme. People from all around the world continued to attend our online events and we welcomed local researchers back to our informal fikas and socials. 

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Nanjala Nyabola

Which Way to the Quickest Exit? Lessons from the Global South on Restoring the Possibilities of the Internet

This year's annual lecture showed how far-reaching and complex questions of morality and humanity entwine with our day to day use of platforms, as  activist and writer Nanjala Nyabola reflected on the impact and harms caused to many, particularly in the Global South, by these technologies and the companies that own them. 

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Immensely enjoyed Nanjala's talk. [It was] interesting and approachable [and] encouraged reflection and hunger to research more on the theme. Overall superb.

Annual Lecture Attendee, December 2022

Seminar Series

Autumn 2022

30th Aug Towards Large-scale Cultural Analytics in the Arts and Humanities Project Findings - Melissa Terras, Rob Baxter, Brendan Miles, Rosa Filgueira, Suzanne Black
6th Sep Book Launch: Millicent Garrett Fawcett: Selected Writings - Melissa Terras and Elizabeth Crawford
28th Sep Allusions, Algorithms, and the Mind: Observations from a Computational Approach to Reading Poetry - James Gawley 
10th 
Oct		 Decolonizing Knowledge Production through Linked Open Data - Jennifer Guiliano
2nd 
Nov		 Moral Horizons of Pain: Participatory Theatre and Public Engagement with Data and Technology in Medicine - Ariel Ducey, Pratim Sengupta, Martina Ann Kelly, Santanu Dutta and Erin Knox
8th
Dec		 Stories of the Syrian New Scots: Digital Storytelling in COVID-19 Refugee Arts - Annie Webster

Spring 2023

18th
Jan		 Self-assessment and self-reflection in the European cultural heritage sector and its role in fostering digital transformation - Fiona Mowat
6th
Feb		 Re-materializing the Digital: Governmentality and the Environmental Consequences of Life Online - Dipali Mathur
7th
Mar		 Protecting Confidentiality When Accessing History - Louise Neilson
26th 
Apr		 Anti-slavery archives, networks, and distributed data: The Case of Mary Anne Rawson’s The Bow in the Cloud (1834) - Christopher Ohge
10th May Uncertainty in Crowdsourced Digital History Projects: The Operation War Diary - Andrea Kocsis
14 events, 649 registrations

Our Audience

Our figures this year reflect the ongoing industrial action across our sector: in solidarity with those striking, we held fewer events with around half as many attendees as last year. However, with a mix of in person, hybrid and online, we continue to cater to a diverse community and maintain a growing  mailing list and social media following. We also addressed new audiences with our partner events this year, holding public debates and community workshops that stimulated new connections and contexts for data-led research.


Read our events policy

EFI Events

What My Body Can/t Remember - A performance by Farah Saleh

What My Body Can/t Remember

In her performance, dancer, choreographer and University of Edinburgh PhD student Farah Saleh explored the ways in which memories are recorded, stored, retrieved and re-shaped over time. Her work invited us to consider the difference between how memories are captured or 'saved' using technology and how memories are encoded into the human body by experience.

What My Body Can/t Remember
It's All About the Feelings... - A Performance on AI and Emotion Recognition

It’s All About the Feelings…

Our second contribution to the EFI public events programme was a thought-provoking piece by artist Bev Hood and actor Pauline Goldsmith, which reflected on AI attempts to read and analyse human emotion, showing its biases and limitations through a live engagement with emotion recognition software. 

It’s All About the Feelings…

Collaborative Events

Digital Humanities Climate Coalition

Digital Humanities Climate Coalition: Tool Kit Launch and Next Steps

The Digital Humanities Climate Coalition launched a new toolkit to support researchers in understanding and minimising the environmental impact of their work.

Imagining Artificial Life

Imagining Artificial Life: breaking through the screen

We partnered with our friends at IASH to contribute an event to the Being Human Festival.

Flickr Explore page

The Flickr Foundation's 100 year plan

We co-hosted a workshop for the Flickr Foundation exploring what a 100-year plan for a cultural organisation might look like.

Cupcake Graphic Mashup

Fikas & Socials

 

One of the things we've all missed in the last few years has been opportunities for informal networking, chatting with new people and relaxing together  over a drink and some food.  So we've brought back our PhD socials and our fikas this year: it's been brilliant to finally meet in person with some of the new researchers who have joined our community in the last few years.

Our Reach

Our online events attract people from all around the globe, with people tuning in from as far away as New Zealand, South America and Japan.