Adam DJ Brett

TIDEL Conference: Racial Justice in the Digital Public Square Presentation

2026-08-13T14:10:00Z

I'm honored to be presenting alongside Dean Teresa Smallwood at the Technology, Innovation & Digital Engagement Lab (TIDEL) Symposium in New York City on October 1, 2026.

Here's why this gathering matters to me. Most of us feel it — the sense that technology is moving faster than our ability to think clearly about it. We adopt tools before we've asked what they're for. We watch innovation set the pace and scramble to keep up. TIDEL was created as a space to slow down and ask better questions: How do we make good decisions about our tech use? What does responsible engagement look like when the ground keeps shifting?

I'll be leading the Racial Justice in the Digital Public Square track — a conversation about who gets heard, who gets harmed, and what justice requires of the platforms where so much of our public life now happens. It's work I care deeply about, and I can't think of a better setting for it.

Two things you can do:

If you're a scholar or practitioner with something to say, the call for papers is open through September 15. I'd love to see your work in the mix — especially in the racial justice track.

And whether or not you're presenting, registration is open now at www.tidelconference.org. Use the code TIDEL20 for 20% off.

New York. October 1. If you're planning to be there, hit reply and let me know — I'd love to connect in person.

Event Details #

Event: Technology, Innovation & Digital Engagement Lab (TIDEL) Symposium
Date: October 1, 2026 · New York City
Adam's role: Presenting alongside Dean Teresa Smallwood; leading the Racial Justice in the Digital Public Square track
CFP deadline: September 15 · Registration: www.tidelconference.org · Code: TIDEL20 (20% off)

The 11th Annual Haudenosaunee Wooden Stick Festival Weekend: A Dinner, a Run, and the Creator's Game at Onondaga Lake

2026-08-13T00:00:00Z

Before lacrosse was a varsity sport, before it was an Olympic event, before it was anything you could buy tickets to, it was a gift. The Haudenosaunee call it Deyhontsigwa'ehs — "They Bump Hips" — and they have played it for over a thousand years as the Creator's Game, a medicine game played for healing and thanksgiving. The game is older than the Haudenosaunee Confederacy itself, and the Confederacy was founded on the shores of Onondaga Lake, where the Peacemaker brought five warring nations together under the Great Law of Peace.

Which is why what happens at Onondaga Lake every September matters. On September 11–13, 2026, the American Indian Law Alliance hosts the 11th Annual Haudenosaunee Wooden Stick Festival weekend: three days that braid together sport, ceremony, remembrance, and restoration. The festival is free, family-friendly, and open to all. Here is what the weekend holds.

An Evening for Alfie: The Ambassador Award Dinner #

Friday, September 11 · 5:00 PM · Bellevue Country Club, Syracuse · alfieaward.com

For more than fifty years, Alfie Jacques of the Onondaga Nation made wooden lacrosse sticks by hand — tens of thousands of them, each one bent, carved, and strung the traditional way, and each one an occasion to teach someone about where the game comes from. When Alfie passed, the lacrosse world lost its greatest stickmaker and one of its most beloved teachers.

The Alfie Jacques Ambassador Award keeps that teaching alive. It honors leaders who grow the game with the same selfless dedication and the same reverence for its Indigenous heritage that defined Alfie's life. The 2026 honorees are Dom Starsia, the championship college coach; Michael Kennedy, a leader in international lacrosse; and Mike Kanatakeron Mitchell, a Haudenosaunee ambassador for the game. The award itself is carved by Ryan Sandy of Six Nations, and proceeds from the evening fund a college scholarship for Native American youth.

The Restore Our Sacred Lake 5K #

Onondaga Lake · Register at aila.li/run

Onondaga Lake holds a double identity. It is the birthplace of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy — among the most sacred places in Haudenosaunee territory — and it spent the twentieth century becoming one of the most polluted lakes in America. The Restore Our Sacred Lake 5K exists in the space between those two facts.

The run brings the community onto the lake's shoreline in support of its ongoing restoration. It is welcoming by design: runners chasing a personal best, families walking with strollers, first-timers, and shoreline cheering sections all belong. Registration is open now at aila.li/run.

The Wooden Stick Festival and Randy Hall Memorial Tournament #

Saturday & Sunday, September 12 & 13 · Onondaga Lake · Free admission

The heart of the weekend is the festival itself: two days of wooden stick lacrosse played the way it has been played for centuries. The Randy Hall Memorial Tournament runs throughout the weekend, honoring Randy Hall of Akwesasne, the coach and player who in 2013 set the game back on the shores of Onondaga Lake and started the tradition the festival continues today.

Around the tournament, the park fills with the rest of the celebration: Smoke Dancing, traditional stick-making demonstrations, Haudenosaunee singers and dancers, Indigenous food, and craft artisans. It is equal parts sporting event, cultural teaching, and family reunion — and everyone is invited to all three parts.

Plan Your Weekend #

The festival weekend runs September 11–13, 2026. The Alfie Jacques Ambassador Award Dinner opens the weekend Friday evening at Bellevue Country Club (alfieaward.com); the festival, tournament, Smoke Dancing, and 5K fill Saturday and Sunday at Onondaga Lake. Festival admission is free.

Register for the run: aila.li/run Learn more about the weekend: aila.li/wsf

Come to the lake. The game began here — and every September, it comes home.

