Wednesday, May 15, 10:00 – 11:00am
Adrian Wisnicki, Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities Program Coordinator, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, will build on his work with generative artificial intelligence (AI) over the last year and a half to frame the practice of humanities scholars in relation to this rapidly evolving technology. He will start by examining how his own scholarship on race, Victorian literature, and the digital humanities — as reflected in projects such as One More Voice and Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom — has informed his investigations into generative AI. In doing so, he will discuss some of the key features of current large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others, and consider some of the common responses of scholars and the general public to these models. Finally, he will leverage this review of existing thought to argue that LLMs and generative AI more broadly create a new, comparative space for investigating the practice, broadly defined, of humanities scholarship. This space combines advanced prompting strategies — on being able to speak and understand the unique language of generative AI — with reconceptualization of the relationship of the user (in this case, the humanities scholar) to generative AI. Ultimately, the space requires that we center ourselves and articulate key elements of our practice that have previously passed for implicit. The result is a new understanding of our practices as scholars and new insights into the critical assumptions that underpin our work.