Presenter: Chris Arsenault

Bio: Dr. Chris Arsenault is Assistant Professor and Chair of the Master of Media in Journalism and Communication (MMJC) Program at Western University. A veteran investigative journalist with over 15 years of experience reporting from more than a dozen countries, he has worked with outlets including Reuters, Al Jazeera English, CBC, and VICE specializing in environmental, resource, and under-reported stories. He co-leads the award-winning "How They Did It" podcast series—funded by the Michener–L. Richard O’Hagan Fellowship—alongside CBC's Josette Lafleur, bridging academia and journalism to teach investigative tradecraft through interviews with top Canadian reporters.

Abstract: In an era where investigative journalism faces increasing challenges, the "How They Did It" podcast series emerges as a innovative model for integrating traditional academic scholarship with public-facing media. Developed through a collaboration between Western University's Master of Media in Journalism and Communication (MMJC) Program and CBC journalists, this project—funded by the Michener Awards Foundation—features in-depth interviews with award-winning Canadian reporters. It dissects the investigative process, from story identification and source cultivation to evidence gathering and narrative construction, offering practical insights into high-impact stories like the Ontario Greenbelt scandal, CSIS sexual misconduct revelations, and exploitative practices in the international student industry.By embedding academic rigor within accessible podcast formats, the series transcends conventional classroom boundaries, fostering a hybrid approach that equips students, emerging reporters, and the public with tools for ethical, evidence-based journalism. This melding enhances pedagogical outcomes, as university researchers and students contribute to episode production, blending theoretical frameworks from media studies with real-world journalistic tradecraft. The result is a democratized knowledge dissemination that amplifies public discourse, encourages accountability in institutions, and inspires future investigations. Looking ahead, this model underscores the potential of multimedia platforms to bridge academia and journalism, promoting transparency and civic engagement in Canadian society. Through such initiatives, scholarly work gains broader relevance, while journalism benefits from structured analytical depth, ultimately strengthening democratic processes.

Keywords: podcasting, investigative reporting, journalism, news

Presenter: D. Grant Campbell

Bio: D. Grant Campbell, currently Professor Emeritus in Western's Faculty of Information and Media Studies, holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Queen's University, and taught at University of Toronto and Dalhousie University before joining Western in 1998. He retired in June of 2025.

Abstract: This talk proposes a relationship between digital systems and humanities in which humanities texts, whether or not they exist in digital environments, facilitate fresh interpretations of such environments. Using as an example a Shakespeare sonnet (“When my love swears that she is made of truth / I do believe her though I know she lies”), I argue that literary texts can stimulate profound and counter-intuitive ways of framing specific challenges within digital environments. When we consider the sonnet in light of the pervasive issue of online disinformation and fake news, the sonnet evokes an ironic response to disinformation which links awareness of conscious lies together with an acknowledgement of one’s willingness to believe them. In this sonnet, the pursuit of truth warily co-exists with acknowledged strategies of resolving cognitive dissonance. If we treat this as a lens through which to view social media systems that disseminate news according to complex algorithmic feeds, we can see that laudable fact-checking efforts must be balanced by an equally important understanding of users' resistance to them. In this example, a humanities text offers a means of envisioning solutions to a digital problem: solutions grounded in caution, balance, and ironic self-awareness.

Keywords: disinformation, poetry, fake news

Presenter: Sara Varón Echeverri

Bio: Colombian PhD student, philosopher and physicist with complementary studies in astronomy. I am interested in scientific developments and their social implications, especially in the comprehensive understanding of knowledge and education that leads to action, and their importance for the development of society. I believe that scientific knowledge that cannot be connected to everyday experiences and civic knowledge is, in a way, unusable.

Abstract: Science, as studied by philosophers, is not value-free: it is sociopolitical and responds to public needs and changes. The independent and neutral scientist has been replaced by a scientific community with a collection of interests and biases that counterbalance each other and, therefore, that achieves an intersubjective objectivity. Although there is a lot of philosophical material on how to build those communities and how to improve scientific development, climate change has posed a new important issue in this discussion. Science in general, but specifically climate science, is now the object of political debate. To believe in climate change is now a political stance, and to say that one trusts those intersubjective communities of scientists is to signal to others other sociopolitical affiliations. When believing in climate change and in the tools of science to predict is so contentious, communicating results, talking about uncertainty, and using scientific measurements also become objects of contemporary discussions. Scientists should, especially in a time like this, not only be preoccupied with producing good science but also with how to communicate and evaluate this science. When and how to publish information, predictions and uncertainties should also be embedded in the discussion of a non-value-free science. My project ultimately aims to show that scientists should talk about climate science in a way that is useful for public policy and climate action, and that we can use technological channels to properly communicate a message that is intersubjective, yes, but also that calls for action.

