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In: Annette Vee
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The English language is a tough one to master. It’s a language full of contradictions, exceptions to seemingly nonsensical rules, and confusing homophones. English Compositionists have spent decades studying how we learn to read and write it, and for most of that time, studies have focused on the language itself; using pens, pencils, and paper—or even a typewriter—little else would likely interfere with or distract from a basic writer’s journey toward mastery. Our April 5, 2021 guest on the podcast, Dr. Annette Vee, studies how writing, and the entire concept of literacy, has changed since the proliferation of digital technologies. For a student to be considered “literate” in an English Composition today, they must not only master the ins and outs of English itself—the minutia of commas, i-before-e, their/there/they’re—but also the computer or device they use to compose: the administrative and participatory tasks of their class’ Learning Management System, their word processing application, the host they send and read class-related emails through, and so much more. And as Dr. Vee points out, a student or employee who pursues a career that uses computers might also be required to learn a programing language before they are considered truly “literate” in the language of their professional world. A lot more goes into language-based literacy today than just words on a page. Dr. Vee is Associate Professor of English and Direction of the Composition Program here at the University of Pittsburgh, as well as a participant and Co-Leader of our Sawyer Seminar, originated in the fall of 2019 (And Read More

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In: Chris Gilliard
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The history of surveillance in the United States is a long one. Our guest for the podcast on March 31, 2021, Dr. Chris Gillard, studies this very fact; Dr. Gillard’s scholarship focuses on digital privacy, institutional tech policy, surveillance capitalism, and digital redlining—a term that he defined on the podcast as “the creation and maintenance of tech practices, policies, pedagogies, and investment decisions that enforce class boundaries and discriminate against marginalized group.” As many of our Seminar guests have attested, too, access and relationships to contemporary digital technologies falls along racial, gendered, and classed lines, and the Internet—and the tools we use to access it—are made overwhelming by and for wealthy, straight white men in urban environments. And as Dr. Gilliard points out, access to the Internet is not the only thing historically minoritized groups are robbed of; these groups are also overwhelmingly stripped of their autonomy and privacy online. Although worries about CCTV and post-Patriot Act wiretapping seem especially twenty-first century, eminent scholars have recently illustrated how the very foundation of our nation, including its formation of racial and class differences, depended on the institution of surveillance. In her groundbreaking Dark Matters: On The Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Browne makes clear the connections between “the Panopticon, captivity, the slave ship, plantation slavery, racism, and the contemporary carceral practices of the U.S. prison system,” illustrating how contemporary surveillance technologies of all kinds have been formed and informed by the U.S.’s methods of policing and categorizing Black life under slavery (Browne pg. 43). This is evident all Read More

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In: Richard Marciano
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On November 1, Dr. Richard Marciano, a professor at the University of Maryland, asked Sawyer Seminar participants, “If you were on an academic desert island, what data would you bring with you?” After hearing about his career, which included working as a computational environmental scientist and at a supercomputing center, studying electrical engineering, and most recently, working as a professor and director of data curation initiatives at UMD, it was clear that Dr. Marciano has had to make decisions like this one numerous times. He discussed moving between jobs or even universities and bringing relevant data sets and sources with him into these roles. Consequently, he lends a fascinating perspective to data curation and records management, as well as pedagogy in these fields. Dr. Marciano first came to UMD when they were seeking professors to transform their Masters in Library and Information Science program and change the way students were trained in digital and computational methods. To balance the fact that he comes from a science background, he intentionally built teams with members from archival and library backgrounds. One of the courses he introduced was an eight-week intensive program across disciplines that uses digital methods to work through data problems. In teaching, he uses tools like Jupyter notebooks to create readable, touchable, interactive environments and learning spaces that others can build upon. In addition, he suggests universities create certificate programs for continuing education in digital methods for humanities and archival professions to keep up with current trends. For example, major curators of data like the National Read More

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In: Edouard Machery
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In a recent meeting of the Sawyer Seminar, Dr. Edouard Machery came to discuss the role of data in his work. He is a Distinguished Professor in the History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) Department at the University of Pittsburgh, and Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science. The HPS department seems to be inherently interdisciplinary, one that brings together apparently diametrically opposed methods, like statistics and philosophy. On their website, it states “Integrating Two Areas of Study: HPS supports the study of science, its nature and fundamentals, its origins, and its place in modern politics, culture, and society.” Though many, seemingly disparate skills are required for such a field, there was still interest in building a new domain, experimental philosophy. Dr. Machery engages in this area in his current research, as he states, “with a special focus on null hypothesis significance testing, external validity, and issues in statistics.” Engaging in such varied methods, and being interdisciplinary at a personal level is difficult (to say the least). If it is true what Malcolm Gladwell states, that mastery in a subject takes roughly 10,000 hours of practice, there are only so many fields of expertise one can cultivate in a lifetime. Working in a domain in which one has gained expertise also takes time. Is it like a language? Are there polyglot parallels? After acquiring four, does one get faster at accruing expertise? Many specialists were drawn to their field because of a passion for the subject, and proficiency materialized as advanced degrees, formalized proof of Read More