In this week’s Five Minute Friday, Professor Sally Young FAHA aims to train a chat-bot to recite accurate information about Australia’s media history, and examines the role the humanities play in influencing AI’s use.
Power of the humanities
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As we observe the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition, Jane Lydon FAHA calls on us to recognise slavery in all its forms, including those persisting today.
Philosophers, physicians, social workers and scientists have long explored the human tendency to form habits. They have also pondered how to break routinised habits by creating fissures—gaps in time that allow new habits to form. And, as Tony Bennett FAHA FAcSS shows in Habit’s Pathways: Repetition, Power, Conduct (2023), the history of forming and changing habits is a politically charged one.
Dishonest politicians and the failure to act on mounting evidence of Robodebt’s inaccuracies has led to a major distrust in technology, media and essential services for our country’s most vulnerable people. Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship recipient Terry Flew FAHA explains how his mediated trust research can help us better understand questions of trust as they relate to news media, digital platforms, corporations, and global institutions.
The effects of climate change are well known, but policy solutions are missing one potential solution to address the issue: creative arts. Dennis Del Favero and Stuart Cunningham FAHA explain how creative arts-led initiatives can help us prepare for and prevent climate disaster.
Linguist and 2023 recipient of the Academy’s John Mulvaney Fellowship Tula Wynyard is helping to document the languages of three remote Arnhem Land communities, a project she felt strongly about after finding it difficult to learn the language of her own Dharug country.
In 2023, we have mostly emerged from the extremes of isolation, but the effects of COVID-19 lockdowns on academia have converged with our looming environmental catastrophe. President of the Academy of Humanities Lesley Head FASSA FAHA reminds us that humanities scholars have the unique tools to address the challenges the world is throwing our way.
The prospect of war crimes trials is once again on the agenda in Australia and globally. Criminal investigations of possible war crimes committed by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan have begun.
Art can communicate across time and space. It transcends life and death. Professor Ari Heinrich FAHA explains how this power is harnessed in an exhibition inspired by a Taiwanese author and created by a Chinese-Australian artist.
Join us on 16 and 17 November for our 54th Annual Academy Symposium as we explore the possibilities and hazards of automation, and the complexities of human-machine relations.
A presentist might assume that audiobooks are a modern invention. They would be wrong. Long before the digital world, literature was being shared orally. Martyn Lyons FAHA takes us back through the centuries to reveal how those who couldn’t read or write maintained a literary culture.
ARC Laureate Fellow, Professor Peter Veth FAHA MAACAI, takes us on a journey from the Ningaloo Coast through the Pilbara and into the Western Desert where innovative science and Indigenous knowledge are helping develop new understandings of the 60,000-year custodianship of Australian deserts.