Keywords: climate action, simulations and models, climate science, education

Presenter: Lucas Kettle

Bio: Lucas Kettle is a Masters of Library and Information Sciences student completing their final term in Western's Faculty of Information & Media Studies. Prior to their time at FIMS, they studied history and social & poltical thought at King's University College. They are presently working as an assistant at London Public Library as they finish their MLIS. They have a passion for social service work in LIS professional LIS contexts, and in this vein is pursuing multiple research interests regarding the critical assessment of library’s power as social institutions. Research interests include critical taxonomies, knowledge organisation, and legal positionality.

Abstract: This brief talk explicates the power and potential of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as a digital humanities tool to do ethnographic and grounded theory research by reframing how researchers envision and engage with space. Starting out as a brief GIS assignment for the MLIS class on Digital Humanities, I mapped London Ontario according to its fourteen urban library branches in relation to geographically-available restaurants. This information was sourced through my own time as a ‘casual library assistant’ for London Public Library, wherein I travelled to all of London’s urban library branches and in doing so familiarised myself with its divergent cultures and subcultures through differing communities’ available food options. In doing so, I gained insights not only into London’s gastronomic quality, but also the alternative ways of relating to cities and how we build and engage with urban infrastructure: food and food scarcity. Extrapolating my own personal, grounded experiences performing social service labour in an LIS context, I use this map to conceptually reframe our understanding of urban geography to illuminate how resource availability is limited and delimited by the physicality of a city’s infrastructure. This talk demonstrates a unique way for GIS to help researchers do ethnography through the alternative mapping of space. Through the analogue of anecdotal data, I will explore how GIS can be a DH tool to do ethnography via the ‘alternative mapping of space’ and how, ultimately, this tool can enhance researchers’ ability to do thick description and represent meaningful connections in research.

Keywords: thick description, GIS, ethnography, library and Information Sciences

Presenter: Pilar Rodriguez Mata

Bio: Pilar Rodríguez Mata is a PhD candidate in Hispanic Studies at Western University. She is currently investigating feminist activism in the digital Hispanosphere, with research interests that range from social media and Spanish as a 21st century language to multimodal discourse analysis and computational methods.

Abstract: This presentation explores the linguistic landscape of the #feminismo movement on Twitter from 2009 to 2022. This study analyzes a 3.5 million tweet corpus to understand how the use of Spanish in networked feminist discourse changes throughout the years. This investigation is carried out primarily through Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, with an emphasis on semantic analysis derived from topic modeling to infer discursive themes from word clusters.

To deepen the analysis, topic modeling is complemented by language variation analysis, sentiment analysis, and OCR (Optical Character Recognition). The inclusion of OCR allows for the exploration of language inside images, treating them as multimodal artefacts that complete the meaning-making process. By doing so, the research seeks to understand not only what topics emerge in feminist digital activism, but also how machine learning processes interpret these thematic developments and paratextual elements over time within the Digital Hispanosphere.

Keywords: hispanosphere, feminismo, natural language processing, multimodality, activism

Presenter: Ruth Skinner

Bio: Ruth Skinner is a teaching fellow and the Community Engagement and Outreach Coordinator for the School for Advanced Studies in the Arts and Humanities (SASAH). My research and teaching interests include artists' publishing and distribution practices, digital and media literacy, archival practices and access; artist-run culture and advocacy in Canada; intersections of art, esotericism & forensics.

Abstract: Personal Homepage (phases 1 and 2) is a major assignment in the second-year undergraduate course "Digital Tools, Digital Literacies." Students explore early eras of the internet and personal websites, including what they represent in this present moment of centralized platforms and 'vibe-coding.' Students also survey early web manifestos and recent perspectives on digital culture from authors that identify as techno-optimists, techno-pessimists, and everything in between.

