I’m Sam Hind, a lecturer in digital media and culture at the University of Manchester, UK. I’m based in the department of Art History and Cultural Practices (AHCP), and a member of the Centre for Digital Humanities, Cultures and Media. I was the founding Programme Director for the MA in Digital Media, Culture and Society (2023-25). I am currently on academic research leave (2025-26, semester 1).
I recently published a monograph on the phenomenon of autonomous driving, Driving Decisions: How Autonomous Vehicles Make Sense of the World (Palgrave, 2024). The book considers how different mapping, sensing, and machine learning (ML)-dependent capabilities are gifted to autonomous vehicles through different kinds of technical work: from computer science students annotating visual data in industry-funded research centres to software engineers designing ‘end-to-end’ ML models at autonomous vehicle start-ups.
My main research interests include:
- machine vision and machine learning cultures
- tech innovation and competitions
- automotive industry/platform automobility
- autonomous driving
- history of computer simulation
- environmental impacts of AI
You can see my publications here.
I was previously a research associate in the Navigation in Online/Offline Spaces project of the Media of Cooperation SFB1187 at the University of Siegen, Germany. Before that I was in Locating Media, and received my PhD from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick, UK. I was also a research assistant on the Playfields project.
I was co-author of Playful Mapping in the Digital Age (2016), and co-editor of both Time for Mapping: Cartographic Temporalities (2018) and Interrogating Datafication: Towards a Praxeology of Data (2022).
Inspired by the AIAAIC repository we (Lucie Kealey, Olivia Shaw, Yihan Chen, Jiahui Tang, Amy Bower and myself) built an environmental AI (EAI) database, a public resource collating material on the environmental impact of AI. Check it out here: https://sites.google.com/view/eaidatabase/home
My research portal is here: https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/sam.hind.html
You can email me at sam.hind@manchester.ac.uk and I’m (still, just about) on X: @samhind10
Sam Hind 