University of Massachusetts Amherst: Inaugural Computational Humanities Initiative Meeting Features Cross-disciplinary Collaboration

The Computational Humanities Initiative—a cross-disciplinary program created by faculty in the College of Humanities and Fine Arts (HFA) and the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) who are interested in building new connections between the colleges in research and teaching—recently hosted its inaugural meeting. It featured a presentation from CICS assistant professor Laure Thompson.

Thompson presented “Computational Humanities and Human-Centered Machine Learning” to an audience that included UMass faculty and students from the departments of Classics, Philosophy, Economics, and Linguistics, as well as CICS, the Marieb College of Nursing, and the School of Public Health and Health Sciences. Attendees also joined from Amherst College and Mount Holyoke College.

During the talk, Thompson discussed how machine learning is typically used to replicate some human activity, thereby reducing human interaction through automation. In contrast, computational humanities encourages human interaction by using humans to interpret data. Thompson, whose research bridges machine learning and natural language processing with humanistic scholarship, shared case studies to help differentiate between the two types of machine learning.

The event was sponsored by the College of Humanities and Fine Arts and the Computational Social Science Institute.