David Wrisley (NYU Abu Dhabi): Listening to Emerging Voices in Digital Humanities in Arab Countries Chair: Kasra Ghorbaninejad (U Victoria)

View presentation: https://echo360.ca/media/b348ae43-40cd-4e3c-8c2b-64208f97920d/public

Abstract: This presentation aims to acquaint the Digital Humanities Summer Institute audience with a community in formation – the digital humanists working in Arab countries – a community that I have the pleasure of interacting with in my day to day practice. In so doing, my main goal is to amplify ongoing work of practitioners in a number of Arab world settings, to outline some of the challenges of research in these contexts and to frame possible scenarios for regional community building. The talk purposefully sets aside digital research carried out on/about the Arab region from the outside, either from area or Oriental studies which “peer in” or from historical frameworks which “look back” on the region as a fixed object. Through interviews with the community I hope to highlight some of the emerging voices in digital humanities that might surprise, nuance or even destabilize notions that we have of the region. The talk will shed light on the multiple barriers that digital scholarship faces regionally: the dearth of digitized materials for research, digital methods developed with other languages and communities in mind as well as infrastructure that has only begun to be localized for regional use.

Miriam Posner (UCLA): What Does “Data” Mean in the Humanities? Chair: Lisa Goddard (U Victoria)

View presentation: https://echo360.ca/media/b348ae43-40cd-4e3c-8c2b-64208f97920d/public

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. In this talk, I’ll outline the specific points of tension between the notion of data and the ways that humanists work with sources, and I’ll explain why I think this epistemological divide actually suggests some incredibly interesting avenues of investigation. Is there a way we can build humanist concerns into the data table? Miriam Posner is an assistant professor at the UCLA School of Information. She’s also a digital humanist with interests in labor, race, feminism, and the history and philosophy of data. As a digital humanist, she is particularly interested in the visualization of large bodies of data from cultural heritage institutions, and the application of digital methods to the analysis of images and video. A film, media, and American studies scholar by training, she frequently writes on the application of digital methods to the humanities.