Prospective reflections on 2025-26 Acting with nature — prehistory My new book Archaeologies of Nature: Activating the Archive, written with Gabriella Giannachi, University of Exeter and Turin, is now complete and in production. Open Access — it will be available as PDF in June 2026. We use an archaeology of artworks to probe human relationships…
creative pragmatics
AI and collaboration — lessons from Stanford
Here is the keynote I presented at our reunion last week in Odense, of Danish alumni of the Stanford H-Star fellowship program (2010 to 2015). Keith Devlin (H-Star director emeritus) and Connie Svabo of the STEM Education Research Center – FNUG at University of Southern Denmark [Link], were our hosts. The program enabled about 50…
Digital Humanities — a zombie concept
This is part of my long-running commentary on the current state and future of the humanities, including what gets called digital humanities. Nudged by a symposium at Stanford There was a symposium at Stanford last week (November 14-15) called “The Futures of Antiquity in an Age of Digital Data and AI”. Credit goes to faculty…
Deep Mapping
I’m in a workshop about Deep Mapping, delivering the opening keynote. A fascinating gathering (Venice and online), organized by Cristina Manzetti (University of Cyprus), and Valentina Mignosa (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Digital and Public Humanities (VeDPH). The topic is an old favorite of mine, developed in my theatre/archaeology with Cliff McLucas and Mike Pearson…
Andrew Pickering — acting with the world
In a complex world of uncertainty, precarity, risk, and trouble, how do we conceive and teach science? I got to read Andrew Pickering’s new book today — Acting with the World [Link]. I have long admired his philosophically-informed studies of scientific practice. With such elegant and compelling clarity he makes the case for a sustainable…
Binford — telling stories with the past
The new book Creative Pragmatics for Active Learning in STEM Education (edited with Connie Svabo, Tamara Carleton, Chungfang Zhou) prompted a memory today. The title indicates the collection is about STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) education. And so it is. But this is not a book about regular science education. We come at the topic…