Two Domains, One Build: Hosting .ngo and .ong Together with Eleventy and xmit

2026-07-30T16:00:00Z

There is a very particular kind of joy that comes from solving a web problem whose final answer is smaller than the problem felt.

I wanted the American Indian Law Alliance website to live at both aila.ngo and aila.ong. The pairing matters: .ngo is the primary address, while .ong is its parallel form. I did not want the second domain to bounce visitors to the first. If somebody requests /give/, a blog post, an image, a PDF, or any other site resource from either hostname, that hostname should serve the resource itself.

This sounds ordinary until the requirements are stated precisely. It is not a redirect rule. It is not an alias that only works for the homepage. It is the entire generated site—hundreds of pages and a large document archive—available under two fully qualified domains.

When I finally had it working, I felt euphoric. Not because the solution was elaborate, but because it was not.

One canonical build #

The site is built with Eleventy. Eleventy writes the finished static site to dist, so there is no application server and no runtime routing layer to duplicate. The first important decision was to build only once.

I set the production URL to the primary domain:

- name: Build Eleventy site
  run: npm run build
  env:
    URL: https://aila.ngo

That keeps canonical links, Open Graph URLs, feeds, and the sitemap anchored to aila.ngo. Search engines get one authoritative address even though human beings can use either domain. The parallel domain serves the same HTML, but the metadata continues to identify the primary.

This distinction cleared up much of my confusion: “available at two domains” does not have to mean “build two versions.”

Let xmit launch the same bundle twice #

xmit is unusually well suited to this because it treats a static deployment as a content-addressed bundle. It hashes the files and uploads only content it does not already have. My site includes a substantial collection of PDFs, images, fonts, Pagefind indexes, and ordinary HTML. Uploading the same unchanged bytes twice would be absurd. xmit recognizes that they are the same bytes.

The domain-to-team syntax is also wonderfully small. Team 389 is written after the hostname:

xmit "aila.ngo@389" dist
xmit "aila.ong@389" dist

That is the heart of the solution. Both commands launch the complete dist directory. Neither command contains a path list because none is needed. /give/ was my first test, but it is not a special case. Every post, page, image, stylesheet, font, feed, search index, and document goes along with it.

The production workflow adds retries because an 800-plus-megabyte site should not fail permanently over one transient network error:

env:
  XMIT_PRIMARY_SITE: aila.ngo
  XMIT_PARALLEL_SITE: aila.ong

steps:
  - name: Deploy to xmit
    env:
      XMIT_KEY: ${{ secrets.XMIT_KEY }}
    run: |
      for site in "$XMIT_PRIMARY_SITE" "$XMIT_PARALLEL_SITE"; do
        deployed=false
        for attempt in 1 2 3; do
          if ./node_modules/.bin/xmit "$site@389" dist; then
            deployed=true
            break
          fi
          sleep $((attempt * 15))
        done
        [ "$deployed" = true ] || exit 1
      done

The DNS records for both domains point to xmit, and xmit serves each requested hostname directly. A request to https://aila.ong/give/ stays on aila.ong; it is not sent to aila.ngo. Yet both responses come from one Eleventy build.

The speed came from doing less #

The other satisfying part was making repeat deployments faster without inventing a new build system. Eleventy’s image pipeline already maintains a cache, so GitHub Actions only needed to preserve it:

- uses: actions/cache@v6
  with:
    path: .cache/@11ty/img
    key: eleventy-images-${{ runner.os }}-${{ hashFiles('package-lock.json') }}
    restore-keys: eleventy-images-${{ runner.os }}-

That cache is about 53 MB. Restoring it avoids regenerating responsive images on every clean runner. Pagefind takes less than a second; it was never the bottleneck. Dependency installation was already cached by setup-node. xmit already avoids resending unchanged content. The fast solution was to let each tool do the job it already knew how to do.

There are more sophisticated architectures for multi-domain publishing. I do not need one. I need a single canonical Eleventy build, two real hostnames, one xmit team, and a workflow boring enough that I will understand it six months from now.

That is what produced the joy: not merely seeing both domains resolve, but realizing that the correct model had been sitting in front of me all along. Build the site once. Name the primary. Launch the same artifact wherever it belongs.

Writing Support Resources

2026-07-21T00:00:00Z

Writing Support Resources #

These resources support the writing process itself: the language you use, the community that holds you accountable, and the institutional tools already available to you at no extra cost.

Coaching and community #

Eileen Campbell-Reed's Writing Table is a weekly virtual writing session for academic and ministry-related writers, built on Robert Boice's research showing that writing briefly and daily builds a more lasting habit than writing in long, infrequent bursts. The Friday session remains free to attend, and it welcomes professors, pastors, students, and anyone else working on a long writing project.

The Grafton Line is a private Facebook group for peer support and accountability during the writing process.

Reference language and templates #

The Academic Phrasebank, developed by the University of Manchester, is a free bank of example academic phrasing for introductions, methods, results, and other common sections. Use it when you know what you want to say but not how academic prose usually says it.

Through your library #

Your university's writing center and library often provide free or discounted access to tools you would otherwise pay for yourself, including Grammarly, EndNote, and NVivo for qualitative analysis. Check with your library before purchasing any of these on your own.

