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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: Lyneise Williams
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In the midst of COVID-19 induced social isolation, with many institutions like museums closing their doors, digital surrogates are forced to temporarily take the place of embodied experience. While most of our distancing is temporary — for some objects, their surrogates are all we have. The weight that replicas have to bear is dependent on their function. If the original object is destroyed, through intentional or accidental means, the record of that original no longer serves as a finding aid — something that points the way to an attainable original. If our reproductions will serve in place of original objects, predicting what will be meaningful about the original is necessary, demanding, and maybe impossible. Such mindful practices are also undeniably worth it. Dr. Lyneise Williams has articulated the stakes of this issue well in, “What Computational Archival Science Can Learn from Art History and Material Culture Studies.” Why not just keep the original? Why put so much pressure on replicas? There are cases that require replicas to rise up to the task of “replacement.” Space is often an issue. Thousands of newspapers have been microfilmed, which is a much smaller and more stable form. The stability is also a key reason why originals are often not saved. Newspaper is produced cheaply, and the paper itself degrades over time. These concerns are not trivial, particularly since the housing of archival documents requires a stable environment (reminder: you shouldn’t store things you want to save in non-climate-controlled areas like basements or sheds). Sometimes it is impractical or even 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

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In: Matthew Lincoln
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On February 7th, one of the Seminar’s very own participants headed our lunchtime discussion; Dr. Matthew Lincoln, a research software engineer at Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, talked with us about museum informatics, archive management, and computational approaches to humanities projects. Although his transition to software engineer is relatively recent, his experience with data modelling and analysis is definitely not—before his move to Carnegie Mellon, Dr. Lincoln earned a Ph.D. in art history from University of Maryland, where he used computational methods to study 16th-18th century Dutch printmakers. This, along with his work on data engineering at the Getty Research Institute’s Getty Provenance Index Databases, makes him uniquely attuned to multiple aspects of building data sets and archiving. As Dr. Lincoln himself articulated during his talk, using large data sets as a Ph.D. candidate—what he worded as the “available technology”—alerted him to particular data absences within library and museum holdings; in other words, researchers can only carry out the large-scale digital projects that data actually exist for. If you’ve ever searched for an eBook only to find that a digital version of this text does not (yet) exist, you know this feeling; it is, on a smaller scale, the same feeling a researcher might have if they, for example, wanted to compare one particular library system’s entire collection to another—but there is no usable data with which to do such a project. The project idea is there, the necessary data is not. This is where and why Dr. Lincoln’s job becomes so essential; his work has helped Read More

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In: Matthew Lincoln
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While all of the Sawyer Seminar speakers so far have been scholars or users of information ecosystems, Matt Lincoln is potentially unique in coding them. His Ph.D. in Art History, time as a data research specialist at the Getty Research Institute, and most recently, work as a research software engineer at Carnegie Mellon University have given him substantial knowledge about museums’ information systems, as well as the broader context of the seminar. For Lincoln, “data” consists of collections of art and associated facts and metadata. In his public talk, entitled “Ways of Forgetting: The Librarian, The Historian, and the Machine,” Dr. Lincoln focused on a case study from his time at the Getty, in which he was working on a project restructuring the way art provenance data were organized in databases. Lincoln argued that depending on who the creator or end-user of the information would be (whether librarian, historian or computer), the way the data are structured can vary. A historian would likely prefer open-ended text fields in which to establish a rich context with details specific to the piece, whereas a librarian would opt to record the same details about every piece, and a computer would prefer the data to be stored in some highly structured format, with lists of predefined terms that can populate each field. On top of balancing these disparate goals, Lincoln cited a particularly poignant Jira ticket, which asked: “Are we doing transcription of existing documents or trying to represent reality?” This question might well be answered with “both” since the Read More

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In: Safiya Noble
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Happy Black History Month! (originally published February 2020) by S.E. Hackney On Thursday, January 23rd, Dr. Safiya Noble spoke to an overflowing room of students, faculty, and community members about her best-selling book Algorithms of Oppression. The thesis of the book, and of Dr. Noble’s talk, is that not only racism is actually built in to the search algorithms which we use to navigate the internet, but that the big players of the internet (Google specifically) actually profit off of that racism by tokenizing the identities of people of color. It does this by associating identity phrases such as “black girls” or “phillipina” with the sites with the most streamlined (aka profitable) SEO, which is often pornography. This is a system of classification explicitly based on the centering of the white experience and and othering of Black people and other people of color. However, as Dr. Noble spoke about in her talk, tweaking a search result or two to avoid offense doesn’t actually solve a systemic problem — one where white voices are treated as the norm, and others eventually become reduced to SEO tags to be bought and sold. This idea played out recently in Barnes & Noble’s miss guided Black History Month project, where public domain books where the race of the protagonist is not specified (determined by algorithm) have new cover art created for them, depicting the characters as People of Color. Rod Faulkner, who first brought this issue to widespread attention describes it as “literary blackface,” and points out, “Slapping illustrations of Black versions Read More

