Branch is a magazine about sustainable and just internet for all. It is edited and funded by the Green Web Foundation on behalf of the volunteer-run Climate Action.tech community. One of the many cool things about Branch is that it exists in three different versions, according to the carbon intensity of the energy grid at any given moment (so the heavier assets, like high resolution pictures, can be delivered by renewable energy). The fantastic issue #8 has just launched, edited by Hannah Smith and Marketa Benisek. The Sussex Digital Humanities Lab has a little contribution ..read more

How does digital technology impact the environment? How do we align our growing use of AI and the cloud with the needs of people and planet? SHL Digital is pleased to be offering these free digital sustainability workshops, for selected participants, as part of our project Designing Sustainable Digital Futures. Introduction to Digital Sustainability. This half-day workshop at The Werks (Middle Street) in Brighton, on May 30th, will explore how organisations (especially SMEs) can accelerate their green IT journey. What are the easy changes you can make right away? What are the bigger shifts tha ..read more

SHL Digital is pleased to announce the latest edition of Communicating Climate Risk: A Toolkit. Originating in a climate risk communication project from COP26 Universities Network (now UK Universities Climate Network), this publication was updated and expanded in 2022 and again this year. Weaving contributions by climate scientists and modellers and social scientists together with decolonial, postdevelopment, and ecocritical approaches within the arts and humanities, and informed by fieldwork with policymakers and stakeholders, it explores the social life of ‘climate risk’ across a variety of ..read more

Digital Sustainability 2024 is an initiative of the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab and the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition. Digital technology represents a significant and rapidly growing proportion of global carbon emissions. With time nearly run out to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, and climate change impacts more visible than every, it’s clear we need bold and intelligent action on multiple fronts. Digital carbon is an important piece of this puzzle. Pop open Digital Sustainability 2024, and you’ll find three projects inside: 1) Designing the Future of Cloud Carbon Data is funded ..read more

By Jo Walton Would you like to collaborate on something? There are a lot of fascinating ongoing conversations about the use of generative AI within HE, and especially the issues it raises for assessment. Kelly Coate, writing for WonkHE, characterizes it as a moral panic, but still a potentially useful one: If in academia we value things like authenticity, integrity, and originality, we need to be able to articulate why those values remain important in the age of generative AI. Doing this can only help students to make meaning from their higher education learning experience – in fact, it’s rea ..read more

by Elena Dennison, Programme Manager, SHL Digital. If I had a penny for each clear answer I have been given when asking that question, I would be penniless. So having no pennies to loose, I approached our own RSE, Dr Nic Seymour-Smith and asked him to give me some examples of the types of work he gets involved with at Sussex Digital Humanities Lab at the University of Sussex. Nic explains that the Research Software Engineer (RSE) role seeks to collaboratively combine professional software expertise with an understanding of research. In this context, to understand what an RSE can and can’t p ..read more

Jo Lindsay Walton, Sussex Digital Humanities Lab, University of Sussex Polina Levontin, Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London ‘The world is ending’, ‘the Earth will be uninhabitable’, ‘humans are going extinct’, ‘we are f⸻’. These are not uncommon sentiments when climate change comes up in university seminar rooms, often accompanied by nervous laughter. Against a background of rising eco-anxiety, how do we talk with students about climate change? As universities move to embed sustainability across curricula, climate change is coming up more frequently. Educators in fields ..read more

By El Priest and Hanna Randall In April, the SHL hosted a PhD Spring Symposium on experimental, interactive and playful research methodologies, which was organised by El Priest and Hanna Randall. The day was full of workshops, papers, and art marking. We had art materials freely available on the table for attendees to use as and when they liked; aiming to engender a sense of freedom, playfulness and creativity.  The day started with El’s paper and workshop on queer archiving and zine making. The paper focused on alternative epistemology and knowledges produced through queer methods of his ..read more

Are you a Sussex researcher in the arts, humanities or social sciences, with an idea about how AI might be used in your work? Are you looking for some expert advice, and the chance to explore some collaboration? If this sounds like you, submit your idea here, and/or get in touch with j.c.walton@sussex.ac.uk. jbustterr / Better Images of AI / A monument surrounded by piles of books / CC-BY 4.0 ..read more

Workshop on humanist and computer science approaches to musical genre at Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany. by Mimi Haddon This post shares some reflections on a four-day workshop at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany in May 2023. The event was led and organised by anthropologist, musicologist, and social scientist Professor Georgina Born and its focus was the points of convergence and divergence between humanist approaches to musical genre and those in computer science, focusing to some extent on music-genre recognition ..read more