Staying current #

Set up citation alerts through Google Scholar for your key authors and search terms, so you are notified as soon as new work appears in your niche rather than having to remember to check.

Apps and Tools for Research and Writing

2026-07-21T00:00:00Z

Apps and Tools for Research and Writing #

These tools cover the three jobs your writing workflow needs done: keeping track of sources, giving you a quiet place to write, and holding your notes and outlines together as your project grows.

Reference managers #

Zotero is a free, open source reference manager that saves citations directly from your browser, organizes PDFs by project, and formats citations and bibliographies in whatever style your target journal requires. It is the reference manager most widely recommended in academic writing guides because it has no cost barrier and works the same way across Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Mendeley is a reference manager owned by Elsevier. It offers similar citation and PDF organization features to Zotero, plus a built-in academic social network for finding related papers and authors. Check whether your university library already has an institutional Mendeley license before you choose between the two.

Nota Bene is an integrated word processor and bibliographic manager built specifically for humanities scholars. Its Ibidem bibliographic database and multilingual support make it a strong choice if your project draws on primary sources in ancient or modern languages beyond English.

Distraction-free writing #

Byword is a lightweight Markdown editor for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. It syncs drafts through iCloud or Dropbox, so you can start a section on your laptop and keep writing on your phone, and it is a one-time purchase rather than a subscription.

Morning pages and daily writing #

750 Words gives you a private, browser-based space to write roughly three pages every morning, following the "morning pages" practice popularized by Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. Many writers use it to clear their head before turning to the dissertation itself.

Simplenote is a free, minimal, cross-platform note app. Its instant sync and full version history make it a good home for quick daily writing or journal-style reflections you want to keep separate from your formal drafts.

Structured research and writing platforms #

Overleaf is a browser-based LaTeX editor. It matters if your target journal expects a LaTeX submission, or if you are co-writing with collaborators who prefer LaTeX to Word.

Notion is a flexible workspace that can hold your reading notes, dissertation outline, and weekly task list in one connected system, which helps if you would rather manage the whole project in one place than juggle several separate apps.

Obsidian is a local-first, Markdown-based note app built around linking ideas together. It is popular for literature notes, since it lets you connect a quote or concept from one source directly to related ideas from other sources as your reading grows.

Notesnook is a free, open source, end-to-end encrypted note app. It is a strong private alternative if you want your research notes stored with zero-knowledge encryption, meaning even the app's own developers cannot read them.

Miro is an online collaborative whiteboard built around sticky notes, arrows, and text boxes. It is especially useful for a literature review, since you can write a short summary of each source on its own note and physically drag related sources into the same cluster until your themes emerge visually instead of staying buried in a spreadsheet.

Time management #

Tomato Timer is a free, no-signup online Pomodoro timer. Set it to 25 minutes, work until it rings, then take a short break. It is the simplest possible way to try time-boxing before committing to a heavier app.

Digital storytelling and visualization tools #

Northwestern University's Knight Lab publishes a suite of free, open source tools built for telling stories with data. TimelineJS turns a spreadsheet into an interactive timeline, which is useful for laying out the history behind a research question or the sequence of events in a case study. StoryMapJS does the same for geography, mapping a professional practice or field site across locations. Both are free and require no coding experience.

The Kanban Method for Dissertation and Journal Article Writing

2026-07-21T00:00:00Z

The Kanban Method for Dissertation and Journal Article Writing #

Kanban is a visual work-management method that started on Toyota's factory floor in the 1940s, where cards, kanban in Japanese, signaled when a workstation needed more material. Software teams adapted it decades later, and individual writers now borrow the same logic to manage a project too large to hold in their head all at once, whether that project is a dissertation, a journal article, or a full season of writing across both.

The method comes down to one idea. Take a board with a small number of columns, commonly something like Not Started, Drafting, Revising, and Done, and represent each unit of your work as a card that moves left to right as it progresses. Chunking, breaking a large project into visible units, is the whole discipline behind it. An 80,000-word dissertation is not a task you can act on directly. A board holding forty specific cards, each one a subsection, a data chapter, or a round of feedback, is something you can actually work through one card at a time.

For dissertation writing, cards work best when they represent chapter sections rather than whole chapters. A whole chapter can sit on a board for months without moving and stop telling you anything useful. Sharper cards look like "Chapter 3: code the interview transcripts," "Chapter 3: draft the findings narrative," or "Chapter 2: revise after advisor comments." Each card advances on its own timeline, so a glance at the board shows which chapters are stalled in revision and which have barely started, instead of leaving you with only a vague sense that "the dissertation is coming along."

For journal article writing, the columns map naturally onto the submission pipeline: Drafting, Internal Review, Submitted, Under Peer Review, Revise and Resubmit, Published. One card per article in progress lets you track several submissions at once without losing track of which one is waiting on you and which is waiting on an editor. Keeping a target journal in view from early in the writing process matters, rather than treating submission as an afterthought once a draft is finished.

Kanban's second core practice, alongside chunking, is limiting work in progress. The method caps how many cards can sit in an "in progress" column at once, often just one or two. The constraint is deliberate. Writers who let five sections sit half-finished at the same time tend to finish none of them quickly, while writers who complete one card before pulling the next tend to accumulate finished work steadily. A work-in-progress limit turns "I am working on my dissertation" into "I am finishing this one section, right now," which is a much easier sentence to act on.

