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In: Melissa Finucane
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After a half-year intermission, on Friday, Nov. 13, the University of Pittsburgh’s Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Information Ecosystems: Creating Data (and Absence) from the Quantitative to the Digital Age welcomed Melissa L. Finucane, senior social and behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation in Pittsburgh. With a portfolio of work that includes studying human reaction to climate change and other disasters, such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Finucane is interested in how people perceive risk, and her discussion of “use-inspired science” in that context seemed especially relevant amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Finucane helped the participants of the Sawyer Seminar, who are faculty and students at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon University, to rethink the purpose of data’s creation. In this case, Finucane is interested in use-inspired science, which encourages input from communities and stakeholders when formulating research questions. Orienting research toward use-inspired science, Finucane explained, comes with thinking through research questions and outputs that can provide help to a specific population, whether that it’s in a context of policymaking or in responding to the needs of a community affected by disaster. Finucane’s work with the Consortium for Resilient Gulf Communities (CRGC) on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill fits that bill. The idea behind the CRGC is to find ways to build community resilience in the areas affected by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The consortium’s work is broken up into four interconnected activities: 1) respond to issues identified within the community; 2) support the community by engaging in dialogue and education; 3) generate data and ideas to Read More

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In: Colin Allen
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In his computational work, Colin Allen, distinguished professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, embraces the fact that the textual data he uses in his computational work often depends not on his choices, but on someone else’s. Data does not emerge, fully formed, for him and his colleagues to study. He discussed this characteristic of data when he addressed the Information Ecosystems Mellon Sawyer Seminar at the University of Pittsburgh on Friday, Feb. 28. Data, as Joanna Drucker has memorably argued, isn’t data as much as it’s capta. If we remember the Latin meaning of data is “things given” while capta is “things taken,” Drucker’s argument makes sense. The stuff we generate in our experiments or gather in the world doesn’t exist naturally. Rather, it’s taken or made (in which case I suppose we’d call it facta). In Drucker’s formation, we are reminded that data isn’t neutral but often exists according to the individual choice of this or that researcher, or this or that curator. Allen points out that the textual corpus — that is, his data — he uses for one project, Darwin’s reading list, for example, yields its own data when he runs a topic model of the corpus. The topics produced by the model is data he can then interpret in his own work. In this way, Allen explained to me when I interviewed him for an upcoming episode of the Information Ecosystems podcast, data has a habit of begetting more data. “I think it’s important to realize that Read More

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In: Edouard Machery
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What is truth? How do people reach conclusions and evaluate facts? What counts as knowledge, and how do we know? Hold up before you give up on this post, which I realize might seem to be getting into the type of heady esotericism humanists are sometimes criticized for. For Edouard Machery, director of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, these questions about how people understand what it means to know something or how people make knowledge come down to very real-world issues, including the replication crisis that has for the past several years caused hand-wringing among scientists, who acknowledge that the causes of the so-called crisis have to do with entrenched publishing incentives but also disagree about ways to correct it. Machery spoke to the University of Pittsburgh’s Information Ecosystems Sawyer Seminar on Friday, Feb. 21, having presented a public talk entitled “Why are Good Data so Hard to Get? Lessons from the Replication Crisis” the previous day. For his part, Machery was one of dozens of researchers who co-authored a Comment piece in Nature Human Behaviour in January of 2018, calling for a change to the threshold for “statistical significance,” the point at which a study’s results could not be the result of mere chance. Currently, statistical significance can be expressed as P<0.05, but the article, “Redefine Statistical Significance,” argued the threshold should be changed to P<0.005. This change, they argue, “would immediately improve the reproducibility of scientific research in many fields.” The replication crisis has real-world implications: this is not a case of cloistered academics splitting hairs Read More

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In: Jo Guldi
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Jo Guldi’s first book, Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State, argues that Britain became an “infrastructure state” during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period which saw an explosion in construction of roads, along with the accompanying surveying, management, and surveillance of that construction. Guldi’s work often deals with infrastructure, and when she turns her attention away from the history of the British Empire to the digital humanities, infrastructure is at the forefront of her mind there, too. Guldi spoke at the University of Pittsburgh’s Mellon Sawyer Seminar, Information Ecosystems, on Jan. 9 and 10. She also sat down with me for an interview that is part of the podcast series, Information Ecosystems, and will be published soon. As professor of history at Southern Methodist University, Guldi teaches history classes with a few glimpses of the digital humanities, and runs the Guldi Lab, where she employs distant reading techniques to better understand historic texts. While interviewing Guldi and hearing her speak, I was struck by the way the concept of infrastructure — be it the analog infrastructure of roads and canals or the digital infrastructure underlying the Internet — recurs in her work and her thinking. She told me during the podcast interview that she considers it important that her scholarship be available online in open-access form. Many of her articles are open-access, as is her second book, The History Manifesto, co-authored with David Armitage. Like the miles and miles of roads that connected Britain in the nineteenth century, the Internet has the power to connect people and Read More