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In: Jo Guldi
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“The world is on fire,” is, by now, a familiar phrase. It is often used when we feel overwhelmed about escalations in geopolitics or in response to the catastrophic effects of climate change. Humanists are human, including the “digital humanists”, and the weight of crises is a reminder to making our scholarly work “count”. In Jo Guldi’s recent visit to the Sawyer Seminar, this desire to do meaningful work was a consistent topic of conversation. We have touched upon questions of making archives public in other visits, such as that of Richard Marciano in the Fall. During this most recent visit however, we spent more time discussing what it means to “democratize” information. For example, how making records “public” relates to the goal of making information more “democratic.” Personal and Professional One argument against treating publically available records as a solution to the problem of democratizing information is the fact that even available information is not guaranteed to reach the “public” or be legible to most. Fortunately, contextualizing and creating a narrative from dispersed evidence across a variety of records is a skill with which humanists are well prepared. What role does activism play in the articulation research stakes within scholarly endeavors? While scholars may also identify as activists, there is a tension between the role of an activist and that of the researcher — concerns about how enthusiasm might affect the quality of one’s work. Scholarly rigor and passion can seem at odds, particularly valuing dispassionate rationality over emotionally grounded arguments. Nevertheless, extended scholarly engagement Read More

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In: Sandra González-Bailón
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“What’s going on behind the analogies”– Sandra González-Bailón Outcomes are not always intentional. We trigger anticipated and unforeseen things with our actions. The “invisible hand” is consequential, known only through its effects. Like contagion processes, our actions are enmeshed in interrelated networks. These are some of the metaphors discussed by Sandra González-Bailón in her research on metaphorical thinking, social processes, and communication structures. She engages head-on with the challenges and affordances of digital realities- using data to learn about or “decode” aspects of social life. “Analogies help make creative connections; but they can also draw pictures of the world that are too coarse-grained for any useful purpose.” (29, Decoding the Social World) Polar area diagram by Florence Nightingale published in Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army and sent to Queen Victoria in 1858.  Models and metaphors are helpful for human cognition and communication, it seems unlikely that they can (or should) be avoided. The role of metaphors and other modes of abstraction are sorts of “black boxes” that are convenient for communication. We humans think with them, but they do shape our view of reality. “The language of argument is not poetic, fanciful, or rhetorical; it is literal. We talk about arguments that way because we conceive of them that way — and we act according to the way we conceive of things.” (pg. 5, Lakoff & Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By) Perhaps other metaphors might be more productive — other models may work better than their forerunners. Read More

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In: Matthew Jones
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Who lets math organize their life? Drawing of the top view of the Pascaline and overview its mechanism, 1779, Oeuvres de Blaise Pascal. “…technical practices in mathematics and philosophy in turn offered important tools for cultivating truer forms of spiritual and mental nobility. These practices enabled mathematics and natural philosophy to transform, discipline, and train the intellect, the senses, and the affects, and they put these trained faculties at the heart of organizing one’s life.” (PG9-Good Life Scientific Revolution) On October 9th, 2019, Dr. Matthew Jones, visited the Mellon Sawyer Seminar group to discuss how his work in the history of science and technology relates to, makes use of, and critically examines “data” and its artefacts. Themes of collaboration and ethics are two threads that run throughout Dr. Jones’ work, though these terms take on radically different meanings as a result of shifting socio-temporal contexts. His work covers an expansive time period, ranging from early modern inventions to contemporary concerns about digital privacy and surveillance. The social nature of knowledge production and innovation were woven throughout our conversations with Dr. Jones. Highlighting collaborations between artisans and inventors in the mechanization of calculation (rather than narratives about exceptional individuals) is representative of a broader shift in historical study. Scholars from many fields have been moving away from the figure of the individual genius towards recognizing a more complicated and collaborative model of innovation. Similar reconceptions are happening within the contemporary discipline of digital humanities, as scholars strive to repatriate the credit for early experiments with computing to Read More

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In: Matthew Edney
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A version of our world where we are not dependent moment-by-moment on GPS tracking and Location Services is quickly becoming more and more unimaginable. So it was fascinating, then, that in his September 5th and 6th talks—delivered as part of Information Ecosystems: A Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar at the University of Pittsburgh—Matthew Edney asked that audience members think critically about these various mapping services and how deeply reliant we have become on them as a source of supposed “truth.” Long before GPS—and even long before TomTom, if you’re old enough to remember those—Edney pointed out that mapping and the so-called “field” of cartography has fundamentally shaped our conceptions of the world: how we visualize and are capable of visualizing it, how we are able to move and think about moving around it, and the many iterations of land-as-property documented over many centuries of maps. Edney’s new book, Cartography: The Ideal and Its History, does an excellent job of providing readers with a timeline of then-to-now. Cartography utilizes an impressively apt epilogue to the “Introduction”: “there is no such thing as cartography, and this is a book about it.” He helpfully framed his talks with this same quotation. By “there is no such thing as cartography,” he explained, he means that what cartography as a “field” purports to be is too loosely defined, too widely varying, too steeped in political motivation to cohere as a truly organized area of thought and practice; to quote Edney again, “the ideal of cartography is the entire belief system, while cartography Read More