You do not need special software to run this. Index cards on a wall or a whiteboard divided into columns work exactly as well as an app. If you would rather keep it digital, Notion and Miro include built-in kanban board views, and dedicated tools such as Trello follow the same model. The board itself matters less than the habit it enforces: name the next small piece of work, finish it, and move the card.

In Praise of Zotero

2026-07-21T00:00:00Z

In Praise of Zotero #

Every writer's toolkit has to pick one hill to die on. This is mine: use Zotero.

Zotero solves the one problem that quietly derails more dissertations than bad theory ever does, which is losing track of what you read and where you read it. Click the browser extension on a journal article, a library catalog page, or even a well-formed website, and Zotero pulls the full citation, the PDF, and often the abstract into your library without you typing a single field by hand. Do that consistently from the first week of your literature review, and by the time you are drafting, your bibliography already exists. You are not reconstructing it from memory the night before a deadline, hunting for a DOI you half-remember, or discovering that a crucial source is a library-loan PDF you can no longer find on your laptop.

The case for Zotero over its competitors is mostly a case for what it does not do. It does not charge you to use it. The desktop application, browser extension, and word processor plugins are entirely free, and the only cost that ever shows up is optional cloud storage for PDFs beyond a generous free allowance, which most doctoral projects never hit. It does not lock your library into one vendor's ecosystem either. Your citation data lives in an open format you can export at any time, which matters if a subscription-based competitor changes its pricing or its terms partway through your program.

Inside a manuscript, Zotero's word processor plugin inserts and reformats citations and full bibliographies automatically, in whatever style your target journal specifies. Switching a completed draft from APA to Chicago, something that happens more often than any writer would like, becomes one menu selection instead of an afternoon of manual reformatting. That single feature is worth adopting the tool for on its own.

None of this requires Zotero to be perfect. Its interface is plain rather than polished, and Mendeley's built-in social network for discovering related authors is a real feature Zotero does not try to match. But polish is not the job a reference manager is hired to do. The job is to make sure that six months from now, every claim in your article traces cleanly back to a source you can still find, cited in the format your journal requires, without you having to remember how you found it. Zotero does that job as well as anything available, and it does it for free.

If you take nothing else from this post, adopt this: install Zotero before you read your next source, not after you've read fifty more without it.

Review: Frame Analysis, Critical Theory, and English Language Teaching

2026-07-20T06:14:00Z

Frame Analysis, Critical Theory, and English Language Teaching #

By Robert J. Lowe Routledge, 2026

Lowe, Robert J. 2026. Frame Analysis, Critical Theory, and English Language Teaching. Abingdon: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-032-54469-4 (hardback), 978-1-032-53280-6 (paperback), 978-1-003-42505-2 (ebook).

Robert J. Lowe opens with a confession common to critical scholars but rarely examined this carefully: he had been calling his research "critical" for years without being able to say precisely what the word committed him to. Applied linguistics and English language teaching research host at least two incompatible traditions under that label, Lowe notes, a neo-Marxist, structural strand focused on redistribution and a poststructuralist strand focused on identity and discourse, and moving between them without a stated theoretical home left his own native-speakerism research, he came to feel, undertheorized. His solution is to build a research method, which he calls frame analysis, directly out of Max Horkheimer's early critical theory, particularly the concept of immanent critique, and then to test that method on a real classroom of Japanese university students studying English. The book is simultaneously a work of intellectual history, a methodological manual, and a research report, and it is unusually honest about the seams between those three functions.

A genuinely useful synthesis #

The theoretical achievement here deserves to be taken seriously by qualitative researchers well outside applied linguistics. Lowe's frame analysis borrows "master framing" and "counter-framing" from social movement theory (Snow and Benford) and from Joe Feagin's work on the white racial frame, then fuses that vocabulary with Horkheimer's immanent critique: rather than importing an external ideology critique and applying it to participants from outside, the researcher identifies the internally held, consciously expressed beliefs that make up a participant's "master frame," then surfaces the participant's own tacit awareness of contradictions between that frame and their lived social reality. When the technique works, it produces a specific, observable outcome, "counter-framing," in which participants themselves generate new understandings that resolve the contradiction, rather than the researcher simply asserting that the participants are falsely conscious. This is a real methodological contribution: most ideology-critique research either stops at diagnosis (participants are shown to be mistaken) or smuggles the researcher's political conclusions in as the participants' own discoveries. Lowe's design, in principle, makes the participants' own reasoning the site of the finding, and the book's case study bears this out in a genuinely interesting way. His students began the course endorsing standard liberal-pluralist claims about English as a "common resource" that "all Englishes" access equally; through the frame analysis intervention they came to recognize the tension between that pluralism and the material reality that certain "inner circle" varieties of English carry more institutional and economic weight, and produced a more structurally aware, if still individualist, revised framing centered on expanded choice rather than enforced standardization.

