The Division of the Humanities’ annual celebration of its discipline took place on October 26, 2024. Here are snapshots of just a few of the day’s events; you can find more talks from this and previous years on the division’s YouTube page.

Of sailors and shipwrecks

“Everybody loves a good shipwreck,” said archaeologist Derek Kennet, “unless they’re a sailor.” Shipwrecks—and the coins, fragments of pottery, and other items they left behind in the Indian Ocean—are the only evidence for the thriving commercial relationship between the Islamic world and China 1,200 years ago. “Until that time, there hadn’t been that level of connectivity,” explained Kennet, Howard E. Hallengren Professor of Arabian Peninsula and Gulf States Archaeology in the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, Department of Middle Eastern Studies, and the College. “It’s what you might call early globalization.”

One of the major pieces of evidence for this connection is the Belitung shipwreck, the remains of a sailing vessel that sank around 826 CE off the coast of modern-day Indonesia. Kennet explained that the vessel’s material and construction method (wooden planks sewn rather than nailed together) was typical of boats made in much of the Indian Ocean area at that time, but the type of wood and style might suggest that the boat was made in the Gulf of Oman area. However, the vast majority of objects on board were Changsha bowls, a kind of highly glazed Chinese pottery made during the Tang dynasty. It is not clear how popular the polychrome style of the bowls was in China at the time, suggesting that the pottery was “very possibly made for the Muslim market of the Middle East,” Kennet said.

Archaeologists can glean information from the smallest pottery fragments as well as the largest shipwrecks. One of Kennet’s research projects involved analyzing the chemical composition of 120 potsherds from the ninth century to identify their chemical signatures. Through this process, “we can group them and say they were probably produced in the same kiln or town,” he said. Such grouping allows researchers to map both short- and long-distance trade routes, showing how merchants spread goods within the empires.

The title of Kennet’s talk, “The Archaeology of Sinbad the Sailor,” references the seafaring hero of The Thousand and One Nights. Sinbad, Kennet acknowledged, was a fictional character, but he was inspired by real sailors of the period and their often perilous voyages from the Middle East to China and Southeast Asia. “There’s an element of basic human energy and exploration,” Kennet said. “It’s not recorded. These guys didn’t write. But they changed the world through their own drive.”—S. M.

Machine made

“What does it mean to create something new?” Jason Salavon asked the attendees gathered at the Weston Game Lab for his talk, “AI, Creativity, and the Limits of Data.”

Salavon, an associate professor in the Department of Visual Arts, has built his career at the intersection of art and technology, probing questions of newness and originality. Long before the recent proliferation of image-generating artificial intelligence (AI) models like DALL-E, Salavon explained, artists had begun using programs—systems with rules—in their work. He pointed out two early examples of this kind of art: mathematician John Conway’s digital configuration Game of Life (1970), in which squares skitter across a grid in distinct patterns, and Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing 51 (1970), in which every architectural element in a room is connected with a straight line.

The subtitle of Salavon’s talk was “Good Art Is Off-Manifold.” The “manifold” is the sum total of what an AI model can recognize as a depiction of a certain entity, such as a cat or a bicycle. A model “learns” to recognize and generate these items by analyzing billions of images and finding common features. “Good art is about being off that center,” Salavon said. For him, the question becomes how to transcend an existing dataset to make something novel. He displayed his 2020 project Little Infinity, a wallpaper compiled from 350,000 images drawn from ImageNet, a database often used for AI training. From a distance, the wallpaper looked not unlike multicolored beaded curtains. But as he zoomed in on a digitized version, the streaks resolved themselves into distinct images—a burger, a face, a violet—before vanishing again as he zoomed out.

Salavon’s current work involves manipulating the code of an AI model to create something impossible to generate with a prompt alone. He showed the audience the results of some of his experiments—distorted, blooming images, reminiscent of dreams or psychedelic hallucinations. Salavon emphasized that AI art is not simply inputting a prompt and receiving an image, but rather the ineffable process of taking a preexisting dataset and making something unexpected from it. Salavon rejects the condemnatory attitude some humanists have toward AI. “These things are really philosophically interesting,” he said. “Artists should be there.”—S. M.

Primary sources

Eric Slauter’s talk, “Human Being and Citizen: A Hands-on Approach to the Humanities Core,” took place in one of his favorite teaching spaces: the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center. Two years ago, Slauter, deputy dean of the Humanities and master of the Humanities Collegiate Division, decided to teach the entirety of his Humanities Core course Human Being and Citizen (HBC) in one of the Special Collections seminar rooms, where students could handle objects and documents from the library’s trove.

It was an idea born partly of panic. Slauter, associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and the College, specializes in 18th-century American literature. Most of the works on the HBC syllabus “frightened me,” he confessed. “I didn’t think I had any business teaching them.” Bringing the course inside Special Collections, he reasoned, “would give me enough props to work with.”

The decision was transformative for both Slauter and his students. “It changes your experience of, say, the work of Homer to be able to see the media shifts—from an ancient papyrus fragment to a first printing from movable type in the 15th century to the various printed translations that have been made of the text,” he said. Slauter also found archival documents about the history of HBC itself.

Working with these documents helped Slauter understand the Core curriculum and its development more deeply. “We sometimes engage in collective myths. All institutions do,” he observed. “One is of an unbroken tradition of the Core, but that’s not true.”

In fact, the Core—and the Humanities Core in particular—has had many shapes and flavors, yet its ambitions have remained more fixed. “The Humanities Core introduces students to some primary texts, and the texts change from year to year,” Slauter said, “but more so, it introduces them to the task of interpreting those texts, and especially of confronting them as an academic community together.” Offering that introduction represents “probably the most important responsibility that any of us in the faculty of the humanities have.”—S. A.

“It is an abiding premise of humanistic thought, and the action it sets in motion, that the arts and the humanities together do things. And it is the conviction that I share with you today that music and sound do good. The affective and the effective converge in music, and accordingly they imbue music with life—the life of the collective community, the life that returns through the realization of goodness.”
—Keynote speaker Philip V. Bohlman, Ludwig Rosenberger Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Music and the College