Working Groups

Faculty Coordinators: Giovanna Ceserani

Involved Members: Patricia Blessing, Elaine Lai, Nicole Coleman, Eyup Eren Yurek

This working group is gathered around methods, tools, and research development and strategization for digital humanities projects using virtual, augmented, and mixed reality technologies. There are a wide range of possibilities for these technologies to be used in DH, as they can allow us to recreate certain archeological sites, reimagine destroyed historical buildings through the reimagining artifacts, create experiences to better understand and feel descriptions within literary and religious texts, and create integrated experiences for education of humanities and social sciences. We are bringing together many on- and off- campus partners to unravel the possibilities of these technologies within the world of digital humanities.

Faculty Coordinators: Mark Algee-Hewitt, Giovanna Ceserani, and Laura Stokes

Graduate Coordinator: Matt Warner

This workshop explores the unique challenges that face the arts and 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. The workshop gives particular attention to what the humanities have to say to data practices in the current moment and urges us to critically examine the issues of representation, equity, accessibility, and discoverability.

Computational and Data Sciences approaches are running against the tensions between the urge to generalize data for the purposes of standardization and prediction, and the need to recognize the significance of the individual and the specific. Recently published work in art history looks to medieval Italy to reveal how measurement itself molds our understanding of truth and accuracy, while work on the long history of all forms of human communication demonstrates from massive datasets how particular events in society, and the effect of one group’s decision-making, can change the course of technological evolution. Stanford, now home to the Institute for Human-centered AI and the Stanford Data Science Institute, as well as the leading Digital Humanities center, CESTA, is uniquely positioned to foster cross-disciplinary conversations on these critical issues.

This workshop is sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center.