Lecture of Holly Case: The Historian Meets AI

The talk will address some approaches to thinking about the history of AI and the specific problems and questions that emerge when historicizing machine learning and generative artificial intelligence technologies.

Holly Case is a professor of history and deputy director of the Data Science Institute at Brown University. She is the author of two books: Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during WWII (2009) and The Age of Questions: Or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond (2018). In 2024–2027, she co-leads collaborative humanities lab Models-Scale-Context: AI and the Humanities.