Knowledge Media Design Institute

2026 Franklin Lecture at the University of Toronto
… After the Ellipses: Loss, Lacuna, and Drift in Human and Machine Understanding

Registration link in our bio

📅 May 11, 2026
🕔 5:00–7:00 p.m.
📍 Centre for Culture and Technology

This year’s Franklin Lecture brings together Daniel Hardt and Nanna Bonde Thylstrup for a conversation on the ontologies of human and machine understanding.

Drawing on computational linguistics and science and technology studies, the lecture examines ellipsis, loss, and lacuna as fundamental features of how knowledge is produced, structured, and interpreted. It asks what it means to read and respond to such dynamics in systems that neither breathe nor inhabit a body—and what is at stake when these systems increasingly mediate our encounters with information, memory, and meaning.

This event is a collaborative effort from the Centre for Culture and Technology, ICCIT, the Centre for the Study of the United States, the Department of Social Justice Education, OISE, Innis College’s Writing and Rhetoric Program, and the Knowledge Media Design Institute.

Large information systems aren’t as neutral as they seem.
Join us for a talk with Farhan Samir on how platforms like Wikipedia, speech recognition, and news media shape what we understand as knowledge—and whose voices get heard.

📅 April 2
🕑 2:00–4:00 p.m.
📍 Robarts Library, Room 7020

In collaboration with Critical Computer Group

🔗 Register via link in bio
TechAndSociety

🎮📚 How do we preserve digital worlds that were never meant to last?

Join us for a research talk exploring the literary and design dimensions of early web-based interactive fiction.

📍 Emulators, Editions, and the Literary Forms of Game Design

With Alan Galey & Brendan Allen (University of Toronto)
Using ApertureScience.com—a Flash-based companion site for Portal—this talk examines how emulation and scholarly editions can help preserve and study born-digital cultural artifacts that risk disappearing as technologies change.

🗓 Thursday, January 29, 2026
⏰ 3:00–5:00 PM
📍 Robarts Library, Room 7020

🔗 Register via link in bio

✨ For folks interested in digital preservation, game studies, literary studies, design, and the afterlives of the early web.

Join the STREET lab on March 21 (11 AM – 1 PM) for an EDI Student Initiative Talk with Prof. Gautam on participatory design, stigma, and tech’s role in impact! 🌍✨

Register: https://bit.ly/4iD40SM

The rise of large-scale generative AI has led to a push for narrative closure and technical stabilization, reinforcing a normative "middle ground" in AI governance and creativity.

In this talk, KMDI Director Beth Coleman, Romi Morrison, and Maurice Jones discuss the Wilding AI Lab, which challenges these norms by exploring freer, more open technological possibilities. Check it out:

CTM 2025: Wilding AI 1 – Generative Aesthetics Across Creative Domains Tuesday 28 January 2025 CTM 2025 radialsystem Beth Coleman and Maurice Jones in conversation with Clara Herrmann The rise of large-scale generative AI has driven powerful actors to push for narrativ