Phase 1 of the assignment challenges students to learn about digital interfaces as well as the aesthetic and the coding languages of Web 1.0. After exploring digital archives of salvaged sites, students build their own small corners of the internet from the ground up (personal homepages, fan sites, business sites, etc.). For phase 2 of the project, students are invited to use LLMs to experiment with finessing site code and introducing contemporary elements. This aspect involves a conceptual negotiation of what "optimal user experience" entails, experimenting with prompts, and testing out the limits of vibe-coding. Examples of student works will be shared, as will reflections from students who opted for or against using so-called generative AI.

The title of this presentation quotes from Kate Wagner's essay, "404 Page Not Found," The Baffler, January 2019.

Keywords: digital literacy, aesthetics, coding, Web 1.0, LLMs

Presenter: José Javier Ponce de León Eyl

Bio: José Javier Ponce de León Eyl (he/him). University of Western Ontario. Javier Ponce is a fourth-year doctorate student from Hispanic Studies, with a Specialization in Environment & Sustainability. His areas of research are Digital Humanities, and Game, Latin American, and Environmental Studies. He is the current Sustainability Coordinator from the Society of Graduate Students (SOGS) and the PSAC 610 Steward for the 2025-2026 academic year. Javier’s PhD Thesis focuses on the representation of Early American landscapes in adventure video games.

Abstract: Adventure video games have long held a central place in game studies due to their ties to interactive fiction, ergodic literature, and spatially driven storytelling. Yet while scholarship by Espen Aarseth (1997), Janet Murray (1997), Mark J. P. Wolf (2001), Jesper Juul (2005), and Ian Bogost (2007) has examined adventure and text-based games from formal and ontological perspectives, few attention has been paid to how these games represent culture—particularly non‑hegemonic cultures associated with the Early Americas, which are custom setting for adventure games.

This paper analyzes representations of Early American cultures in a corpus of text-adventure games released for the ZX Spectrum between 1982 and 1990 and preserved in the World of Spectrum database. The study’s objectives are twofold: to identify cultural references to the Early Americas and to examine their narrative and ludic functions within the spatial logic of the text‑adventure genre. Methodologically, the project combines distant and close reading techniques. Using digital humanities tools such as pyconv, SpaCy’s GLiNER, and zero‑shot classification models, the study extracts, cleans, and categorizes in‑game textual data. Natural Language Processing methods identify relevant references, which are then analyzed through frameworks from game and Latin American studies, narratology, and environmental humanities.

Findings reveal recurring patterns in the frequency, distribution, and categorization of cultural objects and landscapes, showing that Early American settings are constructed through interchangeable artifacts, traps, and spatial markers. While many games exoticize or “totemize” these cultures, others gesture toward self‑critical awareness of their own procedural rhetoric of looting.

Keywords: video games, gamescapes, Ancient Americas, text adventures, cultural artifacts

Presenter: Brianne Machan

Bio: Brianne Machan is a 4th year undergraduate student at Huron University pursuing an Honours Specialization in History and a Minor in History of the Book. Brianne is passionate about sharing and preserving human and animal histories, which helped her create the digital public history resource, "Tails from the Grave: History of Happy Woodland Pet Cemetery"which provides a general history and biographies of some animals buried at the oldest known pet cemetery in Canada.

Abstract: This Huron Centre for Undergraduate Research Learning (CURL) funded project highlights the history of the oldest known pet cemetery in Canada (Happy Woodland Pet Cemetery in Aurora, Ontario), and was voted for a People’s Choice Award at GIS Days 2025. The StoryMap “Tails from the Grave: History of Happy Woodland Pet Cemetery” highlights the importance of pet cemeteries for understanding Canadian human-animal history, and provides some biographies of animals who are buried there. This digital platform combines videos, archival images and contemporary photos of the cemetery grounds and operates as a form of digital public history. Allowing people to “explore” the cemetery and its history virtually also makes the site more accessible as it is still undergoing restoration efforts. This StoryMap is the product of many collaborations with the Town of Aurora local historians and archivists and highlights the capabilities of digital humanities bringing historical research beyond the world of academia.

Keywords: history, cemetery, animal history, pet cemetery, ArcGIS StoryMap

Presenter: Rachel Deiterding

Bio: Rachel Deiterding is a researcher, curator, and writer based between Toronto and London, Ontario. Her curatorial practice works across historical and contemporary Canadian art to centre alternative modes of understanding the world that encourage participants to look through new lenses.

