Deep
Culture

Deep Culture is a five-year ERC-funded project interested in the relations between deep-learning technologies and cultures. It coins the term ‘deep culture’ to describe the global transformations that deep learning has wrought on culture and how culture is in turn key to deep learning.

Neither overly enthusiastic nor despairing about the new deep culture, the project proposes reshaping our relationships with it to address the complexities of cultures and values of difference.

See our latest publications or public updates. You can also follow us on Bluesky and LinkedIn.

Workshop recap: Boundaries & boundary concepts in/as datafication

On February 19-20, members of the Deep Culture project co-organized a workshop on “Boundaries & boundary concepts in/as datafication” together with Yana Boeva (University of Stuttgart) and Sarah Davies (University of Vienna) in Amsterdam. While boundary concepts, such as “boundary objects”, “boundary-work”, “boundary infrastructures”, or “boundary-drawing”, have long played a key role in science and […]

From Vectors to Vibes reading group

From February through May, Sal Hagen (Deep Culture) and Daniël de Zeeuw (UvA) will organize a reading group on the theme From Vectors to Vibes. Content Digital platforms have become vast global infrastructures that constantly listen to the everyday murmurs, moods, and habits of users. Ever more intricate deep learning systems allow platforms like TikTok […]

Visit to Internet Archive Europe

On Monday, members of the Deep Culture project visited the Internet Archive Europe for an exchange on how the Internet Archive and its WayBack Machine are employed in research on online archives. Jonathan Gray (King’s College London) has written a lovely blog post about the visit on the Internet Archive Europe website. Read it here.

Little Tools of Difference

We are excited to report that we have started developing our first Little Tools of Difference in the Deep Culture project. For the past years, deep learning has been driven by a culture of uniformity—optimizing for efficiency, smoothing over outliers and categorizing identity. We asked: What if we used these same state-of-the-art architectures (LSTMs, CNN, […]

Digital rhythmanalysis: Studying memetic and affective rhythms on the post-viral Web

How to move along with the audiovisual, vibey, and AI-infused feeds of today’s platforms? Sal Hagen, together with Daniël de Zeeuw and Tommaso, theorize ‘digital rhythmanalysis’ as a potential new quali-quantitative approach to measure and ‘feel’ rhythms online. Digital rhythmanalysis emphasizes time before space and can study moments of (viral) intensity as well as everyday […]