The candor is the strongest chapter #

What sets this book apart from typical methods guides is Lowe's conclusion, which reads less like triumphant validation and more like a research diary of everything that could go wrong. He flags, unprompted, that his students' revised framing "does not fully transcend the essentially liberal values they began the course with," and cites Marxist critics of just this kind of individualist resolution to make the point against his own findings. He admits that frame analysis as demonstrated here falls short of Horkheimer's original standard, that critique requires "a fully developed material theory of society," conceding that his own "bricolage" leans more on reflexive qualitative data collection than on the historical-materialist grounding Horkheimer's method presupposes, and calls this, bluntly, "perhaps practising sleight of hand." He is equally direct about a structural problem in his research design that many qualitative studies would bury in a footnote: he was simultaneously the students' teacher and their researcher, which gave him extraordinary latitude to raise ideological contradictions in class time but also meant his authority over the participants' grades and standing could easily have produced compliant rather than genuine counter-framing. Few methods books volunteer this level of self-implicating detail, and it makes the book considerably more trustworthy than one that presented frame analysis as a clean, generalizable tool.

Where the candor doesn't go far enough #

That said, Lowe's own diagnosis of the teacher-researcher power imbalance resolves too quickly into reassurance. His ethical defense, that participants "already given their consent for things in the setting to be documented" simply by allowing him into the classroom, treats institutional access as equivalent to informed consent to have one's political views actively challenged and revised by the person grading your coursework, which is a considerably higher bar than consenting to be observed. Lowe's own comparison of frame analysis to the "observer's paradox," the idea that all research inevitably influences its subjects, is true but does real work to flatten a difference in degree that matters here: there is a meaningful gap between a researcher's presence subtly altering behavior and a researcher-instructor deliberately engineering contradictions for students to resolve as part of a graded final project. The book would be stronger if it treated this asymmetry as a genuine limitation on the method's ethical portability, rather than folding it into the general, unavoidable messiness of qualitative fieldwork.

The single-classroom scope is the other real constraint, one Lowe names but doesn't fully reckon with. The study draws on a small, mixed group of students from two countries with no shared prior training pathway, which Lowe himself notes makes it impossible to identify where their initial ideological framing actually came from, textbooks, teacher training, popular discourse, or some combination he cannot disentangle. He proposes, reasonably, that future researchers study a more homogeneous cohort, teachers who completed the same training program, to isolate a specific transmission mechanism. But this means the book's central case study functions more as a proof of concept for the method's mechanics than as a demonstration of what frame analysis can actually reveal about how ELT ideology is produced and circulated at scale, the larger claim the book's opening chapters gesture toward.

A genuinely rare intellectual-historical contribution #

One quieter virtue of the book is its literature review of how Frankfurt School theory has actually been used, and misused, in applied linguistics. Lowe is sharp and specific in noting that critical ELT scholarship has drawn heavily on Habermas and occasionally Honneth while almost entirely skipping Horkheimer's founding formulation of critical theory, and he singles out Bernard Spolsky's recent work for flattening the difference between 1930s Horkheimer and 1960s Marcuse into an undifferentiated "identity politics" ancestor, a criticism that lands because Lowe has done the historical homework to back it up. This kind of returning-to-the-source move is exactly what a field drowning in loosely defined "critical" research needs, and it is a genuine service independent of whether frame analysis itself catches on as a method.

Verdict #

Frame Analysis, Critical Theory, and English Language Teaching is a rigorous, unusually self-aware attempt to give critical ELT research an actual theoretical spine, and researchers in applied linguistics and adjacent qualitative fields will find frame analysis a genuinely portable technique, not just an English-teaching curiosity. Lowe's willingness to name his method's shortfalls, from its incomplete fidelity to Horkheimer's materialism to its small sample size, is the book's most valuable feature and sets a standard other methods books should be held to. But that same candor stops just short of the place it most needs to go: the ethical weight of a teacher using classroom authority to engineer students' ideological transformation as part of their coursework. Lowe has built a genuinely interesting tool. Whether it can be responsibly used by anyone who is not, like him, both the students' evaluator and their critic remains the book's most important unanswered question.

Review: Kant Machine: Critical Philosophy after AI

2026-07-20T00:00:00Z

Kant Machine: Critical Philosophy after AI #

By Yuk Hui Bloomsbury Academic, 2026 (Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy series)

Hui, Yuk. 2026. Kant Machine: Critical Philosophy after AI. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 978-1-3505-6320-9 (hardback), 978-1-3506-0250-2 (paperback), 978-1-3505-6321-6 (ePDF).

The book opens with an epigraph from Turing's 1950 paper: "Can a machine be made to be super-critical?" Turing meant the term in the nuclear sense, a machine whose ideas set off chain reactions of further ideas. Yuk Hui hears the pun that Turing did not intend. Can a machine be critical in Kant's sense, aware of its own limits, legislating for itself, capable of judgment rather than mere execution? The whole book lives inside that pun, and the surprising thing is how much philosophical work it turns out to do.

Hui's wager is stated plainly in the preface. Kant's philosophy can be read as a reflection on two ways of constructing machines, represented by rationalism and empiricism, and these two eighteenth-century schools still govern how we understand machines today, in the debate between symbolic AI and connectionism. The Cartesian machine follows innate rules. The Humean machine learns from experience. GOFAI and deep learning, in other words, were fighting Kant's war two centuries late, and Kant's critical philosophy, which was built precisely to overcome the dogmatism of the first and the scepticism of the second, might therefore have something to say about where both projects run aground. This is the kind of framing that sounds obvious once stated and was stated by nobody before. It gives the current AI debates a philosophical genealogy deeper than the usual references to Dreyfus and Searle, and it explains why those debates feel so stuck: they are repetitions, Hui argues, of the very impasse that made critical philosophy necessary in the first place.

