15 Jan 2025|Noida | Amity University, Noida
First International Symposium on “Digital Humanities in the Anthropocene”
Amity Institute of English Studies and Research (AIESR) at AUUP, in collaboration with IIT Jodhpur and Christ University, Lavasa, Pune, organized the 1st International Symposium on “Digital Humanities in the Anthropocene” from January 15 to 17, 2025.
The event commenced with a welcome address by Prof. Shantanu Ghosh, Director of AIESR, who introduced the theme of the symposium and emphasized its contemporary relevance. Prof. Sanjeev Bansal, Additional Pro Vice Chancellor, AUUP, NOIDA, presided over the Inaugural session and in his presidential address highlighted the evolution of research and education facilitated by the availability and use of digital resources.
The Inaugural session was attended by Prof. Ranjana Bhatia, Domain Head, AIHSSJ-II at AUUP NOIDA; Dr. Manohar Sajnani, Dean of the Faculty of Hospitality & Tourism and Director of AITT; Prof. B. N. Mallick, Director of AINN; and Prof. Anil Sehrawat, Deputy Director of AICC; among others.
Prof. Scott Rettberg from the University of Bergen, Norway, delivered the inaugural keynote lecture. His engaging presentation focused on AI and the Digital Narrative, exploring the role of authorship in the era of large language models (LLMs) and text-to-image generation. Prof. Rettberg explained the workings of AI-driven models and discussed related philosophical dilemmas.
Prof. Shantanu Ghosh gave an expert talk on social cognition and digital memory. He provided a historical overview of AI's development, from Artificial Neural Networks and connectionist theory to the transformer technology that learns context and meaning from sequential data. His insightful talk centred on the representation of structure in mental space.
The first day of the symposium featured research presentations from academics both within and outside Amity University.
Dr. Avishek Parui from IIT Madras delivered the second keynote address on the first day of the symposium, focusing on the intersection of Digital Humanities and creativity in literary studies. He explored the concept of "digicorporeality" – the convergence of digitalization and corporeality – an idea grounded in historical perspectives where humanity has conceptualized identity as extending beyond the physical body. In this context, Dr. Parui argued that digitization should be understood as a diachronic process rather than a sudden, isolated phenomenon.