Events
The NFCDS offers a number of larger opportunities for intellectual engagement, from visits and lectures, to special "signature events," to various awards and fellowships. For regular workshop programming and resources, see our the Workshops Page, and for awards and other opportunities, visit our Opportunities page. View past events on the Visits & Lectures archive.
Upcoming Events
View all Hesburgh Libraries upcoming events.
Guest Lecture: "Space Invasion: The Birth of the Japanese Arcade and the Politics of Public Space," March 30, 2026, 05:00pm - 06:00pm, Hesburgh Library 231A
How was the videogame arcade born in the late Japanese 1970s, and why was it so quickly regulated? This talk considers the significance of play in public space. It argues that so-called “game centers,” even prior to the digital revolution of videogames, troubled the existing power relations and forms that sought to contain entertainment through space. By examining a wide range of actors from the burgeoning arcade industry, the police, and policymakers, the presentation traces how different attempts to regulate arcade spaces marked a new politics of digital play—one that reworked the law to maintain borders around proper youth pursuits and videogames.
Keita Moore is assistant professor of Japanese media and culture at The Ohio State University. His primary research focuses on the sociocultural politics of Japanese videogames as they move between game texts, game designer discourses, and a wide range of social actors including pedagogues, parents, and politicians. His book manuscript, tentatively entitled Videogames, Social Regulation, and the Politics of Wasted Time in 1980s Japan, examines the ways in which gaming served as a major site to rethink norms of childhood in the “new” media temporalities of postindustrial, information society, and incipient neoliberal Japan.
Virtual Lecture: Chris Mustazza, April 2, 2026, 12:00pm - 01:00pm
The DAC Working Group on Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Sustaining Next-Generation Digital Projects in the Humanities invites you to an upcoming virtual talk by Chris Mustazza, Co-Director of PennSound.
Zoom link (Meeting ID: 985 1489 6400, Passcode: 297202)
Chris Mustazza's work centers on the poetry audio archive and digital analyses of sound recordings of poets reading their own work. His current book manuscript, tentatively titled Speech Labs: Language Experiments, Early Poetry Audio Archives, and the Poetic Record, is the first history of the poetry audio archive, detailing how poets' voices came to be collected, valued, and defined during the early period of sound recording. This project includes his work to digitize and contextualize the first collection of poetry recordings in the U.S., The Speech Lab Recordings. As part of this work, he has edited the earliest recordings of Robert Frost, James Weldon Johnson, and Gertrude Stein (among others).
This event is part of the Data, AI, and Computing Initiative Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Sustaining Next-Generation Digital Projects in the Humanities Working Group.
Guest Lecture: "Slop Aesthetics: From Viral Content to AI Expression," Tess McNulty, April 9, 2026, 5:00pm (followed by dinner and discussion), Hesburgh Library 246
Tess McNulty, Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the English Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, will be delivering an in-person talk followed by dinner discussion.
From movie scripts to memes, almost no type of cultural expression now feels safe from AI-generation. But what will a culture saturated by AI-"slop" look like? What aesthetics will it favor—and how should we critically assess them? This talk begins to address those questions by examining the close relationship between AI slop and one of its key precursors: the viral content that has saturated its training data. Through the primary example of what it calls the “hypnotic process”—a major viral genre that now infiltrates video slop—the presentation will consider how core aesthetics of virality have begun to color AI-generated culture, and with what implications.
This event is part of the Data, AI, and Computing Initiative Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Sustaining Next-Generation Digital Projects in the Humanities Working Group.
Events from the Recent Past
Guest Talk and Dinner: "Toward an Applied Critical AI Studies: Literary Criticism and LLM Evaluation," Mar. 18, 2026, 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm, Hesburgh 246
Dr. Claudia Carroll visits campus to deliver a presentation, followed by a dinner discussion, on her recent work as a founding member of Washington University's AI Humanities Lab. Dr. Carroll is a recent ND English PhD and current Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Transdisciplinary Institute in Applied Data Sciences (TRIADS) at Washington University in St. Louis. Her recent co-publication, "‘Written in the Style of’: ChatGPT and the Literary Canon," investigates generative AI, literary style, and nineteenth-century literature. More information about the event is here.
This event is part of the Data, AI, and Computing Initiative Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Sustaining Next-Generation Digital Projects in the Humanities Working Group.
Immersive Technologies Lab Open House, Mar. 24, 2026, 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm
The Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship invites you to an open house celebrating the launch of our Immersive Technologies Lab. Enjoy refreshments, learn about the lab, and immerse yourself in extended reality projects, including virtual, mixed, and augmented reality. More information here.
Love Data Week, Feb. 9 - 13, 2026
- Monday, February 9 - Friday, February 13, 2026
- Tuesday, February 10, 2026
- Workshop: Data Bytes—Where's the Data?
- Wednesday, February 11, 2026
- Thursday, February 12, 2026
- Workshop: Data Bytes—Where's the Data?
- Workshop: So, You Want to Write a Data Paper
Visiting Digital Humanities Workshop, Feb. 16 - 17, 2026
Scholars Giles Bergel, Guyda Armstrong, and Rebecca Bowen will join the NFCDS for several digital humanities events, including a hands-on workshop exploring the analysis of early printed books with computer vision based on their research in the Envisioning Dante project.
- Monday, February 16, 2026 – Tuesday, February 17, 2026
- Meetings with graduate student and faculty groups.
- Monday, Feb. 16, 2026
- Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2026
Signature Events
Fall
GIS Day: Join us annually on the third Wednesday of November for our annual salute to geospatial technology and its power to transform and better our lives and the lives of those around us.
Critical Tech Cafe: Critical Tech Cafe is a reading club for students, faculty, and staff at Notre Dame. The book club is open to new participants each semester, who all receive free copies of our selected books.
Spring
Love Data Week: Love Data Week is dedicated to spreading awareness of the importance of data management, sharing, preservation, and reuse. If you care about research, professional, community, and personal data, please join us annually for celebratory and learning events throughout Valentine’s week!
Critical Tech Cafe: Critical Tech Cafe is a reading club for students, faculty, and staff at Notre Dame. The book club is open to new participants each semester, who all receive free copies of our selected books.
Summer
Digital Humanities Research Institute: The Digital Humanities Research Institute (DHRI) South Bend is a core skills training workshop for faculty, staff, graduate students, undergraduate students of Michiana and the broader region.