DH Colloquiums

SADiLaR organizes monthly Digital Humanities colloquia. These typically take place on Wednesdays (in the middle of the month) from 10:00 to 11:00 SAST. During these DH colloquia a wide variety of topics are discussed, mostly on content related to Digital Humanities, sometimes focusing more on the techniques or methodologies used, sometimes focusing more on the applications or application areas.

The DH colloquia are part of Escalator's Explorer track. You can find more information on Escalator here: https://escalator.sadilar.org/, on Escalator's championship programme here: https://escalator.sadilar.org/champions/overview/, and on the Explorer track within Escalator's championship programme here: https://escalator.sadilar.org/champions/explorer/. Also check out the other tracks within the Escalator championship programme as there may be tracks directly related to your interests. If you want to be a member of the Digital Humanities community, you may also want to consider joining the DHCSSza Slack. This page will provide more information on how to join (this is also free): https://escalator.sadilar.org/connect/.

If you have suggestions for speakers at the DH colloquium (or if you want to speak yourself), or if you want to provide feedback, please do not hesitate to contact Prof Menno van Zaanen: menno.vanzaanen@nwu.ac.za.

 

 

 

 

REGISTER NOW

 
Title:
Depp vs Heard: a Digital-Hermeneutics Approach to Trust in Online Culture
 
Abstract:
There seems to be a surplus of both trust and distrust in contemporary media culture. On the one hand, we place great trust in the platforms that govern and structure our online lives. We rely on algorithms to organize our lives and make decisions for us. We fall prey to confirmation bias and filter bubbles, which we might characterize as an overly trusting attitude towards (human and/or technological) others. On the other, increasing political, ideological, and epistemological polarization in culture means we can be deeply suspicious of others outside our ideological communities, and trust in experts is waning in certain communities. Radicalizing content and he mainstreaming of conspiracy thought only contribute to a deep-seated distrust of groups outside of the own community, and of things as they seem.

In this presentation, I will look at the trust- part of this equation, through the lens of what Paul Ricoeur has called the ‘hermeneutics of faith’. In Freud and Philosophy, Ricoeur contrasts the hermeneutics of suspicion with readers who come at a text with hopes of revelation. He identifies this strand of hermeneutics in the phenomenology of religion and its symbolic language. The interpreter feels herself addressed by the text and unveils or unmasks its meaning with an attitude of reverence, according to a logic of revelation. I argue that hermeneutics today has migrated from a range of philosophical theories and approaches in literary studies, to pervasive practices in online culture at large that warrant scholarly reflection. In this case, these include echo chambers, filter bubbles, and the so-called ‘guru effect’, and in general in the often blind trust that we put in the platforms that govern our lives.

Then, I examine the role that trust plays in online discussions on the notorious case of the trial of Johnny Depp versus his ex-wife Amber Heard. I look at a corpus of posts and comments from Reddit using an approach called 'digital hermeneutics' (Van de Ven & Van Nuenen, 2022), which is inspired by Gadamer's dialogical hermeneutics. It consists of a 'scaled reading' on five different scales: platform hermeneutics; contextual reading; distant reading; hyper-reading (concordance views); and close reading.
 
Speaker: Inge van de Ven
 

SPEAKER & TOPIC

DATE AND PRESENTATION

VIDEO

Inge van de Ven


Change my view? a Digital-Hermeneutics Approach to Dialogism in Online Culture

 

13 September 2023

Presentation

Amandla Ngwendu and Jacques De Wet


Building the IsiXhosa Intellectual Traditions Digital Archive: Challenges & Solutions

 

16 August 2023

Presentation

Karolina Rudnicka


Can Grammarly and ChatGPT accelerate language change? AI-powered technologies and their impact on the English language: wordiness vs. conciseness

 

19 July 2023

Presentation

Geesje van den Berg and Lebo Mudau


Postgraduate student involvement as co-developers of sustainable OER

 

14 June 2023

Presentation

Barbara McGillivray


Publishing data papers in the humanities: my experience from the Journal of Open Humanities Data