She holds a BA in Art History and Museum Studies from Western University and a Master of Museum Studies from the University of Toronto. She is currently Curator of Collections and Special Projects at McIntosh Gallery, Western University.

Abstract: Holding Patterns: the long view - A Look Inside the McIntosh Gallery Collection is an exhibition that examines the McIntosh Gallery collection through the lens of collection data, the information that is recorded to describe, organize, and preserve knowledge about each artwork. This information underpins everything we know about the collection, framing our understanding of individual artworks and the collection as a whole. Tracing the pathways laid by the data, the selected artworks present a proportionally accurate overview of the 4,350 artworks in the gallery’s care. They make visible trends in collecting activity, artistic approaches, and how information has been categorized to offer insights into the collection’s purpose and its evolving priorities. Equally present are the stories that are missing from the data, the gaps and inconsistencies that leave us with more questions than answers, shaping what we ask next. The exhibition has served as a critical tool to communicate the findings of ongoing data analysis, giving visitors an inside look at this otherwise inaccessible information.

This project is part of a larger engagement with the McIntosh Gallery collection and its data as part of a major collections audit and review. Looking closely at our data has showcased its capacity as both a historical and a future-oriented tool, allowing us to better understand the history of the collection and set priorities for its future. The culmination of this work will help guide how we collect, care for, and interpret the collection in the years to come.

Keywords: galleries, data analysis, data visualization

Presenter: Kristi Thompson

Bio: Kristi Thomson is the Research Data Management librarian at Western University and has also worked as a data librarian with statistical consulting support, a data consultant, and a freelance web developer. She has degrees in Library Science and Computer Science. Kristi is deeply involved in developing research data infrastructure in Canada with a focus on protections for sensitive data and work on data rescue, most recently with the Canadian Public Data Rescue Initiative. She’s also co-edited two books on data librarianship and has published on topics ranging from data anonymization algorithms to intergenerational psychology.

Abstract: The Metastasio Database is an index to the numerous librettos, arias, and other poetic works of prolific Renaissance writer Pietro Metastasio, containing over 6,000 records. It comprises much of the life work of Music professor Don Neville at Western University. In 2001 he developed a searchable web site powered by an MS Access database to allow opera researchers around the world access to this trove of data. In 2023, changing technology meant that the original site needed to be retired, and the library was asked to find a way to preserve the data and make it available for future generations. After over 20 years of edits and updates, the underlying databases were disorganized, redundant, and inconsistent. A team including a metadata expert, the music library director, and a data librarian worked with a Library co-op student to clean and organize the data, and a new web site was developed in Omeka to provide access. This proved technically challenging as Omeka does not have the functionality of a relational database. Key to getting the new database to function was developing a data model and a custom ontology to describe Opera Numeri, the Italian Number Opera form.

Keywords: data, music, omeka, metadata

Presenter: Kate Helsen

Bio: Before teaching at Western, Kate Helsen held a two-year post-doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada at the University of Toronto, researching the transition between neumes and square notation in the 12th and 13th centuries. Her doctoral research, at the University of Regensburg, Germany, focused on the structure and transmission of the Great Responsory repertory in the Gregorian tradition. Her publications may be found in journals such as Plainsong and Medieval Music, Acta Musicologica, the Journal of the Alamire Foundation, SPECTRUM, and Early Music. She has been a researcher with CANTUS since 2004, The Becket Project (University of Toronto) since 2008, and has contributed transcriptions to the Internet-based Irish project, The Liturgical Veneration of Irish Saints in Medieval Europe (2009). She was a team member of the Musical Exchanges 1100 - 1650 project at the University of Lisbon from 2009 to 2013. Her current research explores how the Digital Humanities landscape connects to medieval musicology, in which document analysis software is applied to thousand-year-old musical manuscripts. She also sings professionally with the Tafelmusik Chamber Choir in Toronto, which specializes in Baroque performance practice.

Abstract: SoundWalks are immersive digital humanities projects that bridge the gap between the silent, static archives of the past and the lived, auditory experience of the present. Developed through the 'Chant Out Loud' initiative of the Digital Analysis of Chant Transmission (DACT) project (SSHRC), SoundWalks have been featured at conferences, in public spaces, and on university campuses for the past two years, all accessible through the DACT app. For Digital Humanities Day here at Western, this SoundWalk features vocal recordings made by Western students of medieval manuscript fragments curated from Western’s Archives and Special Collections, available on demand to any listener with headphones connected to a cell phone with the DACT app (free of charge) open and running.

