Conférence de Manuel Burghardt (Universität Leipzig) @ McGill U

In association with the Department of Languages, Literatures, Cultures at McGill University, our center is very happy to host Dr. Manuel Burghardt (Universität Leipzig) for two conferences the week of March 16th, the first one on Thursday 19 March at 4.30pm on the McGill University campus for a talk entitled « Computational Environmental Humanities: Between Methodological Innovation and Ecological Responsibility »:

Environmental Humanities (EH) focus on the entanglement of nature and culture, highlighting issues of agency, ideology, and ethics in human-nature relations. At the same time, Digital Humanities (DH) have developed methods for analyzing large collections of socio-cultural data. Bringing these strands together has led to what is often called Digital Environmental Humanities (DEH). This talk builds on these developments and proposes Computational Environmental Humanities (CEH) as a more nuanced approach within DEH, emphasizing computational, data-driven, and exploratory methods for addressing environmental questions. The talk develops CEH both theoretically and methodologically, drawing on recent projects from the Leipzig Computational Humanities Group. It pays particular attention to the application of machine learning to large visual archives, and situates this work within debates on distant viewing and the multimodal turn in DH. An ongoing project analyzing thousands of illustrations from German-language children’s books of the long nineteenth century will serve as a case study. Based on multimodal embeddings and annotations performed by Vision Language Models (VLMs), we explore how nature is represented in scenes of childhood and how environmental imaginaries of rurality, urbanity, and domestic life are constructed across a large corpus.

At the same time, the talk takes a critical perspective on the use of AI techniques in CEH research. The growing reliance on machine learning and large language models raises serious environmental concerns, given the energy and material resources required to train and deploy them. While computational methods can open up new perspectives on environmental issues, they rely on infrastructures that contribute to environmental problems. Drawing on debates around green AI and sustainable machine learning, as well as initiatives such as the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition, the talk will outline emerging frameworks for environmentally responsible research practices. It will argue that any future CEH agenda should integrate environmental responsibility not only into its research agenda, but also into its computational methods.

Manuel Burghardt is Full Professor for Computational Humanities at the Institute for Computer Science at the University of Leipzig. He is responsible for the Bachelor’s and Master’s programs in Digital Humanities and serves as speaker of the Forum of Digital Humanities in Leipzig (FDHL). He also heads the Digital Lab at the Research Center Global Dynamics (ReCentGlobe). His research combines computational methods and cultural analysis, with extensive experience in third-party funded projects on a wide range of topics. These include the digitization and analysis of historical finance newspapers, computational approaches to investigate strategies of canon formation, the computer-aided study of narrative patterns in German television news, and the analysis of visual culture in large corpora of historical children’s book illustrations. His current research interests include game studies, computational literary studies with a focus on remediation and intertextuality, and computational environmental humanities, especially large-scale analysis of visual archives.

Ce contenu a été mis à jour le 10 mars 2026 à 7 h 51 min.