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Colin Allen, distinguished professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, is both an invited speaker and an ongoing participant in our Seminar; on February 28th, Dr. Allen talked with his fellow participants about his work in what he (and others) call “data pipelines.” Broadly speaking, using data pipelines means that data are collected and recorded in one of many particular ways—but eventually used for purposes other than why they were originally collected. And this means, Dr. Allen pointed out, that data are highly fluid, flexible, and even self-perpetuating. An especially potent example of this in Allen’s own work is his current role as Associate Editor of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. While this project has one discreet start date back in 1995, it has been anything but static since then; as of March 2018, the site has approximately 1,600 entries each of which is routinely reviewed and updated. Each new post adds to what is now a highly dynamic reference work containing data culled from all over the web—a pipeline, indeed. Dr. Allen thoughtfully pointed out that as our relationship to data changes over our collective futures, it is important to remember that data does not enter into our world on its own but, rather, it is collected and curated. Allen co-authored an article, “Exploration and Exploitation of Victorian Science in Darwin’s Reading Notebooks,” with Jaimie Murdock and Simon DeDeo in 2017. Charles Darwin left careful records of the books he read from 1837 to 1860, making this Read More

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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: 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