2023-2024 Mellon Sawyer Seminar Series: The Data That Divides Us
What is data in the humanities? What relationships do humanists have with data? What is the place of data in humanistic inquiry? These questions are pressing in our era of rapid technological transformation, one which is increasingly predicated on creating and consuming data at ever larger scales. With the rapidly growing power of data over various aspects of our lives, it has been said that "data is the new oil." And as data science increasingly moves into interdisciplinary spaces, humanists’ perspectives are essential.
At CESTA we have been thinking about humanistic approaches to working with data more and more systematically in recent years. From 2020 to 2023 we ran the yearly workshop ‘Critical Data Practices,’ generously funded by our partner, the Stanford Humanities Center; you can read more about this workshop here. In 2023-24, we expanded the reach of this conversation thanks to the award of a Mellon Saweyer Seminar grant from the Mellon Foundation. This support allowed us to organize a year-long series of events on various aspects of the work humanists do with data under the common banner of ‘The Data that Divides Us: Recalibrating Data Methods for New Knowledge Frameworks Across the Humanities’, while also sponsoring two graduate dissertation fellowships and a postdoctoral scholar working at the intersection of humanities and data.
This work is all the more timely. Flagship humanistic journals in a variety of disciplines—History and Theory, Critical Inquiry, American Historical Review and New Literary History—starting in 2022, have all published special issues on data, reflecting on data as a new structural condition and using humanities methods to illuminate the constructed nature of data. But for far longer the "digital humanities" (DH) has been the space where, most explicitly and intentionally, humanists have worked with data, as Miriam Posner wrote in 2015 in Humanities Data as a necessary contradiction. While the term DH is now commonly accepted, even as it refers to many kinds of work in many different fields, we are still at pains to define what exactly the “digital” is, and how one kind of digital work might be in conversation with another. Yet data might be the key. The stakes of defining the digital might not need to center the taxonomic or the programmatic—although as humanists and educators, we do care about those things. Rather, the stakes of the digital are frequently found in the way in which it invites us to confront our relationship to data—and, it turns out, humanists have many, deeply varied relationships to data.
Our relationships to data are fraught at all stages: capturing, collecting, or making data; “cleaning” or “munging” data; preserving, recording, archiving or storing data; analyzing, understanding, or interpreting data; using, manipulating, abusing, contesting, or resisting data--our practices, and our names for those practices, are rooted in commitments, both political and epistemic, that can be challenging to unpack. What does humanistic data look like? What should it look like? And what can we learn about data and humanities when we deliberately ask these questions across disciplines, institutions, and time periods--when a historian confronts the data practices of a literary critic, or a classicist looks at the data originally collected for scientists?
Below is a comprehensive list of all the seminar sessions we hosted in 2023-2024 at CESTA as part of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar ‘The Data that Divides Us.’ By clicking on each one you can find the video recordings of the seminar presentations and the responses provided by Stanford faculty, graduate students, and postdoctoral scholars which have been published as one of the colloquies in Stanford's open access journal Arcade. You can find the full published colloquy here.
Seminar Series Team
Principal Investigators: Professors Giovanna Ceserani (Classics), Mark Algee-Hewitt (English), Grant Parker (African and African American Studies, and Classics), Laura Stokes (History)
Postdoctoral Fellow: Nichole Nomura (Postdoctoral Scholar at CESTA)
Dissertation Fellows: Matt Warner (PhD Candidate in English) and Chloé Brault (PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature)
The Place of Data (11/2/2023)
Setting the stage for our future Mellon Sawyer Seminar discussions, The Place of Data will explore the various axes along which data has engendered the divisions that shape our current world. Whether those divisions lie along fault lines in geography, race, gender, or discipline, our initial seminar will situate our thinking about data within this complex web of cultural intersections. What dangers attend the use of data across these divisions and how might we use data itself to redress these concerns?
Speakers: Alan Liu and Roopika Risam
Respondent: Mark Algee-Hewitt
Counting before Computation (11/30/2023)
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?
Speaker: Brad Pasanek
Respondent: Matt Warner
Transformation in the Archives (1/11/2024)
Paper archives have long been foundational sources of data for humanities scholars–be these materials organized as logs and records or correspondences and various other writings, institutionally produced and preserved or recovered by other means. This seminar will explore how archives have functioned thus far and how they can be newly envisioned in the digital era. What are the risks and rewards of digital archives?
Speakers: Alisea McLeod, Bethany Nowviskie, Cynthia McLeod
Respondent: Peter Leonard
Challenging 19th Century Data Legacies (2/8/2024)
From the differentiation of gendered labor (and of gender itself), to the biological arguments for race-based thinking, to the codification of measures and mapping for land ownership and economic development, the statistical imagination of the west in the nineteenth century created the conditions of social classification whose ramifications we are still dealing with today.
Speakers: Jo Guldi and Erik Fredner
Respondent: Nichole Nomura
Recuperating Forgotten Narratives (4/8/2024)
Previous seminars in our series have attended to divisions, but also possibilities, engendered by data along various fault lines and contexts (from 19th-century statistical thinking to biases in archives, from the challenges of quantification to the history of data governance). What new possibilities open up with this type of textual data? What new narratives can be written about past and present textual traditions? What remains irretrievable?
Speaker: Marlené Daut
Respondent: Matthew Randolph
Catastrophe, Data, and Transformation (4/11/2024)
Historically, catastrophes and disaster occasioned early efforts at social data collection. With these data before them, early modern authorities considered how best to respond to disaster and ward off recurrence. Meanwhile, modern catastrophes have inspired examinations of premodern data with an eye to understanding the deep patterns of the longue durée, with hopes of yielding not only a better understanding of the past, but also actionable data relevant to our contemporary crises.
Speakers: Dagomar Degroot and Jessica Otis
Respondent: Alex Sherman
Recuperating Forgotten Narratives, Part 2 (5/16/2024)
Previous seminars in our series have attended to divisions, but also possibilities, engendered by data along various fault lines and contexts (from 19th-century statistical thinking to biases in archives, from the challenges of quantification to the history of data governance). With this seminar on ‘Recuperating Forgotten Narratives’ we focus on what happens to text when it is digitized and turned into data. What new possibilities open up with this type of textual data?
Speaker: Ayesha Hardison
Respondent: Chloé Brault
Ancient Data and Its Divisions (5/30/2024)
Previous seminars in our series have attended to divisions, but also possibilities, engendered by data along various fault lines and contexts (from 19th-century statistical thinking to biases in archives, from the challenges of quantification to the history of data governance). With this seminar on ‘Ancient Data’ we focus on what happens to ancient sources—textual, material and visual--when digitized and turned into data, and what it means for the study of antiquity to operate in a digital environment and making use of digital tools. How do we work and reimagine the data and information lost?
Speakers: Chiara Palladino, Chris Johanson, Eric Harvey
Respondent: Merve Tekgürler
Final Symposium (5/31/2024)
The final symposium explores the intersection of data and the humanities across four sessions. Data and Disciplinary Divides examines how data transforms disciplines and the role of transdisciplinarity in the humanities. 19th-Century Data Legacies investigates how biases from the age of imperialism and industrialization influence modern data practices. Pre-Modern Data and Computation questions the relevance of "data" in pre-modern contexts and addresses disciplinary divides. Absent Data reflects on the gaps inherent in data and how humanities methods manage uncertainty.