Data Practices: Challenge

CESTA, Stanford Data Science Institute, and Stanford Libraries are hosting an online trans-disciplinary event exploring how data science, digital humanities, and libraries address sources, methods, and meaning.

Researchers in every field of study have access to far more data than could have been imagined even a decade ago. The scale and speed of data creation has opened up exciting new paths of inquiry while also introducing new kinds of data bias and challenges. Data science has made significant advances in computational and mathematical tools to organize and analyze data, recognize patterns and make predictions at scale. The digital humanities are also concerned with scale, but focus on how we reduce historical and literary sources into data representations that are ripe for computation. Libraries and archives that produce metadata, define collections, and trace provenance, all to provide meaningful context, are in need of more powerful tools to support the production of new knowledge. This state of things provides an opportunity, and perhaps faces us with an imperative, to learn from each other across theoretical and methodological divides, and to address the social, ethical, and political implications of the boundlessness of data today.

Stanford PhD candidates and recent recipients from disciplines across campus will participate in a challenge that includes selected paper presentations and group workshopping of those papers through the lens of issues in data practices. The event will culminate in a discussion and review of the workshopping sessions findings with faculty and library staff.

The application deadline passed on Sept. 6. CFP at datapractices.stanford.edu.

Not open to the public.