This intersection of musicology, archival science, and mobile technology creates a sensory-rich atmosphere that moves historical study out of the display case and into the ears of the community. A SoundWalk also serves as a powerful pedagogical tool. It fosters a unique engagement between singers, listeners, and primary sources, challenging traditional methods by which we encounter music history. By leveraging digital platforms to host these performances, the project creates a dynamic "living archive," making some of Western’s unique medieval holdings audible and accessible to a modern audience.

Keywords: SoundWalk, historical music, manuscript fragments, archives, performance

Presenter: Dani Dilkes

Bio: Dani is an interdisciplinary scholar who works at the intersection of feminist sociomaterialism, critical pedagogy, and design/knowledge justice. Her work is focused on understanding social practices and experiences as entangled in complex sociomaterial entanglements. She isn't just interested in explaining phenomena, but in using collaborative and creative approaches to re-imagine more just worlds.

Abstract: In this lightning talk, I will share an approach to exploring sociomaterial complexity called Entangled Storytelling, which draws on material semiotics and critical narrative inquiry. Entangled Storytelling involves the collaborative making of sociomaterial maps (called “string figures”) that represent the complex entanglements of human and non-human entities through which social patterns and experiences are shaped. The term string figures draws on the work of Donna Haraway, who refers to string figures as a game of narrating the thick connections between human and non-human entities to reveal how they make patterns together and are mutually shaped through encounters with each other. By combining sociomaterial sensibilities with critical narrative inquiry, this methodology seeks to reveal and disrupt harmful patterns and practices and create openings for reshaping social designs.

The Entangled Storytelling methodology was developed as part of a doctoral research project focused on revealing patterns of exclusion in higher education. Examples shared in the talk will highlight how norms are encoded in sociomaterial elements of educational environments (e.g. course materials, physical spaces, course schedules, grading practices), which lead to individual experiences of difference or exclusion. The string figures constructed through the Entangled Storytelling in this project reveal how norms are dominant patterns that colonise other sociomaterial webs and agents, perpetuating beliefs about what is and is not normal and who does and does not belong in a social space. Although examples will focus on educational experiences and practices, Entangled Storytelling has broader applications for exploring complex social phenomena and practices. Citations Haraway, D. (1994). A Game of Cat’s Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies. Configurations (Baltimore, Md.), 2(1), 59–71. https://doi.org/10.1353/con.1994.0009 

Keywords: critical narrative inquiry, entanglements complexity, sociomaterialism

Presenter: Bri Watson

Bio: B. M. Watson (@brimwats.com) is an Assistant Professor in Western's Faculty of Information & Media Studies. Their research focuses on the (multiple) histories of information and on the practice of equitable cataloguing in cultural heritage institutions, or GLAMS (aka Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums, and Special Collections), and they serve as an Organiser on the Homosaurus Collective; the Homosaurus is a widely-used linked data vocabulary for queer terminology developed by and for the queer communities for use in GLAMS. They were a cofounder of and the coordinator for the Trans Metadata Collective and the Queer Metadata Collective; and direct HistSex.org, a free and open access resource for the history of sexuality. Watson has authored nearly 20 peer-reviewed publications, including as the editor of the recently-released Ethics in Linked Data (Litwin Books, 2023).

Abstract: The Homosaurus (homosaurus.org) is a vocabulary developed by an international community of queer knowledge workers—librarians, archivists, curators, registrars, and other informational professionals—for use in cultural heritage institutions (like libraries, archives, museums, etc.). Founded in the late 1980’s as a Dutch and English thesaurus for a gay library and a lesbian archives (now called IHLIA LGBTI Heritage), it became available for widespread use when Dr. K.J. Rawson (Northeastern) launched the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) in 2015 and an editorial board to oversee the vocabulary’s development. From 2015 until 2025 the Homosaurus editorial board was successful in its expansion and development saw a remarkable uptick in adoption and use—it is currently being used in multiple languages, more than 100 institutions and in nearly 20 countries around the world. It has been referenced, celebrated, and discussed in more than 250 academic and professional publications. As interest and use of the Homosaurus has grown, other language communities (Swedish, Bengali, Hindi) began translations and the editorial board developed a successful grant for a Spanish translation, a grant which was targeted/rescinded/partially restored by the current US administration, but ultimately still successful in the a community-led Spanish translation. Following these (and other experiences) the Editorial Board moved away from a top-down, structure and launched a new governance model we call the Homosaurus Collective, and following my appointment at FIMS, and the current state of politics south of the border, the Organizing Board of the Collective initiated the process a move to a new home at FIMS and Western.

