News & Events
International and Area Studies
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“‘At the Limit of the Obscene’: German Realism and the Disgrace of Matter”
Time: - 4:30 PMDate: Location: https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/93239203888
Speaker: Erica Weitzman (Northwestern University)
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Lecture: “Close Reading Distant Viewing”
Time: - 3:30 PMDate: Location: Zoom link: https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/94310825987
Speaker: Professor Fabian Offert (History and Theory of Digital Humanities Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies University of California, Santa Barbara)
Machine learning has not only changed how computers “read”, but also how they process the visual world. In this talk, I will investigate some of the implications of the machine learning revolution for the digital humanities. I will present an analysis of popular distant viewing practices that leverage machine learning to analyze large corpora of images and show how these practices fail by failing to take into account the radical differences between human and machine intelligence. Specifically, I will argue that it is exactly a “close reading” of machine learning that is required to uncover such epistemological limitations, and that…