Critical Data Practices Symposium
What are the unique challenges that face the humanities as we ground data-driven insights in real-world human complexity, and in various social, cultural, and historical contexts? Digitization and computational methods provide new opportunities for understanding the cultural implications of data, its meaning, and its significance to the long history of recorded human experience. We must therefore carefully consider the ways that we derive meaning from data through critical attention to methods and sources—our critical data practices. With this symposium, which we organize around a number of questions raised by working with data in the humanities, we aim to join the threads of the general and the specific, the diachronic and synchronic, and to create a space in which what Lorraine Daston called the “hidden affinities” between disciplines becomes perceptible.
Program
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8:00-9:00 am |
Breakfast |
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9:00 - 10:30 am |
Panel #1: Outliers Is humanism the study of outliers? As data humanists, we are well positioned to overturn this paradigm, but should we?
Rachael King (UCSB) Danny Snelson (UCLA) Radhika Koul (Stanford) and Nichole Nomura (Stanford ) |
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10:30 - 10:45 am |
Coffee break |
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10:45 am- 12:15 pm |
Panel #2: The Problem of Missing Data What can we do about data that is necessarily incomplete, or where the incompleteness of the data is precisely what gives it its scholarly interest? Elaine Treharne (Stanford) Nicole Coleman (Stanford) Kent Chang (UC Berkeley) and Teddy Roland (UCSB) |
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12:15 - 1:15 pm |
Lunch |
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1:15 - 2:45 pm |
Panel #3: Space and Data How do digital tools and methods afford us with new opportunities for working with spatial data, and how can (other) computational methods occlude the spatial? Sean Fraga (USC) Bridget Algee-Hewitt (Stanford) Merve Tekgürler (Stanford) and Leonardo Barleta (Stanford) |
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2:45 - 3:00 pm |
Coffee |
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3:00 - 4:30 pm |
Panel #4: Best Practices for Working with Technical Results How do we communicate results founded on technical methods to subject-matter experts without mystification, but without also erasing or downplaying our own labor? How do we deal with non-textual data? David Bamman (UC Berkeley) Marit MacArthur (UC Davis) Annie Lamar (Stanford) and Alix Keener (Stanford) |
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4:30-5:00 pm |
Concluding Remarks by Miriam Posner (UCLA) |
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5:00-6.00 pm |
Reception |