Linnaean taxonomy, which imposes hierarchical classifications based on morphological characteristics, has become deeply embedded in modern data architecture, from databases to metadata schemas to AI training datasets. With its hierarchical structure and rigid categorization, Linnaean taxonomy privileges one type of knowledge while marginalizing alternative taxonomies that offer more fluid, contextual, and relational understandings of the natural world. This paper examines how the legacy of Linnaean taxonomy continues to shape contemporary classification systems and artificial intelligence (AI). Indigenous knowledge systems, which include spiritual, cultural, and ecological dimensions, view entities not as isolated objects but as nodes in dynamic, interconnected networks. We draw from the French naturalist, Comte de Buffon, who, in line with Indigenous knowledge systems, viewed nature as continuous and contextual rather than discretely compartmentalized. The dominance of Linnaean-style classification in AI and data systems perpetuates colonial power dynamics and contributes to knowledge homogenization while losing Indigenous languages and classification systems crucial for addressing contemporary environmental challenges, particularly in agriculture and biodiversity conservation. In this Age of AI, we call for a holistic and ecological approach to archives. Therefore, we propose applying ‘rhizomatic hylomorphism,’ an ethnobiological, alternative classification that transcends hierarchical taxonomies to embrace multiplicity, relationality, and contextual meaning.

This paper describes a prototype test harness that has been developed to evaluate the use of large language model retrieval-augmented generation systems for humanities and social science research, with an emphasis on collections held in the galleries, libraries, archives and museum sector. We propose the development of new modes of research software engineering oriented towards the values and principles of those communities, and rigorous modes of software testing grounded in industry best practices.

Data slicing is an inherent practice in machine learning (ML) evaluation, where different subsets of a dataset are used for training and evaluating ML systems. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between September 2023 and February 2024 among the data scientists who develop ML-driven recommender systems for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), this reflection piece highlights the important, yet often overlooked, ML practice of data slicing. Building on archival influences in Critical Dataset Studies and scholarship on critical curation, the paper proposes recasting data slicing as a curatorial practice. This shift makes visible the often highly tacit slicing practices undertaken by data scientists when working with ML datasets. Specifically, the paper traces three central considerations regarding data slicing: replicability, representativeness and generalisability. Using these as examples, the paper reflects on the implications of the selection, organisation, and choices of how to best represent the past to predict the future preferences of audiences. By engaging with data slices as curatorial constructs, we can better understand and intervene in their material politics by making visible how their orderings convey certain meanings more effectively than others. Through this approach, the paper expands on existing work within Critical Dataset Studies by identifying the political role of data slicing in the evaluation of ML systems.

Foundation models are many things and encompass several modalities; they use text, images, sound, and more recently, action or inference units. But all of these forms share one thing in common: the (massive) scale. The “large” in large language models has been well studied by scholars in critical data, AI and archive studies, with several experts pointing at how these models are environmentally harmful, technically opaque and corporationally monopolistic primarily because of their scale. This piece discusses questions of technical and cultural scale – in the material, archival and procedural senses – within the contemporary technical and discursive landscape. At stake here is the role of critical and design studies within academic, artistic and para-academic worlds. It suggests that instead of corporate chatbots that aspire to pass the Turing test through multipurpose, encyclopedic service, we may be better served by playing with local models and reaching for small-scale AI development. This epistemological shift, in fact, may also provide some creative and critical potential that more effectively gets at the strangeness of machine learning systems while consciously and carefully handling the scalar environmental and social impacts of big AI.

This article examines how artificial intelligence (AI) systems engage with archival collections as data, proposing a critical framework to interrogate archival records positioned as data for AI. I present a three-part heuristic for analysing archival records in AI contexts: first, by understanding records as processual entities; second, by examining the infrastructural power that shapes access and preservation of records in AI; and third, by focusing on obfuscation of provenance information and selective inclusion of data that creates new forms of archival silence and exclusion. By reading such data against the training window, critical AI scholars, archivists and archival researchers can better understand the limitations of engaging AI in cultural heritage, reassert institutional control over collections and develop more responsible approaches to documenting archival materials incorporated by AI systems as data resources.

The Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, facing the threat of being the first country lost to climate change, has declared itself the world’s “First Digital Nation.” In the age of deep learning and generative artificial intelligence (AI), this article examines Tuvalu’s state-scale digital twin as a project of preservation and archiving – not a technical fix, but a governing paradigm built on pattern discovery and predictive efficiency. It asks what is preserved through this process, by whom and for whom. The article advances three claims. Firstly, Tuvalu’s digital twin can be read as a state archive recalibrated for the era of generative AI and climate crisis: a live, multimodal apparatus in which records do not merely describe but route attention and authority. Secondly, converting the nation into a digital twin renders Tuvalu an asset, commodifying its culture and infrastructure. This extends a broader pattern of “knowledge islandization,” enacted through archival violence and rooted in colonial practices. Thirdly, drawing on performance theory, the article reads both the modern state archive and the emergent digital twin as performative agents operating across networks of humans, apparatus and governance, actively refining the perceptions of citizenship, local knowledge and statehood.

This article examines the emergence of a new politics of vision shaped by the generative capacities of contemporary AI. It argues that generative technologies craft a distinct visual order, one that enables subtle yet devastating forms of harm through anticipation, projection, and the symbolic manipulation of the future by means of visual pre-enactment. I conceptualize this as speculative violence: a form of harm that does not depict bloodshed or explicit brutality but nonetheless embeds erasure and annihilation within the frictionless aesthetic of machine-generated futures. Speculative violence arises when generative AI is mobilized for its forward-oriented capacities in politically charged contexts, enabling images of possible futures to act upon the present; while not limited to war zones, this article focuses on the Israel–Palestine context for reasons of scope. It shows how, by giving visual form to what has not yet occurred, AI contributes to normalize the disappearance of populations and the destruction of places, stripping politically inflammatory ideas of their shock by rendering them aesthetically plausible. A striking instance is the “Riviera of the Middle East” video, circulated by Donald Trump in February 2025, whose synthetic fantasy of Gaza as a luxury resort visually anticipated – and helped normalize – the logic later formalized in policy proposals, such as the G.R.E.A.T. initiative and the 20-Point Peace Plan. More broadly, the article argues that generative AI functions as archival technology. Far from merely recalling past data, it generates speculative futures that accrue into a future archive: a corpus of synthetic images that shape political discourse and collective perception by visually scripting what should be imagined as likely, desirable or inevitable. In examining this archive, the article illuminates how generative AI transforms political imagination into an aestheticized form of world-making, with profound implications for contemporary regimes of power and violence.

AI assistants are increasingly used for navigating and analysing the contents of major archives. Applying Retrieval Augmented Generation to existing large language models, these tools draw on indexes of the relevant archives to answer, in natural language, users’ questions. In addition to being powerful finding aids, archival AI assistants are also presented as being capable of providing useful, automated answers to questions about the past. This article argues that such tools and how they are marketed result in major conceptual disruptions and uncertainties, placing pressure on our understanding of a range of roles, forms of information and outputs involved in the production of historical knowledge. In particular, we argue that these tools may obscure well-established beliefs that “sources” and “archives” are not unmediated, clearly navigable or necessarily comprehensive, and that the processes by which these are used to write “history” are by no means straightforward or instantaneous. With the aim of mitigating these misunderstandings, the article makes suggestions for how deployers could more carefully frame and describe the intended use of archival AI assistants (especially for public users), to ensure that their benefits for accessibility are exploited while also avoiding misconceptions and safeguarding rigorous historical practice.

