When Applied and Critical Digital Humanities Meets Democracy: the KT4D Project
The Knowledge Technologies for Democracy (KT4D) project is investigating how democracy and civic participation can be better facilitated in the face of rapidly changing knowledge technologies – namely Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data – to enable actors across society to capitalise on the many benefits these technologies can bring in terms of community empowerment, social integration, individual agency, improving trust in both institutions and technological instruments while also identifying and mitigating potential ethical, legal and cultural risks.
Though its broad partner consortium includes many social scientists, SMEs and NGOs, the project was distinctively conceived of and is led from the perspective of the critical digital humanities, which, with its balanced traditions of cultural critique and technical building, offers new opportunities to provide alternatives to the techno-solutionism defined by one scholar as “portraying technologies as a substitute for political decisions and as a model for politics so commonly applied to complex problems in the 21st Century.” (Ferrari, 2020).
Throughout its activities, KT4D brings precisely this balance of technological acumen and humanistic criticality to its approach to facilitating more productive interactions between AI, big data and democracy. In particular this presentation will focus on how the project integrates humanistic knowledge, values, and modes of interaction to expand our notion of digital humanities work, and of the future of civic participation in a technologised world.
Subtitles for this video were provided by Áine Foley.
Learning Outcomes
After watching this video, learners will:
- have a greater understanding of how technology both benefits and is impaired by technological developments
- recognise how safeguarding principles such as FAIR, CARE and TRUST can support greater digital literacy
- appreciate the humanistic approach to technical challenges in society
