Toronto Metropolitan University
Centre for Digital Humanities
September 2025
- CDH events are open to the TMU community and beyond.
- Also, check out the workshops hosted by the Collaboratory!
The Centre for Digital Humanities (CDH) is temporarily located on the 4th floor of the Podium (POD) building (where the School of Law is currently situated) and is planning to have a permanent home in the Library building (LIB) in the future. CDH events are held virtually (on Zoom) and in-person in the TMU Libraries’ Collaboratory.
Join us! If you have an idea for a CDH-hosted event or a question, please contact CDH Director Jason Boyd (jason.boyd@torontomu.ca) or CDH Manager Reg Beatty (rbeatty@torontomu.ca).
DH@TMU
on Zoom
Tuesday September 16
noon-1:00pm EDT
“It’s All About Context: Recent Experiments in Generative AI and Interactive Fiction”
Presented by Jeremy Andriano
In the whirlwind of excitement surrounding generative artificial intelligence (genAI) and its rapidly expanding capacity to model meaningful, coherent exchanges in natural human language, there have been several studies investigating the potential for AI-generated interactive fiction (IF) that responds to textual prompts provided by the reader. However, the storytelling abilities of large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT have always been limited by “context memory,” causing responses that are often hallucinatory or internally inconsistent in narrative detail. The LLM might never respond, “I don’t understand that,” but it also has a tendency to lose the plot rather quickly.
This paper presents two recent demonstrations that seem to successfully mitigate such memory woes, using distinct methods to produce text-based interactive games that offer surprisingly coherent and structurally-consistent narrative responses: PANGeA (“Procedural Artificial Narrative using Generative AI”) and its prototype game, Dark Shadows GPT, and Steven Johnson’s “You Exist in the Long Context,” which begins with a playable 10-turn interactive fiction based on Johnson’s recent book, The Infernal Machine.
Jeremy Andriano is a Communication & Culture MA candidate at TMU. His research examines digital authoring tools that enable humans to write interactive fiction.
CDH Virtual
Drop-Ins
Each month, weekly drop-ins will be dedicated to a specific theme. Tiny Tools Tour, Web Walks, and DH Workbench are explorations of a digital resource or tool for research, creativity, and/or teaching. Stories in Play features discussion of entries in the Playable Stories Archive and episodes of the Playable Stories: Unarchived podcast, both of which are focused on storytelling in games. Reading Bytes is a reading group for discussion of published digital humanities scholarship. DH@TMU Talks feature CDH members presenting their research.
READING BYTES
Tuesday September 9
noon-1:00pm EDT on Zoom
Critical AI Literacy
Jason Boyd and Reece Steinberg (Head, Library Learning Services)
Join us for a discussion of Andrea Baer’s “Unpacking Predominant Narratives about Generative AI and Education: A Starting Point for Teaching Critical AI Literacy and Imagining Better Futures.” Library Trends, vol. 73, no. 3, 2025, pp. 141–59, https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2025.a961189.
(Available online through TMUL)
AI FUTURES
Tuesday September 23
Noon-1:00pm EDT on Zoom
Imagining and Critiquing AI Futures
Jason Boyd
Current AI hype claims that AI will replace human workers in many sectors. Two sectors where such a replacement causes considerable anxiety are mental health and taxi services, where humans are replaced by AI therapists and self-driving cars.
Join Jason for an examination of two 2019 visual novels offering a critical exploration of the use of so-called AI technologies in therapy and taxi services: Eliza (Zachtronics) and Neo Cab (Chance Agency).
DH WORKBENCH
Tuesday September 30
Noon-1:00pm EDT on Zoom
Using Zotero with Google Docs
Jason Boyd
Learn how to use Zotero—a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, annotate, cite, and share research—in conjunction with Google Docs to facilitate individual and collaborative scholarly writing.
Please install Zotero and the Zotero Connector on your browser of choice in advance of the session (https://www.zotero.org/download/).