Integrating Digital and Computational Dimensions into Arts Research

Dr. Patrick Parra Pennefather is an Associate Professor in Theatre and Film at UBC, an author, researcher of emerging technologies, and has worked as a composer since the mid 1990’s licensing original tracks for live and mediated productions. He has used intelligent systems with audio since that time and has worked with major advertising brands, theatre companies internationally, Fortune 500 companies in tech, retail and entertainment. He is an advocate of and supervises teams to optimize open-source machine learning models used privately and trained with company/organizational data, taking advantage of different frameworks to increase the accuracy of generated content. He regularly speaks on the importance of developing guidelines on the use of generative AI aligned with organizational values, designs learning and processes to enable teams within organizations to integrate AI, and conducts workshops on the creative uses of the technology to support production-oriented workflows (Telus, Arc’teryx). Patrick has written two books with Springer/Nature’s Apress on the subject of AI with a third book in the works called The Human-In-The-Loop Playbook. His methods and processes for unique image creations using his own corpus of data on a still functional 2017 iMac with a 16GB video card, have inspired the development of guidelines for authors with Springer/Nature and are detailed in his current book Regenerating Learning: Transforming How we Learn with Generative AI. He recently established a new lab dedicated to transmedia storytelling, that integrates AI development with spatial audio, motion capture, xR and other immersive technologies. Current research initiatives are focused on fine-tuning and optimizing open-source text-to-speech models with actors to co-create an equitable voice portal that gives 100% sovereignty over the data and how it is used. He is currently co-leading a CFI application with larger ambitions to create an on premise, volumetric camera capture system to protect actors, athletes and other professionals from deep fake technologies. 

Laura K. Nelson is an Associate Professor of Sociology whose research examines how collective identities form, change, and gain meaning in public life. Her work focuses on language and discourse—how people describe themselves, their communities, and their political or cultural commitments—and how these descriptions shape social action. To study these processes, she combines sociological theory with computational approaches to analyzing text. Her research uses tools such as natural language processing, machine learning, and, increasingly, generative AI to study large collections of documents, from online discussions to organizational materials and public statements. These methods make it possible to trace patterns in language that would be difficult to observe through close reading alone. Recently, she has been exploring the opportunities and challenges that large language models present for social research. While these systems offer powerful new ways to analyze and interpret textual data, they also raise methodological and ethical questions about how scholars should use AI to study social life. Her current work examines how these tools can be integrated into sociological research while maintaining transparency, interpretability, and strong connections to qualitative inquiry.

Jennifer Lee Moss is a storyteller, podcast producer, and Lecturer in Creative Writing for New Media at UBC. Her research explores how emerging technologies reshape narrative form, particularly through immersive media and AI-assisted writing. With support from a TLEF grant and in collaboration with students at UBC’s Emerging Media Lab, she is co-creating the Procedural Poetry Funhouse alongside Creative Writing colleagues Austen Osworth, Bronwen Tate, and Annabel Lyon. This VR environment invites students to experiment with procedural poetry using generative AI. The world blends hand-drawn aesthetics inspired by the late Vancouver poet Judith Copithorne with computational text systems, encouraging critical and creative engagement with machine collaboration. Just as Copithorne pushed the boundaries of text, this project expands poetic process through AI and VR. Rather than treating AI as a shortcut, the work frames it as a process partner that reveals how language is structured, remixed, and spatialized. Drawing on the metaphor of blackout poetry, it also examines how AI can overtake creative thinking if left unresisted. The broader goal is to foreground process over product while preserving human voice, ethical awareness, and attention to place within digital literary practice.

Kevin Fisher is an anthropological archaeologist interested in the relationship between people and place, and the application of remote sensing and digital technologies for recording, analyzing and visualizing archaeological phenomena. His research focuses mainly on the early complex societies of the eastern Mediterranean and Near East, especially Cyprus, although he has worked on projects in Greece, Jordan, Peru, Guatemala, the US and Canada. He is currently Co-director of the Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environments (KAMBE) Project, an investigation of the relationship between urban landscapes, interaction and social change in Late Bronze Age Cyprus (c. 1700-1100 BCE). This project uses a variety of 3D digital technologies to undertake high-resolution recording and analysis, including photogrammetry to record each excavation context, terrestrial laser scanning (LiDAR) to record architectural remains and analyze construction methods, and drone-based LiDAR to record landscapes as a means to recover traces of past land use and water management practices. It has also experimented with extended reality (XR) to explore new ways of understanding place-making and data integration and visualization.

Megan Daniels is Assistant Professor of Ancient Greek Material Culture at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, BC). Her main interests cross between ancient history and archaeology, centering on migration, religion, cross-cultural interaction, and political developments over the Bronze and Iron Ages in western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean. She is currently completing a monograph on the emergence and spread of ideologies of divine kingship through the worship of goddesses over these periods and regions. Part of her study of ancient political and religious ideologies involves systematically studying and quantifying patterns of iconography in religious dedications at ancient sanctuaries. Her presentation will show how quantitative and digital thinking has helped her analyze and visualize these patterns and make deeper arguments about the intangible elements of ancient societies.

Nikki Georgopulos is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of British Columbia, where she teaches European art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as curatorial practice. She previously served as the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in the Department of French Paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, where she worked on the curatorial team of the landmark exhibition, Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment. She has published widely on the work of Mary Cassatt, including in exhibition catalogues for the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Musée d’Orsay, as well as Print Quarterly and Panorama. Her current book project examines representations of mirrors and reflections in nineteenth-century French art.

A Digital Projects Specialist at DiSA, Sara is a graduate student working towards her Dual Master of Archival Studies and Library and Information Studies. Prior to coming to the University of British Columbia, Sara received her Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from the University of Washington. As a Digital Projects Specialist for DiSA, she has consulted with faculty on digital scholarship projects, offering her expertise in computer programming, website development, and digital methods. She has worked with Nicole Georgopulos from the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory on creating a CollectionBuilder site of a historical French art exhibition that allows for analysis of the artists, their nationalities and regionalities, when the artworks were made, and genres of art represented in the exhibit. Additionally, she has worked with Siobhán Wittig McPhee and Michele Koppes from the Department of Geography on the creation of a static website from scratch using React to display an interactive map documenting sounds in the Vancouver area from the 1970s to present. More broadly, her interests include integrating ethical uses of AI into research practices, digital archives and preservation, and exploring new computational tools and methods.