Data Practices: Conference

Date
Fri October 2nd 2020, 12:00am
Event Sponsor
CESTA
Stanford Libraries
Stanford Data Science Institute
Location
Broadcast live via Zoom
Data Practices: Conference

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. This virtual conference will feature plenary talks by Anne Burdick, Jo Guldi, and Mark Hansen.

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.

The Data Practices conference will feature three plenary talks from thought leaders in data science, the humanities, and design introduced by the conference organizers: Giovanna Ceserani, Chiara Sabatti, and Nicole Coleman.

This event will be hosted as a "watch party" via Zoom, with talks followed by question and answer sessions with the speakers. Register by October 1 to receive details to access the video conference.


Anne Burdick is Founding Director of the Knowledge Design Lab in the School of Design at the University of Technology Sydney where she is a Research Professor of Visual Communication Design. Her practice-based research explores new forms of knowledge production through the design of media, visualisations, interfaces, and publications. She is currently working on the design of the digital New Variorum Shakespeare together with researchers at the Center of Digital Humanities Research (CoDHR) at Texas A&M. Dr. Burdick has collaborated with writers and texts on projects that include: Trina: A Design Fiction, with Janet Sarbanes; Digital_Humanities (MIT Press, 2013) with Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Pressner, and Jeffrey Schnapp; Writing Machines (MIT Press, 2004) book and web supplement with N. Katherine Hayles; and Fackel Wörterbuch: Redensarten (Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2000), an experimental dictionary that received the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for the “Most Beautiful Book in the World.” From 1995 through 2012, she was designer and design editor of Electronic Book Review. Dr. Burdick is also adjunct faculty in the Media Design Practices MFA at ArtCenter College of Design, which she chaired from 2006-2018.

Jo Guldi is Associate Professor of History at Southern Methodist University and external faculty at the Stevanovich Institute for the Formation of Knowledge at the University of Chicago.  She is author of Roads to Power (Harvard 2010) and, with David Armitage, of The History Manifesto (Cambridge 2014).  She has published many articles on the techniques and theory of "distant reading" applied to history, including “Critical Search,” Journal of Cultural Analytics (2018), and "The Birth of Rent Control," Flux (2020). Dr. Guldi is a former junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.  She is currently PI of a $1 million NSF grant for applying text mining to the history of property in modern Britain.  Her next book, a history of global struggles over housing and landownership in the twentieth century, will be published by Yale in the Fall of 2021 under the title The Long Land War.   She is currently preparing a methodological manuscript called The Dangerous Art of Text Mining.

Mark Hansen is Director of the Brown Institute at Columbia Journalism School. Mark Hansen joined the faculty at Columbia Journalism School in July of 2012 and took on the position of inaugural director of the east coast branch of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation. Prior to joining Columbia, he was a professor at UCLA, holding appointments in the Department of Statistics, the Department of Design Media Arts and the Department of Electrical Engineering.  He was also a Co-PI for Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, an NSF Science and Technology Center devoted to the study of sensor networks. Prior to UCLA, Hansen was a Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. For nearly three decades, Hansen has been working at the intersection of data, art and technology. Hansen has an active art practice involving the presentation of data for the public. Read his full bio here: https://brown.columbia.edu/portfolio/mark-hansen/

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