WILLIAM J. TURKEL

My current research focuses on the task of sorting out how collaboration with AIs could change the nature of historical thinking. Philosophical questions about history are usually divided into three overlapping areas of inquiry. Historical methods include subjects like source criticism, bibliography, and historical reasoning. Historiography covers the history of the writing of history. History and theory covers topics like time, chronology, events, causality, selectivity, narrative, and so on. Technically all three could be thought of as “philosophy of history” but that term was historically associated with a strand of speculative thinking that “attempted to construct metaphysical accounts of the totality of human events”. It fell out of favor in the 1960s (Klein, From History to Theory, 2011). My methods are computational. Here are three examples of work in progress. In one project I am text mining the journal History and Theory (1960-present) to create a historical database of concepts that have been used in the discipline to date. Some examples include colligation, covering laws, and counterfactuals. These will be used to suggest topics for more focused studies. Another project, with colleagues, involves using gen AI to write thousands of historical sketches of events. These sketches are then matched to human-authored historical sketches of the same events (using semantic search). By combining distant reading with close readings, the idea is to start to characterize the differences between machine-authored and human-authored histories. A third project, also with a colleague, involves traning a system on 18th-century legal documents (such as statutes) and then using it to read 30K historical criminal trials. For each trial we ask the system to explain the legal reasoning in effect and highlight any discrepancies or anomalies to follow up with close reading.

Monographs

W. J. Turkel. Spark from the Deep: How Shocking Experiments with Strongly Electric Fish Powered Scientific Discovery. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.

W. J. Turkel. The Archive of Place: Unearthing the Pasts of the Chilcotin Plateau. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008.

Editions

Alan MacEachern and W. J. Turkel, eds. Method and Meaning in Canadian Environmental History. Toronto: Nelson Education, 2008.

Open Access Textbooks

W. J. Turkel. Digital Research Methods with Mathematica, 2nd rev. ed. 2020. 2nd ed. 2019. 1st ed. 2015.

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles (Selected)

Tim Hitchcock and W. J. Turkel. “Making Sense of the Emergence of Manslaughter in British Criminal Justice.” Digital Humanities Quarterly special issue on Data Driven Inquiries into the Past. Accepted with revisions, May 2024.

W. J. Turkel. “Incorporating the Sensemaking Loop from Intelligence Analysis into Bespoke Tools for Digital History.” Invited for Historia y Grafía special issue on “Historia digital: en la frontera del sur y norte global.” Forthcoming, March 2024.

Jeffrey A. T. Lupker and W. J. Turkel. “Music Theory, the Missing Link Between Music-Related Big Data and Artificial Intelligence.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 15, no. 1, special issue on Audiovisual DH (2021).

Niels Brügger, Ian Milligan, Anat Ben-David, Sophie Gebeil, Federico Nanni, Richard Rogers, William J. Turkel, Matthew Weber and Peter Webster. “Internet Histories and Computational Methods: A ‘Round-Doc’ Discussion.” Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Society (2019).

Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters (Selected)

W. J. Turkel. “Ourorack: Altered States of Consciousness and Auto-Experimentation with Electronic Sound.” Modular Synthesis: Patching Machines and People, edited by Ezra J. Teboul, Andreas Kitzmann, and Einar Engström. Routledge, 2024.

W. J. Turkel and Edward Jones-Imhotep. “Sensors and Sources: How a Universal Model of Instrumentation Affects Our Experiences of the Past.” Varieties of Historical Experience, 219-39, edited by Charles Stewart and Stephan Palmie. Routledge, 2019.

Edward Jones-Imhotep and W. J. Turkel. “The Analog Archive: Image-Mining the History of Electronics.” Seeing the Past with Computers: Experiments with Augmented Reality and Computer Vision for History, 95-115, edited by Kevin Kee and Timothy Compeau. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019.

Devon Elliott and W. J. Turkel. “Faster than the Eye: Using Computer Vision to Explore Sources in the History of Stage Magic.” Seeing the Past with Computers: Experiments with Augmented Reality and Computer Vision for History, 83-94, edited by Kevin Kee and Timothy Compeau. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019.

Peer-Reviewed Published Abstracts and Conference Papers (Selected)

Ruramisai Charumbira and W. J. Turkel. “A Minimal Computing Approach to Southern African Language Resources.” Journal of the Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa. Vol 5, No. 1: Digital Humanities for Inclusion, 2024.
https://upjournals.up.ac.za/index.php/dhasa/article/view/5027

Michael Bartlett and W. J. Turkel. “Digital Analysis of Historic Bridge Images.” Artificial Intelligence: New Pathways Towards Cultural Heritage: Proceedings of the 25^th International Conference on Cultural Heritage and New Technologies (CHNT 25, 2020), edited by Wolfgang Börner, Hendrik Rohland, Christina Kral-Börner, and Lina Karner, 13-21. Heidelberg, Germany: Heidelberg University, Propylaeum, 2022.

