Event Details

This talk will explore a long-standing question in the history of technology concerning the trope of the living machine.

This talk, co-hosted by the Department of History and the Digital Humanities Centre, will explore a long-standing question in the history of technology concerning the trope of the living machine. It approaches the question using a multi-disciplinary synthesis of computational methods and historical research. In particular, it showcases the use of a cutting-edge feature of today's information landscape – a language model – as a means of exploring historical texts. Making use of a model, itself often portrayed as alive, it aims to detect forms of figurative language, which could not be discovered using simple keyword search. Collecting such sentences for close-reading and analysis, it concludes that, used judiciously, language models have the potential to open up new avenues of historical research.

Daniel Wilson is a historian of science and technology working on the politics and provenance of data and machines in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His work combines traditional close-reading and archival study with computational techniques. Current projects include using language models and other critical methods to explore historical text datasets, including the internationally important collections of the British Library.