Online Conference & Challenge

October 2 & 9, 2020

All times listed are Pacific Daylight Time (UTC -7)

Challenge Research Presenters and Discussant Presenters announced. (Scroll down for details)

Conference

(public event)

Friday, October 2, 2020

9 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. PDT

9:00 - 9:15 Introduction to the conference
9:15 - 10:00 Anne Burdick, Books, Algorithms, and Robots
10:00 - 10:45 Jo Guldi, The Dangerous Art of Text Mining
10:45 - 11:00 Coffee Break
11:00 - 11:45 Mark Hansen, Computational Journalism
11:45 - 12: 30 Moderated Q & A with the speakers

This online event requires registration.

Challenge

(Stanford-only event)

Friday, October 9, 2020

10 a.m. - 3 p.m. PDT

10:00 - 10:15 Introductions
10:15 - 12:00 Working groups
12:00 - 1:00 Lunch break
1:00 - 3:00 Moderated discussion with faculty and library respondents

This is an invitation-only event that will be held online. Pre-recorded papers will be made available to participants beginning October 2, 2020.

October 2 Talks

Books, Algorithms, and Robots: Designing Architectures of Knowledge

Brick-and-mortar libraries might seem like an unlikely starting point for a discussion of data practices. Yet it is precisely the heavy materiality of the library’s modular units (books) and physical infrastructure (floors and shelves) that makes evident the inseparability of design, data structures, and models of knowledge. Therefore, this talk will look at the systems and spaces designed to manage book circulation at four contemporary libraries. The Seattle Central Library’s (SCL) spiral stacks manifest the relative positionality of the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC); in spite of its unique form, the architecture is built upon age-worn disciplinary categories. At the University of Chicago’s Mansueto Library, a giant glass dome sits atop subterranean stacks that are inhospitable to humans but suited to retrieval robots. The public spaces are filled with light but the library’s collection is literally and metaphorically a black box. In contrast, Sitterwerk, a private art library in Switzerland, employs a small army of robots that spend each night tracking books, allowing readers, by day, to place them in arrangements of their own choosing on shelves and tables. What results is a library that is in a dynamic state of remix (Navas). Taking this notion one step further, the speculative Universal Programmable Library, imagined in The Library Beyond the Book (Battles and Schnapp), uses algorithmic logistics to create a library in a perpetual state of flow, one whose physical dimensions confound our expectations of what shape a library should assume. In each example, we will see how the assemblage of books, metadata, mechanisms, and infrastructures are manifest in a kind of material epistemology, designs (architectural and otherwise) that give form to each configuration.

Watch recorded talk.

Anne Burdick

Anne Burdick is Founding Director of the Knowledge Design Lab in the School of Design at the University of Technology Sydney where she is a Research Professor of Visual Communication Design. Her practice-based research explores new forms of knowledge production through the design of media, visualisations, interfaces, and publications. She is currently working on the design of the digital New Variorum Shakespeare together with researchers at the Center of Digital Humanities Research (CoDHR) at Texas A&M. Dr. Burdick has collaborated with writers and texts on projects that include: Trina: A Design Fiction, with Janet Sarbanes; Digital_Humanities (MIT Press, 2013) with Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Pressner, and Jeffrey Schnapp; Writing Machines (MIT Press, 2004) book and web supplement with N. Katherine Hayles; and Fackel Wörterbuch: Redensarten (Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2000), an experimental dictionary that received the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for the “Most Beautiful Book in the World.” From 1995 through 2012, she was designer and design editor of Electronic Book Review. Dr. Burdick is also adjunct faculty in the Media Design Practices MFA at ArtCenter College of Design, which she chaired from 2006-2018.

The Dangerous Art of Text Mining: Thinking About Monkeys, Violence, and Time in an Age of Automated Information Retrieval

Mass digitization has created other-worldly landscapes onto which scholars and entrepreneurs have projected their fantasies: dreams about a deep history of human evolution and schemes for predicting human interaction and markets. What is the truth of the new troves of data and what we can find there? Reviewing recent disasters and successes of research longue-duree and digital, this talk urges three postulates for an interdisciplinary data science driven by engagement rather than fantasy: (1) The data about the past is dirty in more ways than one. (2) Critical thinking is most powerful when applied to each part of the research process. (3) The building blocks of historical analysis reward inquiry.

Watch recorded talk.

Jo Guldi

Jo Guldi is associate professor of History at Southern Methodist University and external faculty at the Stevanovich Institute for the Formation of Knowledge at the University of Chicago. She is author of Roads to Power (Harvard 2010) and, with David Armitage, of The History Manifesto (Cambridge 2014). She has published many articles on the techniques and theory of "distant reading" applied to history, including “Critical Search,” Journal of Cultural Analytics (2018), and "The Birth of Rent Control," Flux (2020). Dr. Guldi is a former junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She is currently PI of a $1 million NSF grant for applying text mining to the history of property in modern Britain. Her next book, a history of global struggles over housing and landownership in the twentieth century, will be published by Yale in the Fall of 2021 under the title The Long Land War. She is currently preparing a methodological manuscript called The Dangerous Art of Text Mining.

Computational Journalism

Journalists have long turned to data and computation as important components in their reporting. In 1904, Joseph Pulitzer himself advocated for the inclusion of data analysis in his College of Journalism. “You want statistics to tell you the truth” he explained, and then quickly pointed out that with statistics you can find “romance, human interest, humor and fascinating revelations.” Data and its analysis are unique “sources” for journalists, having tremendous narrative potential — and on every beat. But we train our students not to simply report “with” data and computation. In ways that would have been hard for Pulitzer to fully anticipate, data and computation now form complex systems of power in our world. Journalists have a unique responsibility to assess if these systems are fair, holding these new constellations of power to account — reporting “on” data and its uses. For the last eight years, I have been training journalists to report “on” as well as “with” data, code and algorithms. My talk is about my experiences and what “Computational Journalism” might mean for the practice of Statistics — what the Data Sciences can learn from Journalism.

Watch recorded talk.

Mark Hansen

Mark Hansen joined the faculty at Columbia Journalism School in July of 2012 and took on the position of inaugural director of the east coast branch of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation. Prior to joining Columbia, he was a professor at UCLA, holding appointments in the Department of Statistics, the Department of Design Media Arts and the Department of Electrical Engineering. He was also a Co-PI for Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, an NSF Science and Technology Center devoted to the study of sensor networks. Prior to UCLA, Hansen was a Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey.

For nearly three decades, Hansen has been working at the intersection of data, art and technology. Hansen has an active art practice involving the presentation of data for the public. Read his full bio here: https://brown.columbia.edu/portfolio/mark-hansen/