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In: Sandra González-Bailón
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Sandra González-Bailón began her presentation to the faculty and student participants of the University of Pittsburgh’s Information Ecosystems Sawyer Seminar on Friday, Dec. 6, by discussing one of the first sociology classes she took as an undergraduate in the late 1990s. She recalled learning about the debate between two early sociologists, Gabriel Tarde and Émile Durkheim, who disagreed about what role individuals played in social institutions and social interactions. Tarde suspected that social changes or developments occurred when people with social influence adopted the change or development. He argued this influence might not happen in physical space, but rather occurred between individuals writing letters to one another, or speaking to each other on a new invention, the telephone. Durkheim, on the other hand, argued that societies exist as amalgamations of the people who comprise them. This society is a new entity that is greater than any one group of people or small cabal of influencers. Durkheim was less interested in individual interpersonal interactions that was Tarde. Durkheim was able to back up his claims with data, and as González-Bailón put it, “won” the debate. He is considered to be a father of modern sociology. But González-Bailón, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication and the Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences and studies the way social networks form and function online, suspects that, if Tarde had lived today and had the kind of data that social media or email can yield, he would have been able to better support some of Read More

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In: Mario Khreiche
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The University of Pittsburgh’s Mellon Sawyer Seminar, Information Ecosystems, turned its attention to automation and artificial intelligence on Friday, Oct. 25, when the seminar’s postdoctoral fellow Mario Khreiche presented his research related to the future of work in an age of increasing automation. Khreiche can be described as neither a positivist nor a dystopian. His work lies somewhere in the middle. While he states in his 2019 paper “The Twilight of Automation,” published in Fast Capitalism this fall, “an unchecked project of automation is both ill-conceived and ill-fated” (117) he also takes to task postcapitalist interventions, which he argues “suffers from a certain naïveté, in that its authors undertheorize how emerging technologies unfold as sociotechnical systems, rather than isolated machines” (121).  Khreiche is interested in what he calls a “more nuanced question” – something along the lines of trying to figure out how a company like Uber can adapt or change systems to make them less susceptible to technological redlining, for example. In particular, Khreiche keeps asking what is new about this technological revolution. Work has changed many times in the past: think the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or the first computer revolution of the mid-twentieth century. The Luddites of the nineteenth century smashed weaving machines – but not, as is commonly thought and as the term “Luddite” as it is used today indicates, because they were against technology of any kind. Rather, they were concerned about mechanization being used as a way to exploit workers and produce lower-quality goods. This technological Read More

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In: Ted Underwood
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Ted Underwood has been poking around in the massive HathiTrust database for a few years now, and it’s taught him that libraries are anything but uniform. During his talk with the Sawyer Seminar on Friday, Sept. 20, at the University of Pittsburgh, Underwood, a professor of English and information science at the University of Illinois, pictured his child-self walking through physical libraries, looking for books. He never guessed that every other library in existence didn’t catalogue their books in exactly the same way. But, as he now works with the metadata associated with digitized books in the HathiTrust database, he’s realized the human side of library science a bit more. He’s learned quite a bit about how physical libraries operate, he admitted. While there is national coordination with Library of Congress cataloguing standards, many of the decisions are up to individual librarians, he said. Underwood was the second speaker in the Sawyer Seminar yearlong series entitled “Information Ecosystems: Creating Data (and Absence) from the Quantitative to the Digital Age.” He first spoke at a public lecture on Thursday, Sept. 19, and then for Sawyer Seminar participants on Friday. Many of Underwood’s projects deal with large collections of data, including the HathiTrust database, which stores the digitized collections of several universities totaling over 17 million volumes. In the past, he and his collaborators have leveraged that data to find that the number of women writers of fiction declined from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. He and his team at Illinois are mining HathiTrust for their latest Read More

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In: Matthew Edney
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At first glance, the map may not look like a data-dependent project. But with Matthew Edney’s guidance, the data of cartography became clear at the inaugural Friday lunch seminar in Information Ecosystems: Creating Data (and Absence) From the Quantitative to the Digital Age. Edney, the Osher Professor in the History of Geography at the University of Cartography at the University of Southern Maine, does, however, work with data. Maps, Edney’s specialty, require a lot of data, as it turns out. And the appearance of the finished map depends on what data is collected, for whom, and why. As Johanna Drucker has reminded us, the information scholars work with isn’t given as much as taken, hence her alternate term for “data” – “capta.” That concept is clear in Edney’s work, and in the lively discussion that took place during the Sept. 6 seminar, which included Edney and more than twenty Sawyer Seminar participants from the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon University. Edney’s 1997 book, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843, argues that the British did not record the geographical boundaries of India so much as they invented the space called India to fulfill their imperial ambitions. His new book, Cartography: The Ideal and Its History, puts into tension the ideal of a map – that it is a completely accurate, objective representation of geography – with its reality – that it is in fact a representation of Drucker-esque capta, with all the subjective decisions that go along with amassing that capta. That’s a Read More