Data and the Critical Process: Knowledge Creation in the Digital Humanities

What happens when the material of the humanities is transformed into data and algorithmically parsed in current Digital Humanities work? What do we gain by bringing computational methods to bear on literary historical or critical questions and, when we do so, how do we fundamentally change the kinds of questions that we can ask?  In this talk I explore the meaning behind the practical aspects of Digital Humanities analyses as I probe the delicate balance we maintain as we apply the critical methodologies of the humanities to the algorithmically derived, statistically significant data that lies behind our results.

Presenter: Mark Algee-Hewitt, Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities, Associate Director of the Stanford Literary Lab, Department of English, Stanford University

Mark Algee-Hewitt is an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at Stanford University and is the Associate Director of the Literary Lab. His research focuses on long eighteenth-century literature in England and Germany as he seeks to combine literary criticism with quantitative analyses. His work in the Literary Lab includes projects on the automatic detection of poetic meter, the origins of the experience of suspense, and the language of environmental protectionism in the US Supreme Court.

This public lecture is part of the Polonsky Foundation Graduate Student Workshops in Digital Humanities: Tools and Methods. This event is open to the public. Attendees without an NYU ID card should enter at the guard's desk in Bobst Library. View the full list of public lectures and graduate student workshops in this series on the Digital Scholarship Services blog.