In a conversation with our editor, Lauren Klein, Tanvi Sharma, Shiyao Li, and Margy Adams reflect on their digital humanities project at Emory University, Data by Design: A History in Five Charts. The co-authors reflect on visualizing difficult histories, and the unique ways in which digital humanities allows us to make arguments.

Previous seminars in our series have attended to divisions, but also possibilities, engendered by data along various fault lines and contexts (from 19th-century statistical thinking to biases in archives, from the challenges of quantification to the history of data governance). With this seminar on ‘Recuperating Forgotten Narratives’ we focus on what happens to text when it is digitized and turned into data. What new possibilities open up with this type of textual data? What new narratives can be written about past and present textual traditions? What remains irretrievable? Ayesha Hardison addresses these questions through her work on digitizing and making accessible the history of Black writing.

With this seminar on "Recuperating Forgotten Narratives" we focus on what happens to text when it is digitized and turned into data. What new possibilities open up with this type of textual data? What new narratives can be written about past and present textual traditions? What remains irretrievable? Marlene Daut addresses these questions through her work on 19th-century Hatian print culture. 

Paper archives have long been foundational sources of data for humanities scholars–be these materials organized as logs and records or correspondences and various other writings, institutionally produced and preserved or recovered by other means. What are the risks and rewards of digital archives? What are our corresponding responsibilities–as archivists and scholars of archives in the digital era? What makes a digital data archive? What are their ethics in the new digital formats of accessibility and of preservation? Can we revolutionize the burdens that accompany past archives? This seminar addresses these pressing questions of archives in the digital era.

The statistical imagination of the west in the nineteenth century created the conditions of social classification whose ramifications we are still dealing with today. This workshop begins the hard task of unpacking this late nineteenth-century nexus, challenging in particular its data legacies. What conditions underwrote these codifications of race, gender, and development? What do they tell us about the prehistory of data in the centuries before, and what are the consequences of that transformation today?

In a conversation with our editor, Elaine Treharne reflects on the synergy between Medieval studies and technological innovation, pathbreaking student research at CESTA, and the challenges digital humanists navigate at Stanford.

In a conversation with our editor, Matthew Warner and Nichole Nomura reflect on their work at the Stanford Literary Lab, the importance of collaboration and technical skills, and the future of the digital humanities curriculum.

Jessica Otis from George Mason University and Dagomar Degroot from Georgetown University discuss the intricate relationship between catastrophe and data through early modern sources.

What do we make of the quantifying impulse in response to danger? What of the affective affordances of putting danger in the form of numbers or visualizations? How do divides in data literacy set up stark material divides when data represents life-threatening dangers? 

Brault examines the promise of data as the opportunity to examine methods, to do something new and to vary methods, to scale claims and the type and amount of evidence presented to substantiate them, and to deepen and complicate arguments.