The book is short, three chapters over roughly 117 pages, and organized with a symmetry that is itself a Kantian joke. Kant's three questions, what can I know, what must I do, what may I hope for, become three questions about machines: What kinds of machines are intelligent? Are machines capable of being moral? Does an algorithm of perpetual peace exist? The latent question, Hui notes, shifts accordingly from "what is the human?" to "what is the machine?" He is candid that the book concludes a long engagement, extending threads from Recursivity and Contingency (2019), Art and Cosmotechnics (2021), and Machine and Sovereignty (2024), and that he has deliberately refrained from developing the implications already explored in that trilogy. That candor names the book's character precisely, in ways I will return to.

The intelligent machine and the epigenesis of reason #

Chapter 1 is the strongest and the most durable. Hui reads Turing's post-war lectures carefully, noting that Turing's intelligent machine is an empirical machine, one that learns rather than merely executes, and that Turing's real answer to Lovelace's objection was a bet on experience over innate instruction. From there the chapter runs backward into the eighteenth century, setting up Descartes's animal-machine and Hume's habit-driven mind as the two poles between which Kant's transcendental philosophy emerges, then forward again into cybernetics. The pivot is a remark of Simondon's from 1953 that Hui rightly flags as extraordinary: "Kant could only have dealt with cybernetics by situating it in the Critique of Judgment." The third Critique, with its reflective judgment, its organisms that are causes and effects of themselves, and its "technics of nature," turns out to be where the modern machine question was already latent. Hui traces this through the concept of epigenesis, which recent scholarship (Zammito, Mensch, Huneman, Lenoir) has placed at the center of Kant's account of reason itself. Reason is not preformed but self-organizing, and the three Critiques elaborate what Hui calls an organic, recursive structure, technical unity versus architectonic unity, aggregate versus system. The suggestion that Kant's philosophy is simultaneously an antidote to the machines of his time and, paradoxically, a theory for future machines, since cybernetics is precisely the mechanization of the organic and recursive, is the book's deepest claim, and chapter 1 earns it. Hui also recovers Gerhard Lehmann's neglected reading of Kant's Nachlass as a "critique of technological reason" and engages Franziska Aigner's recent Kant and Technics, arguing that the technics of nature only becomes concretely comprehensible once we have the cybernetic machine in view. This is genuine scholarship, not vibes, and the footnote apparatus, which Hui explicitly designs as a parallel text dialoguing with Kant's commentators while the main text stays with Kant, makes the chapter usable as a map of an entire literature.

The moral machine and the Kant test #

Chapter 2 proposes what may become the book's most quoted idea: after the Turing test, the Kant test. A machine that passes the Turing test is only a knowing machine, not a moral one, and the "Moral Turing Test" proposed in the machine-ethics literature fails for a reason Kant would have appreciated: a moral act is an act in the world, not a language game, and a beautiful speech about morality is no evidence of a moral will. Hui's taxonomy is again elegant. Current artificial moral agents are at best partial Humean moral machines, deriving norms from conventions and data while lacking the sentiments and sympathy on which Hume actually grounded morals. A Kantian moral machine would require autonomy in the strict sense, self-legislation, and the chapter turns on Kant's own observation about Vaucanson's automaton, in which the question of freedom is unthinkable. The antagonism between autonomy and automation is the chapter's real subject, and Hui handles it without the sentimentality that mars most writing on machine ethics.

The chapter's critical passages are more uneven. The reading of AI alignment through Asimov's three laws and the figure of the slave is historically suggestive, Hui connects the robot to the vacated symbolic position of the slave via Aristotle and Agamben, and his observation that the alignment problem never specifies whose goals count (individuals, clans, the species?) is a fair hit. The pages on Yudkowsky's shutdown proposal and the Hinton-LeCun quarrel are lively. But this is engagement with AI ethics at the level of its public spokesmen and its op-eds, not its technical literature. The alignment research programme has more sophisticated formulations than "AI systems' goals may not align with those of humans," and a book proposing a Kant test owes the reader more specificity about what taking it would involve. What would count as evidence of machine self-legislation rather than a very good simulation of it? Hui's own Turing material contains the objection, the solipsism problem he cites approvingly against Searle, and the book never quite explains why that objection would not devour the Kant test too. The best moment in the chapter is the Greenspan aside: the 2008 testimony blaming the crisis on models fed only two decades of euphoric data becomes a parable of the Humean machine's incurable vulnerability to contingency, and it does more argumentative work than the Yudkowsky pages combined.

