Knowledge Media Design Institute

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

What is omitted is not simply absent—it is constitutive of meaning.

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.

CHANGE OF VENUE
Please note that the venue for the 2026 Franklin Lecture has changed. The lecture will now take place at:
📍 Northrop Frye Hall, Room MF003
73 Queen’s Park Crescent East, University of Toronto

Date and time remain unchanged.

📅 May 11, 2026
🕔 5:00–7:00 p.m.

🔗 Registration: Eventbrite LINK IN OUR BIO

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

Research Talk @ KMDI - Link in our bio
Sensing Bread: Food, Neuroscience, and Design Research
with Maciej Chmara

What happens when bread-making meets neuroscience and design research?

In this performative lecture, designer and researcher Maciej Chmara explores cooking as a site of scientific inquiry, embodied cognition, and sensory experience. The session features live sonification of microbial fermentation and concludes with a guided multisensory sourdough tasting.

📅 March 19, 2026
🕑 2:00 PM
📍 KMDI – Robarts Library, Room 7020
130 St George St, Toronto

Digital Qu**rs and High Tech G**s — Book Talk at KMDI

📅 Tuesday, March 3, 2026
🕑 2:00 p.m.
📍 KMDI – Robarts Library, Room 7020
130 St George St, Toronto
🔗 Register via the link in bio

Join us for a conversation with Dr. Alex D. Ketchum (McGill University) about the history of LGBTQ+ cyber activism—and how q***r communities have long shaped internet culture by organizing, sharing knowledge, and preserving their own histories.

From zines and phone lines to early websites, this talk explores how LGBTQ+ activists built digital infrastructures that still offer vital lessons for today’s debates about technology, power, and activism.

🎮📚 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.

Apply by December 31 to the Black Studies Summer Seminar (BLK-S3)—a one-week, research-intensive, on-campus seminar dedicated to generative debate, collective inquiry, and professional development for PhD candidates, postdoctoral fellows, and pre-tenure faculty with lived experience of being racialized as Black.

📅 May 25–29, 2026
🔗 Link in bio

🎤 Research Talk @ KMDI

We’re excited to welcome Maurice Jones (artist, curator, and PhD candidate at Concordia University) for a talk on AI, digital creation, and cultural institutions.

📅 Tuesday, Sept 23
🕙 10:00 a.m.
📍 Robarts Library, Room 7020, U of T

✨ A Maroon’s Technical Practice: Computational Research-Creation and Black Machine Agencies explores technology-making as resistance, drawing on Black, postcolonial, and feminist technoscience.

🔗 RSVP now [link in bio]

Join us in conversation about art, AI, and futures of cultural practice.

The GLAM Incubator has opened its 2025 Call for Projects, inviting creative and innovative proposals for small-scale, short-term projects in the GLAM sector. The deadline for submission is August 1, 2025. For more details, visit their website: (https://glam.ischool.utoronto.ca/?page_id=2)

Call for Projects « The purpose of the GLAM Incubator is to connect GLAM organizations (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) with expertise and resources from the University of Toronto and industry partners. The Incubator is dedicated to prototyping and supporting small-scale, experimental, and innovative proje...

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