Lauren Tilton Lecture | "Distant Viewing: Digital Images in the Age of AI"

This lecture is part of the Global Arts + Humanities' Society of Fellows 2025-26 event series, "Artificial Intelligence: Propositions from the Arts + Humanities" — a series of lectures by artists and scholars whose work foregrounds the ethical obligations arising from the simulation of human intelligence and increased surveillance.

How do computers see images? How is AI shifting the ways we view? In what ways can we use AI to analyze images in the humanities? This talk will introduce the concept of distant viewing, engage with the shifts brought about with generative AI, and then turn to how AI facilitates scholarship in areas such as art history and media studies.

Moderator: Leigh Bonds, Digital Humanities Librarian (Ohio State)

Lauren Tilton is the E. Claiborne Robins Professor of Liberal Arts and Digital Humanities at the University of Richmond. She specializes in computational approaches to studying 20th- and 21st-century visual culture. Her most recent co-authored books include Distant Viewing: Computational Exploration of Digital Images (MIT Press), Humanities Data in R 2nd Edition (Springer) and Computational Humanities (University of Minnesota Press). Tilton's award-winning scholarship has received funding from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Mellon. She is editor-in-chief of Computational Humanities, an open access journal with Cambridge University Press. She is President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) — the scholarly association for digital humanities in the United States — and president of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organization (ADHO), the global DH association.