The peace machine and the buggy algorithm #

Chapter 3 is the boldest and the most Hui. Reading Kant's late political writings, composed as censorship closed in on a philosopher who had considered abandoning Königsberg over it, Hui proposes that "Toward Perpetual Peace" describes an algorithm: a recursive procedure that presupposes conflict, resolves it through reciprocal operations and communal structure, and generates new conflicts at each iteration, avoiding war not by eliminating antagonism but by metabolizing it. International trade is the algorithm's key parameter. The conceit could easily be cute. It becomes productive when Hui introduces the bug report: Hume's "jealousy of trade," Fichte's Closed Commercial State as a rival implementation that swaps the trade parameter for Wissenschaft, and then the devastating historical test cases, Perry's black ships forcing open Japan, the Opium Wars forcing open China, in which the "spirit of trade" arrived as war rather than preventing it. Hui, writing from within the East Asian experience of that history, poses the question with real force: can we refuse Kant's perpetual peace on the evidence of the nineteenth century? His answer is carefully double. A true Kantian would say the algorithm was sound and the technical element failed, and the regulative principle concerning whole and parts might still hold even if trade no longer serves. The closing section on DeepSeek, "sovereign AI," hypersonic missiles, and prediction as itself a source of war is vivid, and the Caygill-inspired reading of Clausewitz's On War as an intensification of Kantian reflective judgment, purposiveness without purpose applied to the strategy of attack, is a chilling and memorable demonstration that the organic paradigm serves war as readily as peace.

Yet this chapter also exposes the method's limit. "Algorithm" is doing metaphorical work throughout, and Hui never fully confronts the disanalogy: Kant's perpetual peace is a regulative idea, an infinite task, while an algorithm is a finite effective procedure, and collapsing the two risks precisely the confusion of reflective with determinative judgment that the book elsewhere polices so carefully. Hui clearly knows this, his refusal of the planetary "superintelligence" as guarantor of peace depends on the distinction, but the chapter's rhetoric repeatedly borrows precision from the computational vocabulary that its argument then withdraws. The topical references, DeepSeek "at the moment of this writing," the Oreshnik launch of November 2024, ground the book in its moment at the price of dating it within a few years, a trade-off Hui accepts with open eyes but that sits oddly in a book about a philosopher whose examples have lasted 230 years.

A coda that knows it is a coda #

The deliberate restraint announced in the preface, elucidating Kant without developing the implications already treated in the trilogy, gives the book its discipline and its thinness at once. Readers arriving fresh will find the cleanest introduction to Hui's whole project yet written, and at this length that is a real service, given how demanding Recursivity and Contingency is. Readers who know the trilogy will notice that the conceptual heavy lifting, recursivity, contingency, cosmotechnics, technodiversity, happens offstage, and that the book's final gesture, philosophy must set off again from Kant's island into the fog-bound ocean, seeking a new condition of philosophizing "after the organic," points directly back at Hui's other books rather than resolving anything here. The ending is nonetheless beautifully judged: Kästner's epigram about perpetual peace among all men, "all but the philosophers," lets Kant's own account of philosophy's constitutive "itch" to quarrel have the last word, war avoided everywhere except in the seminar room, which for Kant was exactly how it should be.

Verdict #

Kant Machine is the rare AI book by a continental philosopher that neither denounces the technology from a safe distance nor capitulates to its hype. Its central historical claim, that the symbolic-connectionist debate replays the rationalist-empiricist impasse and that Kant's third Critique is where cybernetics was philosophically anticipated, is illuminating and, I think, correct, and chapter 1 will be cited for years. The Kant test is a genuinely useful provocation even in its underspecified state, and the peace chapter's East Asian rereading of Kantian cosmopolitanism is something no other book on Kant and technology attempts. Its weaknesses are the mirror of its economy: engagement with machine learning at the level of its publicists rather than its practice, analogies that occasionally outrun their arguments, and a self-imposed dependence on a trilogy it declines to summarize. Read it as the keystone of Hui's arch rather than a freestanding structure and it holds. Anyone teaching philosophy of AI should assign it alongside the analytic literature it pointedly brackets, because the questions it asks, not whether machines can think but what kind of machines our thinking has already made us, are the ones that literature cannot formulate.

Review: Big Data in the Arts and Humanities—Theory and Practice

2026-07-19T06:39:28Z

Big Data in the Arts and Humanities: Theory and Practice #

Edited by Giovanni Schiuma and Daniela Carlucci CRC Press / Taylor & Francis, 2018 (Data Analytics Applications series)

Schiuma, Giovanni, and Daniela Carlucci, eds. 2018. Big Data in the Arts and Humanities: Theory and Practice. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. ISBN 978-1-4987-6585-5.

It matters where a book comes from. Big Data in the Arts and Humanities sits in CRC Press's "Data Analytics Applications" series, alongside titles like Big Data Analytics in Cybersecurity, Sport Business Analytics, and Actionable Intelligence for Healthcare. That placement is not incidental. The volume treats arts and humanities as one more industry vertical waiting to be brought into the big-data fold, the same way the series treats hospitals, governments, and sports franchises, and the framing chapters read exactly like what that pedigree would predict: a business-consulting register applied to museums and literature departments. The surprise is that buried in the middle of the book is a chapter that has nothing to do with that register at all, and it is good enough to make the surrounding material look worse by comparison.

Three parts, two registers #

The book collects fifteen chapters into three sections: understanding big data in arts and humanities, digital humanities proper, and managing big data with and for the sector. The first and third sections are dominated by what can fairly be called cultural-management consultancy: chapters on "Culture Metrics" as a quality-assessment tool for arts organizations, a case study of Arts Council England's data practices, museum provenance databases, "data culture" in the creative industries, and smart-city art initiatives. These chapters are competent as institutional reporting—the Arts Council England chapter, for instance, is a genuinely useful account of how one major funding body tried to operationalize data-driven decision-making—but they rarely rise above description of programs and tools. The introduction sets the tone early with language like "the datification of human life" and repeated insistence that arts and humanities need to build a "big data culture," phrases that get restated across several chapters without much argumentative work being done between restatements.

