Similar to Janus, the Roman God with two faces in one head, Digital Humanities seems to bring two different fields together. So, do scholars straddle humanities and technological studies? To probe into the facets of this emerging discipline, the Digital Society Research Cluster of CityU’s College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS) gathered three speakers to deliver via Zoom an insightful seminar titled “Miscibility and Digital Humanities: What kinds of solutions are we talking about?” on 8 February 2023. Keynote speaker Professor Caroline BASSETT, Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Cambridge, delivered a presentation on Digital Humanities as an innovative theoretical approach. Then, Dr XU Xiaoyu and Dr Esterina NERVINO, both research cluster members from CityU’s Department of English, gave two presentations in dialogue with Prof Bassett.

In the opening remarks, Dr TSUI Lik-hang, the Convenor of the Digital Society Research Cluster and Assistant Professor at CityU’s Department of Chinese and History, welcomed the participants and speakers by introducing the background and endeavours of the Research Cluster, highlighting the significance of Digital Society research. “A thorough understanding of the relationship between technology and society informed by both the humanities and social sciences must involve vigorous interdisciplinary research,” said Dr Tsui. 

In the main talk “Miscibility and DigitalHumanities: What kinds of solutions are we talking about?” delivered by Prof Caroline Bassett, the word “miscibility” means the ability of a liquid to be thoroughly mixed into another liquid. Some may find the chemistry jargon bemusing, pondering how it is relevant to the field of research. To one’s surprise, it exactly signposts the pressing queries about the nature of digital humanities—the mixing of data science with literary studies. She discussed the hotly debated ChatGPT in a new light. Instead of dichotomising humans and machines, she disrupted the conventional binarism and emphasised the deep entanglements between humans and machines. Immediately after, referring to the human ownership of language, she took ChatGPT's responses regarding authorship as an example. Apart from accentuating that “authorship” is a key concept that can navigate us to think through questions about human-machine collisions and machine fear, etc, she also pointed out that in human-machine collaboration, people should think about the relationship between machine and creativity and also avoid fetishising a certain aspect of the technology. In the presentation, she unpacked a few common queries regarding the technological trajectory and interdisciplinary thinking. 

After this presentation, Prof Bassett and Dr Nervino continued to discuss the issues of creativity in AI writing and how to use machines in beneficial ways. Prof Bassett said that it is urgent to figure out how we define “creativity” and how to assess the cultural forms we are producing prior to discussing these issues. Following this session, Prof Bassett answered the question of biases in artificial intelligence and gave an example from her CDH Project to talk about the duality of biases.

The second talk titled “Digitally assisted curational writing of wall labels for art accessibility” delivered by Dr Xu Xiaoyu is an ongoing project which she conducted with Dr Nervino in collaboration with the Hong Kong M+ Museum. She demonstrated current digital curational tools for writing wall labels and presented the challenges faced by curators amidst the “democratisation” of museums. Then she focused on four issues with the current digital tools for readability, using Hemingway as an example. Considering all the issues, she gave four directions for improvement. Prof Simon MAHONY, Professor Emeritus of Digital Humanities at UCL and Professor of Digital Humanities at Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai, joined the scholarly discussion and asked about the significance of digital tools for curational writing. Dr Xu elaborated on how AI can save time for curators and train new writers. Relating to Prof Bassett’s concept of “agency,” she also emphasised the necessity of changing the didactic and prescriptive tone of current digital tools and giving room to human agency.

In the third talk “From advertising billboards to social media galleries: The multimodal journey of fashion photography”, Dr Esterina Nervino discussed the digital transformation of fashion photography, the materiality of the medium, and the multimodal orchestration of different semiotic resources. She shared her insights into the multimodal journey of fashion photography with examples from print media and social media posts referring to a study she conducted on Facebook posts of diverse luxury brands. Her closing remarks echoed the discussion of digital humanities, highlighting how digital technologies empower photographers, how fashion branding can benefit from AI, and how we can move beyond a unimodal discussion of AI and language to explore the multimodal construction of reality. Prof Bassett raised a question about whether circulation is valued over quality, and Dr Nervino further elaborated on how communication practices, such as fashion photography, are the result of different variables, including intended message, target audience, and communication channel, which in this case determine whether quality or quantity are prioritised. 

Dr Nervino concluded the event by summarising the discussion into three standpoints related to human-machine interaction, initially highlighted by Prof Bassett, being authorship, agency, and creativity. She suggested continuing the conversation to focus on the adoption of technology as a tool to empower a positive change in society.

Organised and moderated by Dr Tsui and Dr Nervino, the seminar was attended by about 55 people on Zoom across different geographies, disciplines, and career stages, including students.