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. “Goals as Constraints: Writing miniKanren Constraints in miniKanren.” In miniKanren and Relational Programming Workshop, 2023.
Donahue, Evan. “All The Microworld’s A Stage: Realism in Interactive Fiction and Artificial Intelligence.” American Literature 95. no. 2 (June 2023): 229-254.
Donahue, Evan. “Efficient Variational Inference in miniKanren with Weighted Model Counting.” In miniKanren and Relational Programming Workshop, 2022.
Donahue, Evan. “Towards an Android Linguistics: Pragmatics, Reflection, and Creativity in Machine Language.” Proceedings of Theoretical and Foundational Problems in Information Studies 81, no. 1 (July 2022).
Donahue, Evan. “Guarded Fresh Goals: Dependency-Directed Introduction of Fresh Logic Variables.” In Proceedings of the 2021 miniKanren and Relational Programming Workshop. Virtual. 2021. 74-88. Mississauga: University of Toronto Mississauga.
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, 2021.
Donahue, Evan. “The Last Ship Sails: Raising the Titanic from Black Diamond Bay.” Lute & Drum, vol. 7, no. 1, 2016.