Jeffrey A. T. Lupker and W. J. Turkel. “Observing Mood Based Patterns and Commonalities in Music.” Innovation in Music (2019 edition), edited by Russ Hepworth-Sawyer, Justin Paterson, and Rob Toulson. Taylor and Francis, 2021.

Conference Presentations, Posters and Colloquia (Selected)

W. J. Turkel. “A Complex Adaptive Systems Approach to a Large Historical Document Collection.” Western Complex Systems Conference. University of Western Ontario. London, ON. March 2024.

Ruramisai Charumbira and W. J. Turkel. “A Minimal Computing Approach to Southern African Language Resources.” Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa. (Online). November 2023.

Allen Priest and W. J. Turkel. “What Causes Contemporary Facial Recognition Systems to Misclassify Historical Photographic Portraits? An Investigation of Facial Landmarks, Pose, and Subject Age.” Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) Conference. (Online). June 2023.

Charankamal Mandur and W. J. Turkel. “Studying Direct-to-Consumer Television Advertising at Scale Using Mismatched Text and Video Descriptors.” Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) Conference. (Online). June 2023.

Ruramisai Charumbira, Jaylen Edwards and W. J. Turkel. “A Minimal Computing Approach to Building Computational Language Resources for Southern African History.” Global Digital Humanities Symposium. (Online). March 2023.

Allen Priest and W. J. Turkel. “Using Contemporary Facial Recognition Systems to Classify Historical Photographic Portraits: Race, Gender and Sexuality.” Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) Conference. (Online). June 2022.

Uésio Jeremias da Gama Santos and W. J. Turkel. “Compiling a Dataset to Explore the Uses of Autism in English Language TV News, 2009-Present.” DH Unbound (The Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities). (Online). May 2022.

Tim Hitchcock and W. J. Turkel. “Studying the Historical Emergence of Manslaughter in English Law using Stable Random Projections and Tag Parameter Spaces.” Association for Computers and the Humanities. (Online). July 2021.

F. Michael Bartlett and W. J. Turkel. “Automatically Harvesting High-Quality Images of Historic Bridges.” Canadian Society for Digital Humanities. Edmonton, AB (Online). June 2021.

Tim Hitchcock and W. J. Turkel. “Using Dimensionality Reduction and Tag Parameter Spaces to Study Historical Change in a Large Document Archive.” Canadian Society for Digital Humanities. Edmonton, AB (Online). June 2021.

F. Michael Bartlett and W. J. Turkel. “Digital Analysis of Historic Bridge Images.” Conference on Cultural Heritage and New Technologies (CHNT 25). Vienna, Austria (Online). November 2020.

W. J. Turkel. “Text and Image Mining for Historical Research.” Wolfram Technology Conference. Champaign, IL (Online). October 2020.

Jeffery A. T. Lupker and W. J. Turkel. “Creating New Music with Big Data and Evolutionary Algorithms.” Paper accepted for Digital Humanities. Ottawa, ON. July 2020. (Conference cancelled due to COVID-19).

W. J. Turkel and Zain Sirohey. “A Comparison of Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approaches to Recognizing Component Assemblies in Image Mining Electronic Circuits.” Canadian Society for Digital Humanities. London, ON (Online). June 2020.

Jeffery A. T. Lupker and W. J. Turkel. “Observing Mood-Based Patterns and Commonalities in Music Using Machine Learning Algorithms,” presented by Lupker at Innovation in Music. London, UK. December 2019.

Invited Presentations (Selected)

W. J. Turkel. Invited participant for roundtable, Rotman AI and Democracy Research Retreat. University of Western Ontario. London, ON. May 2024.

W. J. Turkel. Invited participant, UK-Canada Frontiers of Science: Artificial Intelligence. Organized by the Royal Society (UK) and Royal Society of Canada. Ottawa, ON. February 2024.

W. J. Turkel. “Hostile Environments.” Harriet Ritvo Symposium, MIT. Cambridge, MA (Online). April 2022.

W. J. Turkel. “Patching Equations.” Patch-Up! Toronto, ON (Online). April 2022.

W. J. Turkel. “How to Read 10K Books.” Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. Fairfax, VA (Online). November 2020.

W. J. Turkel. “Knowledge Infrastructures,” Invited participant, “STS Futures: A Symposium.” York University. Toronto, ON. February 2020.

W. J. Turkel. “Computation and the Practice of 21st-Century History.” Digital History Seminar, MIT. Cambridge, MA. April 2019.

W. J. Turkel. “Realtime Monitoring of the Collective Memory of Events,” Invited participant, “Workshop on Quantitative Analysis and the Digital Turn in Historical Studies.” Fields Institute for Mathematical Studies. Toronto, ON. February-March, 2019.

Academic Honours (Selected)

Western Award for Innovations in Technology-Enhanced Teaching, 2021.

Wolfram Research, Wolfram Innovator Award, 2020.

Canadian Social Knowledge Institute, Open Scholarship Award, William J. Turkel and Adam Crymble for The Programming Historian, 2020.