Reported by Helen Wu
At the 2025 Arts ISIT Welcome Back Conference, Arts faculty members, staff, and instructional assistants gathered to share insights on technology topics and digital tools ahead of the new academic year. Concluding the first day, four scholars from the Faculty of Arts joined a panel moderated by Christine D’Onofrio, director of Digital Scholarship in Arts, on the topic of how digital and computational methodologies are shaping academic research. Each of them offered different answers, drawing on their projects in archaeology, sociology, fine arts, and classical studies.
Christine D’Onofrio, Director of Digital Scholarship in Arts (DiSA), introducing the session
Dr. Laura Nelson, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology, was searching for discussions of “inequality” in American society, using supervised large language models (LLMs) such as Llama and GPT-4 for qualitative coding based on hand-coded materials. However, in historical text simulation, the ChatGPT 1914 model raised a new set of questions for sociologists as anachronisms appeared. “Inequality,” Nelson reminded the audience, is a concept gradually developed and articulated by sociologists over time. What, then, qualifies as a discussion of “inequality” in a period when the term itself had not yet crystallized, or when multiple competing ground truths coexisted?
The audience later noticed a shimmering connection between Nelson’s work and that of Siobhán McElduff. Dr. McElduff, who appeared in one of our recent features, presented her TEI project on 18th and 19th century Irish love ballads as well as the catalogues of James Lackington’s Temple of the Muses bookstore. For her, the act of encoding texts functions as a mode of close reading—an indispensable part of her projects.
Although manual qualitative coding played different roles in McElduff’s and Nelson’s projects, both showed that human judgment remains central: a project can take a different direction as a classicist interprets a text differently or as a sociologist reconsiders a shifting socio-scientific concept. During the Q&A, D’Onofrio addressed the question of how digital tools are reframing human roles in academic research, and Nelson expressed concern over people’s tendency to over-trust machines and AI models. Patrick Parra Pennefather, on the other hand, emphasized the exploration of human experience in his work.
In the Department of Theatre and Film, Pennefather engages with mediated forms such as virtual, augmented, and mixed reality in transmedia projects. Transmedia means presenting unique parts of a story through different media; while each part may be independent of another, a thread interconnects them across media and time to tell the whole story. Pennefather takes the idea of transmedia a step further by extending it to different kinds of research outputs as well. For example, the touch-table experience of Shakespeare’s First Folio features the Folio telling the story of itself. Visitors to the art gallery can also experience the story of the three witches in Macbeth through AR and VR, inviting them to actively participate in the retelling of the classic play.
Concerns about the reduced traces of the human being, however, are not overstated. In the opening presentation, anthropological archaeologist Kevin Fisher highlighted the absence of human presence in digital archaeology. Fisher, associate professor of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology, focuses his research on the relationship between space and place, social life and built environments, particularly in Late Bronze Age Cyprus (c. 1700–1100 BCE). He relies on non-invasive digital tools such as terrestrial laser scanning, photogrammetry, and 3D modeling to scan, record, and visualize archaeological sites, preserving contexts that excavation can sometimes destroy.
Fisher emphasized that digital methodologies in archaeology and Ancient Mediterranean studies provide flexible ways of
Dr. Kevin Fisher presenting at the Digital Scholarship in Arts session.
approaching research on past built environments. This included a VR application that attempted to reconstruct a Late Bronze Age monumental building. The lack of transparency about how 3D reconstructions are created could potentially be remediated in the app by allowing the user to add or remove components based on how solid the evidence was for their presence. Yet, when asked how he learned to be digitally literate, he admitted to the limits of his expertise. Often self-taught, he acknowledged gaps in his proficiency with digital tools and the difficulty of keeping pace with constant software updates. Instead, he credited the digital specialists and graduate students that he has collaborated with over the years. For him, digital scholarship is a team sport, where seven or eight researchers with different expertise areas work collaboratively and learn from one another.
As Dr. Fisher’s response suggests, the ways scholars learn digital tools are inevitably shaped by personal experience and the courage to take bold risks into unknown territory. Nelson recalled her time in a study group building machine-learning classifiers, which provided a valuable foundation for further work overlapping with programming and AI. McElduff, who spent a year in Dublin for her degree in digital humanities, encouraged taking formal courses to push oneself through the learning curve and overcome obstacles along the way.
Although scholars learn about, understand, and apply digital scholarship in their own distinct ways, they are all searching for the most effective and intellectually rigorous methods of conducting research. It takes more than digital expertise to carry it through. As Pennefather half-jokingly summarized, when asked how he learned the digital methods he uses: “[It takes] curiosity, obsession, and a lack of sleep.”