In cultural heritage projects and artistic documentation, motion capture has emerged as a key archival strategy that is promised to be a “next stage” solution in preserving and accessing the past. However, motion capture is not an objective recording; it transposes a technological bodily imaginary onto the bodies whose movements it documents. This essay is situated at the intersection of current critical discourses on archives, dance and AI, bringing domain-specific knowledge to reimagine biased algorithmic systems. Although there is substantial risk for representational harms in how current AI motion models are used to render dancing bodies as data, recent projects show that retaining the entanglement of expert practitioners can refine data processing. We argue that incorporating the specificity of dance-based knowledge can support more meaningful historical research practices, in particular when understanding how bodies are themselves also archives. This contributes to identifying and countering the harms that arise from the mismatch between what automated motion extraction systems purport to accomplish and what they actually represent. The article outlines questions and guidelines that reimagine motion data through a visceral approach for an era of AI.

This article examines the collecting that occurred after the 2018 referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution, using the collections database as a lens for understanding how this recent period of Irish history is currently being narrativized. The Eighth Amendment prohibited abortion in almost all circumstances by equating the life of a pregnant person to that of the unborn child; its repeal was a result of four decades of grassroots, feminist campaigning. The collections now being preserved depict this activism, and are made up of campaign documents, photographs, and first-person stories archived from Facebook. Through a close analysis of the database of the Digital Repository of Ireland, where most of these materials are held, this article argues for an interpretation of the database as a political infrastructure, which refracts existing tensions surrounding the future of Irish feminisms and the activist archive. It also examines the database’s politics of visibility in relation to the shame and silence that defined women’s position in Ireland prior to the referendum and advances a theorisation of the archival database as a historiographical technology, which plays an active role in the production of Irish identity in the wake of the Eighth.

Archives are essential vehicles for both historical research and memory practices like genealogy. The sheer volume of documents produced via digital infrastructures, however, has posed a challenge for traditional archival processes that rely on human judgments. Some archivists have responded to this challenge by engaging with research in natural language processing (NLP), a subfield of AI that offers practical tools for working with large corpora of text. In this paper, we review applications of NLP methods in archival processes in order to surface fundamental tensions between archival values and automation. NLP can be used to classify materials as sensitive, recognize names in documents and facilitate new kinds of search, among other applications. Our discussion of these issues follows the journey of a document through an archive, from acquisition to interpretation. We find that sensitivity to context, transparency, resource limitations and maintenance appear as recurring challenges that are complicated by automation. The benefits that NLP technologies lend to managing large archives, however, suggest that these tools should be considered, not discarded. Turning to a more forward-looking discussion of generative AI and archival infrastructure, we argue that the narrative and dialogic potential of contemporary large language models has an especially contentious relationship with conventional archival desiderata.

This paper presents a brief history of archival provenance and its shifting role across different paradigms of archives, considering how this past work can provide insights into current trajectories of AI. It explores what archival provenance does, or can do, differently than current imaginations of data provenance in AI. It proposes three “lessons from archival provenance” that challenge the present focus of existing approaches in AI, in particular highlighting how narrowly this work structures and models evidence, authenticity and creatorship of data. These lessons can be used to identify new opportunities for applying concepts of archival provenance by presenting a roadmap for future work where AI research might align and converge with related work in archival theory. It concludes by asserting that grounding AI datasets in this perspective of archival provenance can realize a new paradigm of “data as archives,” serving to envision responsibilities to a range of data creators, determine needs for documentation of context and establish a crucial role for “data archivists.”

This contribution argues that the practice of data provenance developed in critical research on artificial intelligence (AI), especially around publicly accessible data documentation, could inform a more transparent practice of provenance in archives. To set the ground for this cross-field exchange, I trace frameworks related to provenance, first from archival studies and then from AI/machine learning (ML). I ask how these frameworks overlap and diverge and how they have “flowed” or been assimilated into and adopted by the other field. I show how archival theories have been animated in documenting data in the context of AI and ML, including through documentation frameworks like Datasheets for Datasets, and then reverse that flow of knowledge, arguing that a practice of provenance developed in AI could forward some of the evolving goals of archival provenance, including those related to traceability and transparency.