The middle section, "Digital Humanities," is a different book. Ian Milligan and Robert Warren's chapter on historians moving "from black boxes to models" takes seriously the methodological stakes of computational history—not just that historians can now use big data, but what habits of mind they need to develop to use it responsibly, rather than trusting opaque tools they don't understand. It is the first chapter in the volume that treats its subject as an intellectual problem rather than an adoption curve.

The chapter that justifies the book #

The standout, though, is Federica Perazzini's "The English Gothic Novel: Theories and Praxis of Computer-Based Macroanalysis in Literary Studies." Working in the tradition of Franco Moretti's distant reading and Matthew Jockers's computational macroanalysis, Perazzini builds a large corpus of digitized Gothic novels and runs it through stylometric analysis—most-frequent-word comparisons, type-token ratio for vocabulary richness, and motif mining—to trace how the genre's "genome" evolved across decades. What makes the chapter work is that Perazzini treats her quantitative results as data to be interpreted rather than conclusions that speak for themselves: the chapter closes with a section of "epistemological considerations" that asks directly what it means to have discovered a pattern in word frequencies, and what interpretive work still has to happen before a pattern becomes a literary-historical claim. This is exactly the question the framing chapters never ask about their own material. Culture Metrics and audience-development dashboards are presented as though the hard part is generating the data; Perazzini's chapter understands that generating the data is the easy part.

An uneven case for the thesis #

The book's implicit thesis is that arts and humanities can benefit from big data approaches while also having something distinctive to contribute back to those approaches—qualitative depth, narrative sense-making, what Paul Moore's chapter calls "thick data." That is a defensible and interesting claim. But the volume makes its case unevenly: the chapters that actually demonstrate humanistic method enriching computational analysis (Perazzini, and to a lesser extent Milligan and Warren) are outnumbered by chapters that gesture at the idea of "data culture" without showing what a genuinely humanistic engagement with data analysis looks like in practice. A reader who wants to see the thesis proven has to do some of that comparative work themselves, chapter by chapter, rather than being handed a synthesis by the editors.

The book also shows its age in a way that is hard to avoid noting from 2026. Published in 2018, its touchstones are Amazon, Facebook, and Google as the paradigm big-data companies, and its framing questions—should museums adopt big data? what does a data culture look like?—belong to a moment before generative AI reorganized the entire conversation about computation and the humanities. None of this is the editors' fault, but it means the book now reads less as a live intervention than as a snapshot of a specific, already-superseded stage of the digital humanities conversation, useful mainly for readers doing the history of that conversation rather than looking for a current one.

Verdict #

This is a mixed book whose value is concentrated rather than distributed. Read it for Perazzini's Gothic novel chapter, which is a small, well-executed model of what computational literary analysis owes to interpretive judgment, and for Milligan and Warren's argument against black-box historical method. Read the surrounding chapters on data culture and cultural-sector metrics for institutional context if you need it, but don't expect them to meet the same bar. As a series entry in business-analytics publishing applied to a new vertical, it does what that genre does. As a sustained argument about what big data means for arts and humanities specifically, it is a partial success carried by a couple of chapters that clearly belong to a more demanding tradition than the one the book was packaged in.

Adam DJ Brett

TIDEL Conference: Racial Justice in the Digital Public Square Presentation

Event Details #

The 11th Annual Haudenosaunee Wooden Stick Festival Weekend: A Dinner, a Run, and the Creator's Game at Onondaga Lake

An Evening for Alfie: The Ambassador Award Dinner #

The Restore Our Sacred Lake 5K #

The Wooden Stick Festival and Randy Hall Memorial Tournament #

Plan Your Weekend #

Two Domains, One Build: Hosting .ngo and .ong Together with Eleventy and xmit

One canonical build #

Let xmit launch the same bundle twice #

The speed came from doing less #

Writing Support Resources

Writing Support Resources #

Coaching and community #

Reference language and templates #

Through your library #

Staying current #

Apps and Tools for Research and Writing

Apps and Tools for Research and Writing #

Reference managers #

Distraction-free writing #

Morning pages and daily writing #

Structured research and writing platforms #

Time management #

Digital storytelling and visualization tools #

Further reading #

The Kanban Method for Dissertation and Journal Article Writing

The Kanban Method for Dissertation and Journal Article Writing #

In Praise of Zotero

In Praise of Zotero #

Review: Frame Analysis, Critical Theory, and English Language Teaching

Frame Analysis, Critical Theory, and English Language Teaching #

A genuinely useful synthesis #

The candor is the strongest chapter #

Where the candor doesn't go far enough #

A genuinely rare intellectual-historical contribution #

Verdict #

Review: Kant Machine: Critical Philosophy after AI

Kant Machine: Critical Philosophy after AI #

The intelligent machine and the epigenesis of reason #

The moral machine and the Kant test #

The peace machine and the buggy algorithm #

A coda that knows it is a coda #

Verdict #

Review: Big Data in the Arts and Humanities—Theory and Practice

Big Data in the Arts and Humanities: Theory and Practice #

Three parts, two registers #

The chapter that justifies the book #

An uneven case for the thesis #

Verdict #