The Data that Divides Us: Methods and Frameworks for Data Across the Humanities

Flagship humanistic journals in a variety of disciplines—History and Theory, Critical Inquiry, American Historical Review and New Literary History—have recently published special issues on data, reflecting on data as a new structural condition and using humanities methods to illuminate the constructed nature of data. But for far longer the "digital humanities" (DH) has been the space where, most explicitly and intentionally, humanists have worked with data, as Miriam Posner wrote in 2015 in Humanities Data as a necessary contradiction. While the term DH is now commonly accepted, even as it refers to many kinds of work in many different fields, we are still at pains to define what exactly the “digital” is, and how one kind of digital work might be in conversation with another. Yet data might be the key. The stakes of defining the digital might not need to center the taxonomic or the programmatic—although as humanists and educators, we do care about those things. Rather, the stakes of the digital are frequently found in the way in which it invites us to confront our relationship to data—and, it turns out, humanists have many, deeply varied relationships to data.

Our relationships to data are fraught at all stages: capturing, collecting, or making data; “cleaning” or “munging” data; preserving, recording, archiving or storing data; analyzing, understanding, or interpreting data; using, manipulating, abusing, contesting, or resisting data--our practices, and our names for those practices, are rooted in commitments, both political and epistemic, that can be challenging to unpack. What does humanistic data look like? What should it look like? And what can we learn about data and humanities when we deliberately ask these questions across disciplines, institutions, and time periods--when a historian confronts the data practices of a literary critic, or a classicist looks at the data originally collected for scientists?

At the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) at Stanford we began in 2020 a conversation about data and the humanities in the Workshop "Critical Data Practices" (funded by Stanford Humanities Center). In 2023-2024, thanks to a Mellon Foundation grant, we continued and expanded on that conversation to include outside invited speakers and to support a postdoctoral researcher and two graduate dissertation fellows with the Mellon Sawyer Seminar Series “The Data That Divides Us.” Hosted by CESTA, this year-long seminar asked participants to interrogate how historical assumptions about data continue to shape modern divisions and, paradoxically, might offer new avenues for bridging them. (See the full schedule here.) Taking a deliberately historical and transdisciplinary approach, the seminar as a whole explored the underlying assumptions in the collection, conceptualization, and application of data as these have developed in the last three centuries. What latent bias might historical data carry undetected into our present moment? How has this data shaped contemporary manifestations of historical divisions even as it has created new social, cultural, and political fissures? And how might data help us to redress or speak across the very divisions that it has engendered? These are of the kind questions best tackled in conversations across disciplines and expertise, and we have been fortunate to draw on a community of librarians, archivists, graduate students, faculty, and data activists in this work.

In this Colloquy we share various outcomes of our "The Data that Divides Us" conversation. We include video recordings of visitors’ presentations and written responses to these talks by other seminar participants. We also feature a piece written for the concluding symposium by Chloé Brault, one of the Seminar’s Dissertation Fellows and a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature, in which she synthesizes the major themes and conversations of the year. And we include a post-seminar interview, led by Nichole Nomura (Seminar’s Postdoctoral Researcher, and now lecturer in the English Department at Stanford) and Matt Warner (Seminar’s Dissertation Fellow, and now lecturer in the English Department at Stanford) with the Mellon Sawyer Seminar’s PIs: Giovanna Ceserani (Classics), Mark Algee-Hewitt (English), Laura Stokes (History), and Grant Parker (Classics and African and African American Studies). The interview reflects on the lessons of the year, and answers the hardest question of all: is data singular or plural?

These reflections underscore the notion that data, in the humanities, is more than a tool. It is a site of inquiry, a cultural artifact, and often a point of tension. Through collective examination, we find that our relationships to data invite us not only to question what we know but also to explore how we know it, taking us to a space of humanistic inquiry where data both divides and connects us, drawing disparate practices and perspectives into critical conversation.