Workshop Announcement: Homer and Artificial Intelligence

A Webinar on October 31st, 1-4 pm EDT

A few months back I wrote with some enthusiasm about some recent publications looking at Homer using new tools broadly characterized as AI [these approaches are largely statistical language models…but that’s less attention grabbing]!

I had several conversations with Homerists and friends and we figured there was enough going on to organize a workshop to provide those interested with a basic primer of the processes available, the kinds of questions people are asking of the texts, and how we can collaborate in the future. Our plan is pretty simple: John Pavlopoulos, a computer scientist, is going to start us out with an overview statistical language models, large language models, and other potential frameworks for thinking about ancient texts. Then, we will have three short presentations about ongoing work followed by some responses, posing questions we may contemplate at future workshops.

The schedule is below. It is provisional, with room for others if they’re interested. Pre-registration for the webinar is recommended. All are welcome. Any questions can be sent straight to me!

Homer and Artificial Intelligence Workshop 

Zoom Webinar

October 31st, 2024 1:00-4:00 EDT

Hosts: Joel Christensen, Brandeis University and Elton Barker, Open University

State of the Art

A Quick Primer on Modern Computing: Statistics, LLMs, and AI (20-25 minutes)

John Pavlopoulos

Discussions/Questions (15 minutes)

Current Projects

Research Presentation: Maria Konstantidou, John Pavlopoulos, Elton Barker (15-20 Minutes)

Discussion  (15 minutes)

Research Presentation: Chiara Bozzone, Ryan Sandell (10-15 minutes)

Discussion  (15-20 minutes)

Computational Research Labs in Classics Departments: Lab-Based Frameworks for Scholarship and Funding (10-15 minutes) Annie K. Lamar, UCSB

Discussion  (10-15 minutes)

Homer and AI Future Questions

Stephen Sansom, FSU (5-10 minutes)

Justin Arft, UT Knoxville (5-10 Minutes)

Closing Discussions, Future Plans

Some of the research to be discussed:

Bozzone, Chiara and Sandell, Ryan. 2022. “Using Quantitative Authorship Analysis to Study the Homeric Question.” David M. Goldstein, Stephanie W. Jamison, and Brent Vine (eds.). Proceedings of the 32nd Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference. Hamburg: Buske. 21–48.

Pavlopoulos, J., Konstantinidou, M. Computational authorship analysis of the homeric poems. Int J Digit Humanities 5, 45–64 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42803-022-00046-7