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SUMMARY:Measuring Futurity\; the Future of Modeling\; and the Risks of Syn
 thetic Data in SF Studies
DTSTART:20260617T120000Z
DTEND:20260621T210000Z
UID:https://cdh.princeton.edu/events/2026/06/measuring-futurity-the-future
 -of-modeling-and-the-risks-of-synthetic-data-in-sf-studies/
DESCRIPTION:\n\n  In this talk\, I will share findings from the Speculativ
 e Fiction Observatory (SFO)\, a collective of researchers based at the Cen
 ter for Digital Humanities at Princeton. Over the past two years\, we have
  devised data-intensive methods for observing what’s out there in the va
 st history of sf. SFO members are exploring the unique shape of contempora
 ry space opera\, digitizing and cataloguing thousands of 1920s pulp reader
  letters\, curating a dataset of all works in the Internet Speculative Fic
 tion Database (ISFDB) accessible in the HathiTrust Digital Library\, and m
 easuring how far a future sf has imagined in works of fiction\, film\, TV\
 , comics\, and video games from 1733 to the present.The second part of my 
 talk will share findings from this latter project\, a peer-reviewed datase
 t called “Time Horizons of Futuristic Fiction\,” published last summer
  by the *Post-45 Data Collective.* Viewing sf as a mega-franchise of futur
 e histories in conversation with one another\, strung out along a single\,
  linear timeline\, severely limits the true temporal horizons of the genre
 . I will use the data I have curated to gesture toward more fluid time sca
 les\, including those suggested by the natural world (like Alaska River Ti
 me\, a project of the Anchorage Museum’s SEED Lab that calibrates a cloc
 k according to the pace of glacial melt) and zoefuturist works of sf inspi
 red by ecological and nonhuman time scales.\n\n\nhttps://cdh.princeton.edu
 /events/2026/06/measuring-futurity-the-future-of-modeling-and-the-risks-of
 -synthetic-data-in-sf-studies/
LOCATION:Michigan State University\, East Lansing\, MI
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