Opening Session of 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