Welcome back to our CLCF profile series, where each month we interview a CLCF researcher to hear more about their projects (check out our previous profiles here). This spooky season, we’re sitting down with CLCF Research Assistant Dr. Cate Cleo Alexander to talk all things creepy, uncanny, and historical. Cate is a digital humanities scholar who recently defended her PhD thesis titled “Digital History Content Creation: Platformed Precarity and Affective Innovations.”
Rafael: In a nutshell, who are you as a researcher?
Cate: At my core, I’m a history nerd who accidentally became a digital humanist. During my history undergrad, I took a course on History and Video Games with the wonderful Sean Gouglas who then introduced me to Digital Humanities. It opened my eyes to these thorny questions about technology: how we use it and how we study it.
Fundamentally, my research is about how digital technologies have changed how people learn about history. The reality is that a significant portion of the population learns about history through social media, and we need to understand the ways that platforms simultaneously enable and constrict access to learning about the past.
The Greek word historia, which is the root for our word ‘history,’ originally meant inquiry or investigation. I take this ethos of investigation into my scholarship, and think about my methods as detective work investigating different questions. Sometimes this looks like scraping and coding YouTube comments, sometimes it looks like autoethnographic experimentation with AI tools, and sometimes it looks like Charlie’s conspiracy wall in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
Courtesy of Dr. Cate Alexander
M.E.: Reflecting on your excellent PhD work, can you please tell us a bit about how generative AI comes into play in digital history content creation?
Cate: Broadly speaking, social media algorithms prioritise accounts that upload consistently and frequently. This puts flesh and blood content creators at a disadvantage to AI generated slop.
In the history content creation sphere specifically, there’s three key concerns. First, accuracy. AI image generators famously struggle with simple questions like “how many fingers do humans usually have?” They are simply unequipped to generate accurate images of the past, which require subject expertise and a nuanced understanding of sources.
Part of this comes down to issue #2, recursiveness. Despite the best efforts of historians, archivists, and digital humanists, a lot of human history has not been digitized. These gaps reflect biases in historic preservation practices as well as modern biases. This means that any AI program, which has been trained off of digitized material, generates a very skewed and narrow representation of the past that’s entrenched in bias.
These limits of digitization can be seen in issue #3, copyright violations. Because the training data available on niche historical topics can be limited, it can be more obvious when genAI rips off specific creators — like one of my interviewees, Mike from OceanLiner Designs, talks about in this video.
Daphne: Can you share what you’ve been working on with CLCF and future directions of you’d like to explore in research?
Cate: Connected to my general nerdiness about history and my work contextualizing technology within broader media histories, I’ve been working on an Internet history timeline for CLCF. This timeline incorporates temporal and geographic information to demonstrate digital developments and better contextualize the rise of generative AI tools.
I also have been working with the incredible Lauren Knight on a project examining AI sound generation. Lauren and I both experiment with genAI tools to unpack their logics in our own research, and we came together to combine my expertise in museums with her expertise in sound. You can read more about our work here!
And most recently, I presented my work as one of the CLCF crew at the Association of Internet Researchers in Rio de Janeiro!
M.E.: What’s your star sign?
Cate: I’m a Leo! I don’t know much about astrology so I’m not sure what that means about me, but I do have a personal superstition that it’s good luck to touch the paws of stone lions.
Follow Cate’s work with CLCF here.
Research Assistant
Dr. Cate Cleo Alexander is a graduate of the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Cate employs a wide variety of methodologies in her research, including autoethnography, digital ethnography, media historiographies, sampling/scraping, qualitative coding,& artistic autoethnographic experiments with genAI
CLCF Co-Director & Postdoctoral Fellow
Daphne Rena Idiz (she/her) is a Co-Director of the Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF) cluster and Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC).
CLCF Co-Director & Associate Professor
Dr. MaryElizabeth (“M.E.”) Luka is PI and Co-Director of the Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF) cluster and Associate Professor, Arts & Media Management, at University of Toronto, where they examine modes and meanings of co-creative production and distribution in the digital age for arts, culture, and media.
CLCF Co-Director & Assistant Professor
Rafael Grohmann is a Co-lead and Co-Director of the Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF) cluster and an Assistant Professor of Media Studies (Critical Platform Studies) at the University of Toronto. Rafael is the leader of the DigiLabour initiative and founding editor of the Platforms & Society journal.
