The NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science hosted its eighth annual spring conference on April 25, 2025. The conference theme was “Social Justice” and the event included a diverse set of interdisciplinary presentations on topics including digital community archive projects, participatory modeling methods, collaborative algorithm development, and digital resources for collaboration and learning.
The event began with opening remarks from Moira Zellner, NULab Co-Director and Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs. Professor Zellner led the group through a grounding exercise, connecting us to the energy within us and around us and reminding us that we always have energy accessible to strengthen our commitment to our work and the communities we serve. Zellner recognized how the concept of social justice is more important now than ever and so the work we do as a community is more important now than ever. By expanding the NULab team with NULab Coordinators Stephanie Young in Oakland and Brian Ball in London, by incubating new projects, and by hosting events and workshops, Zellner concluded, we hope to contribute to a more just future for everyone.
Panel 1: “AI, Language, and Networks: Digital ecologies and Communities”
The first panel, moderated by Assistant Professor at CAMD Nabel Gillani, featured presentations by Rahul Bhargava, Brian Ball and David Freeborn, and Burak Ozturan. The title of the panel was AI, Language, and Networks: Digital ecologies and communities. Dr. Bhargava presented the project AI for Contested Good and proposed five key principles to engage more critically with the notion of contested goods, which tends to get limited attention in AI narratives. He also presented the Data Against Feminicide project as an example of ongoing efforts to center underserved issues, and count what is often not counted. In their presentation, Drs. Ball and Freeborn presented their project Analysing AI Ethics…Using AI! By exploring different analytical approaches (e.g., term frequency-inverse document frequency, SciBERT, Latent Dirichlet Allocation), they provide one starting point to show how computational techniques can inform philosophy and philosophical pedagogy. Doctoral student Burak Ozturan closed the panel presenting his project Beyond Political Segregation: Divided on Every Front. Motivated by the wide ideological gaps between young men and women globally, his project analyzed Twitter/X data including 1.1 million domains between the beginning of 2020 to the end of 2021 to explore the segregation at the domain and URL levels and how this segregation manifests by age, gender, and partisanship. Collectively, these presentations highlight the critical influence of AI, language, and networks on digital ecologies, emphasizing how ethical considerations and social dynamics shape the communities we build and inhabit online.
Keynote by Catherine Knight Steele
The keynote address was given by Catherine Knight Steele, Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland – College Park. The address was titled Lessons from a Black Feminist Technoculture: Against Automation, Toward Joy. Dr. Steele framed joy as a main technology for our liberation. She based her provocation in Black feminist technoculture that goes against the American narrative of democracy and technology as productivity and efficiency. Dr. Steele located the beginnings of Black feminist technoculture in the Virtual Beauty Shop i.e. the black blogosphere and hair braiding as computational. She introduced other theories of black feminist technoculture: Matrix of Domination from Patricia Hill Collins, Hip Hop Feminism from Joan Morgan, and Black Technophilia from Anna Everett. She then introduced some practices of black feminist technoculture that are useful for digital humanists and computational social scientists: providing care for the different archives despite their temporal difference and moving at the pace of trust. Dr. Steele concluded by describing joy as a strategy and a technology which digital humanists are obligated to bring into research in order to combat the wave of algorithmic and surveillant oversight. For those interested in learning more, Dr. Steele shared a reading list based on her talk.
Panel 2: “Technology, Representation, and Radical Possibility”
The second panel, moderated by Associate Director of the Digital Scholarship Group Caitlin Pollock, featured presentations by Lisa Arellano, Kai-cheng Yang, Johan Arango-Quiroga, and Stephanie Young on the theme “Technology, Representation, and Radical Possibility”. In her presentation on “History and Queer Resistance,” Lisa Arellano presented the projects Queer Pasts, a primary source database, and Quist, a smart phone application with queer historical content. Arellano highlighted the essential role librarians and editors play in supporting gender and queer studies in the current political climate. Kai-cheng Yang presented the paper “Accuracy and political bias of news source credibility ratings by large language models”. This paper shows that large language models tend to deviate from human expert ratings of news source credibility, showing a bias toward rating left-leaning news outlets as more credible. Johan Arango-Quiroga presented the community collaboration project “Energy Equity, Transition, and Futures: Insights from Photovoice in Latinx Communities in Boston”, which reveals the energy and environmental challenges these communities face. Of particular concern to community participants were the lack of lighting for pedestrian safety and the placement of an environmentally hazardous substation and jet fuel storage facility in their community. Stephanie Young presented her project “Phil Lesh & the Future of the Grateful Dead Songbook”. This project explores collaboration among diverse music artists and the themes of cultural appropriation versus cultural appreciation. These projects emphasized the importance of integrating diverse perspectives and the advantages and risks of using digital methods for research.
Closing Remarks
Following the second panel, Moira Zellner thanked everyone for sharing different perspectives on technologies and their ethical implications on politics and how we relate to each other and create community. Zellner encouraged attendees to keep the same energy as we continue our social justice work and to stay connected with each other.
While Dan Cohen, Dean of the Library; Vice Provost for Information Collaboration; Professor of History, was unable to attend in person to deliver the conference’s closing remarks, he recorded a brief video with his sentiments. Professor Cohen remarked on the key role of communities like the NULab in “thinking deeply and carefully about existing and emerging technology, how it is impacting our society and culture, and how we might enable new scholarly insights.” He emphasized that as we work with messy technologies like AI in the coming year, academics, scholars, students, and the general public will all be “critical in establishing not just norms but technical methods that can shield what must be protected and make available what might be useful.” Cohen pointed to Snell Library’s workshop series on AI and books in the public interest, funded through a Mellon Foundation grant, as an example of how we might imagine new models and ground rules for better interactions between AI and cultural works. Finally, he concluded that despite the feelings of chaos, he feels confident in the valuable contributions of the NULab in helping to shape a future that considers the ethical and cultural concerns discussed during the conference.
