Professor Miriam Posner (UCLA) will be speaking this week as our Uncommon Digital Humanities Critic for the 2019-2020 academic year. More information about Professor Posner is available here and in Nebraska Today.
Her lecture, titled "Data Trouble," will be delivered on Thursday, January 30, 3:30-5pm in Bailey Library, Andrews Hall. Professor Posner, a digital humanist with interests in labor, race, feminism, and the history and philosophy of data, will discuss how humanists think of data and how they use it, as she writes in her abstract:
"Digital humanists have no particular problem talking about data. We use it, trade it, and think about it constantly. Many "traditional" humanists, though, bristle at the notion that their sources constitute “data.” And yet humanists work with evidence, and they speak of proving their claims. So is this just a problem of terminology? I'll argue in this talk that our data trouble is more substantial than we’ve acknowledged. The term "data" seems alien to the humanities not just because humanists aren't used to computers, but because it exposes some very real differences in the way humanists and scholars from some other fields conceive of the work they do."