My work examines the history and contemporary practice of artificial intelligence (AI) with an emphasis on natural language processing. I study how the ideas and institutions of AI took shape in response to both broader social trends as well as the specific materialities of computation. Moreover, I draw on this historical material to design new computational technologies. I am currently working on a book manuscript that traces the history of the entanglements between language and intelligence in artificial intelligence. In particular, at Tokyo College, I am investigating how competing conceptions of intelligence and computation in Japan and the United States during the 1980s influenced the development of AI in these countries.
2021- Postdoctoral Fellow, Tokyo College
2021 PhD Computational Media, Arts & Cultures, Duke University
2011 ScB/BA Computer Science/Mathematics and Modern Culture & Media, Brown University
Donahue, Evan. “Theseus in the Epistemic Labyrinth: A Critical History of the Semantic Differential Method and the Apparent Weight of Color.” Machine Intelligences in Context: Beyond the Technological Sublime, special issue of Culture Machine, vol. 20, no. 1, forthcoming.
Donahue, Evan. “Guarded Fresh Goals: Dependency-Directed Introduction of Fresh Logic Variables.” In miniKanren and Relational Programming Workshop, forthcoming.