 

17 May 2023

Presentation

Imke van Heerden


Making Strange: Co-Creating Afrikaans Poetry with a Boutique Language Model

 

12 April 2023

Presentation

Hiwa Asadpour and Arash Amani


An NLP method in the corpus analysis of Central Kurdish definiteness marker

 

15 March 2023

Presentation

Elsabé Taljard, Danie Prinsloo, and Michelle Goosen


Creating electronic resources for African languages: challenges and opportunities

 

15 February 2023

Presentation

Thea Pitman and Janet C.E. Watson

CELCE: Playing Green Games: micha cárdenas’s Sin Sol / No Sun

 

25 January 2023

 Presentation

Annemi Conradie

How to hang paintings on digital walls: processes and challenges of translating a physical art exhibition into a virtual showcase on the Kunstmatrix platform

 

16 November 2022

 Presentation

Yliana Rodríguez and Luis Chiruzzo

Considering language varieties and language contact in Natural Language Processing and Machine Translation: the case of Guarani

 

12 October 2022

 Presentation

Gordon Matthew

Measuring the impact of subtitles on cognive load

 

14 September 2022

 Presentation

Sibonelo Dlamini

Cross-lingual transfer learning

 

17 August 2022

 Presentation

Anelda van der Walt and Anne Treasure

The ESCALATOR programme - a big vision for growing digital and computational skills and community in Humanities & Social Sciences

 

20 July 2022

 Presentation

 

Franziska Pannach

A short introduction to Digital Folkloristics

 

15 June 2022

 

 

Maria Keet

Natural Language Generation for Agglutinating African Languages - A brief overview 

 

18 May 2022

Presentation

Amanda du Preez

Thinking Through Images: Approaching Aby Warburg and the Digital Arts and Humanities

 

4 May 2022

 

Presentation

Emmanuel Ngué Um

When Ideologies we live by stand at odds with Digital Humanities collaboration

 

16 March 2022

 


Vanessa McBride

Big data, astronomy for development, and cross disciplinary collaboration

 

16 February 2022

 

Presentation

Peter van Kranenburg

Computational Modelling in Musicology: The case of Medieval Chant

 

19 January 2022

 

Presentation

Martin Benjamin

Towards valid linguistic measurement: The Kam4D Linguistic Knowledge Graph: Putting Smurfs, Ducks, Lemurs, and Party Terms to the Service of African Languages

 

17 November 2021

 

Presentation

 


Karien van den Berg

Towards valid linguistic measurement: what digital humanities can bring to the forensic linguistic table and vice versa

13 October 2021

 

Presentation

Marissa Griesel

Creating linguistic resources for use in digital humanities: notes from one proudly South African adventure

 

15 September 2021

Presentation

Lizabé Lambrechts

Digital humanities and the archive: Looking at the challenges of taking the Hidden Years Music Archive online

 

11 August 2021


Vanessa Joosen

 

Constructing Age for Young Readers - A Digital Approach

 

14 July 2021

Presentation

Iris Hendrickx

 

Getting to know people by automatic text analysis of talks and tweets

 

9 June 2021

Presentation

Tunde Opeibi

 

Digital Humanities and African Scholarship: Exploring Opportunities, Embracing Challenges

 

19 May 2021

Presentation

Barbara Bordalejo

 

A Historical Perspective on Digital Editions

 

14 April 2021


Viktor Schlegel

 

Deep learning for natural language processing

 

17 March 2021

Presentation

Rachel Hendery (Western Sydney University)

Digital Humanities approaches to digitising, repatriating and exploring an historical Australian colonial archive 

 

17 February 2021

Presentation

Umamaheswara Rao Garapati (University of Hyderabad, India)

Language Technology, a Bridge Spanning the Linguistic Divergence

 

20 January 2021

Ayodele James Akinola
 
Resources, scholarship and DH practice: Reflections on resilience and coping strategies of an African scholar

 

Martin Bekker (University of Johannesburg, Computational Social Science)

Everything I knew about protests was wrong

 

21 October 2020

Presentation