Tasha, Anna-Maria, Max

In the past few months, there has been a growing awareness within the project of the environmental impacts of different digital tools and methods, including but not limited to our experimentations with LLMs like ChatGPT. Analysts have recently warned about the environmental costs of training and deploying LLMs, as well as other computing-intensive tasks, and these have been reported extensively in mainstream news headlines. Environmental costs include high energy consumption (alongside its associated carbon emissions in both computation and in cloud storage solutions relying on large data centres), water usage employed in cooling, the mining of rare metals for building computers, and the proliferation of technological waste and its associated pollution. As this is a relatively new area of research and practice, there is a lack of detailed information available to cultural heritage researchers and practitioners on the topic – the most detailed currently is produced by the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition.

Drawing on the CE’s experience over the past three years, we intend to contribute to future research practice in the following ways:

  1. To better understand the Congruence Engine’s energy usage, by developing a questionnaire which will assess the carbon footprint of the project’s research practices and processes, to be completed by a combination of team members and project partners.
  2. To create and share a Zotero group with references to recent literature on the environmental impacts, paying particular attention to material relevant to cultural heritage. Any literature review produced may feed in to future publications. Zotero group available here.
  3. To author a checklist for cultural heritage researchers and practitioners which will help improve environmental literacy in the sector. This checklist will be shared in collaboration with the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition (DHCC). We will also produce a project case study for publication by the DHCC.
  4. To run a workshop for members of the CE in July (provisional date = afternoon of July 16th August 5th, 2-4 pm) to discuss the results of our work, and lead a wider project conversation around the question of environmental ethics in research.

Anna-Maria, Tasha and Max will also complete a daylong course offered as part of the Carbon Literacy Project, which will help to inform each of the points above.

Update 17/07/2024 - ENVIRONMENTAL WORKSHOP, August 5th (2-4pm)

In early June, we launched a survey of the CE’s understanding of environmental impact and its relationship with our various strands of work. We have now scheduled a workshop to explore CE’s work in relationship to environmental impact and ethics. This will take place at the Dana Study on Monday 5th August, 14:00-16.00, during the space currently reserved for the investigations meeting.

The workshop will follow the following structure:

  1. Introduction (Tasha and Ana-Maria)
  2. Analysis and discussion of survey (Tasha) + discussion
  3. Environmental impact case study (Kunika) + discussion
  4. Discussion of the SMG’s positionality in relation to environmental impact work (Max) + discussion
  5. Summing up

If you have not yet responded to the survey, it is not too late. You can do so by following this link: https://forms.office.com/e/wUu3KwVRdD .

Workshop notes