Mellon Sawyer Seminar Series: Counting Before Computation - Brad Pasanek with a response by Matt Warner
The Data that Divides Us: Recalibrating Data Methods for New Knowledge Frameworks Across the Humanities
Although data is something that we now associate with the revolutions in information technology in the 20th century, the rise of data-driven quantification dates back substantially earlier. This seminar will explore how Enlightenment-era science and nineteenth-century statistics continue to influence our data collection and analysis today. What kinds of quantification existed before the digital turn and how can the application of contemporary methods of data analysis help redress the inequalities that eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century counting produced?
This is the second event in the Mellon Sawyer Seminar series, The Data that Divides Us: Recalibrating Data Methods for New Knowledge Frameworks Across the Humanities, generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. During Stanford University's 2023-24 academic year, the Sawyer Seminar Series will convene scholars from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and personal standpoints to discuss the data that has saturated our world. Following the talk, there will be a response by Matt Warner (PhD candidate, English at Stanford).
This event will be preceded by a reception at 5:00 p.m. at the Stanford University Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) on the fourth floor of Wallenberg Hall (Bldg. 160). A Zoom link is available upon request from Office Management Intern, Daniela Perez (perezd20 [at] stanford.edu (perezd20[at]stanford[dot]edu)).
About the Presenters
Brad Pasanek is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies. He is the author of Metaphors of Mind, A Dictionary, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2015. His overlapping areas of study include eighteenth-century literature, the digital humanities, and poetry and poetics. His research, teaching, and advising focus on literary form and intellectual history, with a developing interest in critical making and fabrication (laser cutters and 3D printing). He's at work on a new book about Josephine Miles and the pre-digital digital humanities.