Keywords: community-based research, linked data, cultural heritage institutions, library and information science

Presenter: Yijing Li

Bio: Yijing Li is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art and Visual Culture (curatorial stream) at Western University. She previously earned both her Honours Bachelor and Master degrees at University of Toronto. Her current research investigates how ecological, decolonial curatorial practice can transform contemporary photography exhibitions into relational, processbased systems grounded in Indigenous sovereignty, diasporic knowledge, and more-than-human collaboration within Canadian art contexts.

Abstract: My research studies Ursula Handleigh’s Banig project, which integrates Filipino matrilineal weaving techniques with banana-leaf photographic contact prints, offers a model for reimagining how knowledge might be structured within digital archives. Traditionally, banig weaving follows interlaced, non-linear, and relational patterns passed down through matrilineal lines—forms of knowledge transmission grounded in repetition and ecological attunement.

This abstract proposes that such weaving logics could be conceptually programmed into digital archival design. Instead of hierarchical, database-driven systems that privilege fixed metadata and centralized authority, archives could adopt woven architectures—interlaced nodes of memory, migration, and material history. Metadata structures might mirror weaving patterns, allowing stories, images, and users to intersect dynamically rather than follow linear taxonomies. By encoding matrilineal, process-based weaving principles into digital frameworks, archives can shift from extractive storage models toward sustainable systems that foreground diasporic continuity and ecological temporality.

Keywords: environmental sustainability, Filipino matrilineal weaving, decolonial infrastructure

Presenter: Celia Carrasco Gil

Bio: Celia Carrasco Gil is a Hispanic Philologist and poet with a Master of Arts in Spanish and Latin-American Literatures, Literary Theory, and Comparative Literature. Currently, as a predoctoral fellow of the Ramón Areces Foundation, she is pursuing a PhD in Hispanic Studies at Western University (CulturePlex Lab) and a PhD in Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Zaragoza (Abyssal Margin Literary Research Laboratory).

Abstract: In this presentation, I analyze the Enactive Poetics of nimiia cétiï, by Jenna Stutela (2018), an audiovisual work created from a machine learning project that invents an alien language based on the movement of an extremophile bacterium (Bacillus subtilis, which was used in space missions to Mars) and the “Martian” language channeled by the medium Hélène Smith in the 19th century. From a fusion of Enactivism (Varela, Thompson, Rosch) and the Poetic Theory of Embodied Cognition, I explore how this work, in line with the poetic tradition of bird language, creates an “Animal Poeticum” (Amelia Gamoneda), that is, a post-anthropocentric language that does not represent but instead enacts. nimiia cétiï is a work developed in collaboration with Somerset House Studios resident Memo Akten, and Damien Henry, Head of Innovation at the Google Arts & Culture Lab, as part of Google Arts & Culture’s artist-in-residence program n-Dimensions. Through its creative process, the movement of bacteria is not translated into human language. Instead, the author and the system co-create a language that emerges from the assembly of biological movement, algorithmic modeling, and the cultural history of spiritualism. Thus, this work reactivates the ancient poetics of the language of birds in a technological key and shifts mystical mediation toward the algorithmic mediation of the system. From an Enactive Poetic perspective, the work destabilizes linguistic anthropocentrism by proposing that language does not belong to humans, but rather arises in interspecies relational processes that challenge expectations of human intelligibility.

Keywords: enactive poetics, cognition, machine learning, linguistics, bacteria

Presenter: Yusheng Xia

Bio: 5th year PhD student in Philosophy

Abstract: This paper investigates the historical and methodological intersection of metaphysics and science using large language models (LLMs). Grounded in James Ladyman's naturalistic metaphysics, the study addresses the persistent charge that metaphysicians frequently misuse scientific theory. To move beyond anecdotal evidence and the limitations of traditional philosophical training, the author employs an AI-driven quantitative survey of approximately 5,000 Anglo-phone metaphysical works published between 1980 and 2024.

Keywords: AI, data mining, history of philosophy