[JFKI-News] Library Lecture #1 Ryan Cordell "Towards a Bibliography for AI Systems" 08.06.2023 4-6pm CET

["JFKI Culture Department" <culture@jfki.fu-berlin.de>]

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Subject: Library Lecture #1 Ryan Cordell "Towards a Bibliography for AI Systems" 08.06.2023 4-6pm CET
From:    "Dennis Mischke" <mischke@ada.fu-berlin.de>
Date:    Fri, May 26, 2023 12:15
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Dear JFKi-List,

it is my great pleasure to cordially invite you to the following event: the Alexander von Humboldt Fellow *Prof. Ryan
Cordell (The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign),* who will be AvH Senior Fellow at the Ada Lovelace Center for
Digital Humanities at Freie Universität will deliver a first lecture on /"Towards a Bibliography for AI Systems"/
touching on pressing issues such as large language models, ChatGPT and the question of how we can approach recent
developments in AI bibliographically and from the perspective of Cultural Studies and Digital Humanities.

*Time & Place*

08.06.2023 | 16:00 c.t. - 18:00

Hörsaal D / HFB
Garystr. 35-37 /
Henry-Ford-Bau

*Registration*:
https://www.fu-berlin.de/xcehhk3

*Information*:
https://www.ada.fu-berlin.de/kalender/librarylecture_1.html

*Contact*:
digital.humanities@ada.fu-berlin.de

*Abstract*: To date, much bibliographic study of digital textuality has focused on the materiality of
computation—forensic studies of the hard drive's textual inscriptions, for example, or vertical analysis of the
layered software and hardware of a single ebook. Less clear, however, is how such approaches might apply to the texts
generated by a large language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT.  While the data for LLMs exists somewhere, that existence
is far more diffuse, abstract, and distributed
than that of a discrete digital document or bound set of files. Is the textual data undergirding an LLM inscribed in
any single place to which we could point, in the way that bibliographers point to a particular witness of a particular
state of a particular edition of a particular book, or does this new medium require a more capacious bibliographical
approach? The "black box" constructed by the corporate owners of popular LLMs further obfuscates bibliographical
investigations, forcing researchers to speculate about material realities through indirect clues rather than through
direct experience of material substrates.

In this talk, Cordell argues that a bibliography for AI systems must bring together two related traditions: the
sociological school of bibliography and book history, which forefronts the linked technological, social, economic, and
artistic contexts through which books coming into being, and the growing set of approaches gathered under the mantle
of "data archaeology," which seek to outline the similarly linked contexts through which datasets are created,
distributed, and accessed. Such a bibliography triangulates between materiality, infrastructure, and labor to describe
the systems of digitization, archiving, extraction, and representation that lead from digitized and born-digital
sources to the strings of text output by LLMs in response to user prompts. Just as D.F. McKenzie argued bibliographers
should "describe not only the technical but the social processes of texts' transmission," AI systems require a
bibliography that studies the diffuse and often obscured sociology of textual data.

We are welcoming Prof. Cordell at the FU and are looking forward to seeing you.

Dennis Mischke

-- 
*Dr. Dennis Mischke*
/Ada Lovelace Center for Digital Humanities/
--
Freie Universität Berlin
University Library
Garystraße 39
14195 Berlin, Deutschland
--
web: www.ada.fu-berlin.de/en
email: mischke@ada.fu-berlin.de
tel: +49 30 838 58632
mastodon: @dennmis@fedihum.org