Loading Events

« All Events

  • This event has passed.

Visiting Lecture: Reordering the digital library: what do 21st century algorithms make out of 19th century collections?

January 29, 2018 @ 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Millions of books have been digitized since 2000. When we want to discover them, though, researchers often have to choose between two often unsatisfactory choices: keyword search that dips into library at random, and historical classifications that carry the century-old priorities. Ben Schmidt (assistant professor of history, Northeastern University) will explore how new techniques in visualization and machine learning make it possible to better understand the elisions, biases, and priorities that shaped taxonomies of knowledge as the modern research library emerged. What groups, people, and classes were consciously or unconsciously excluded from the organization of knowledge as the state took over America’s library infrastructure after 1900? Tools from the digital humanities can help us draw a new picture of politics of knowledge at the turn of the 20th century, and lets us better understand the digital source base that is essential to humanities scholarship in the 21st century.
About the Presenter:
Benjamin Schmidt is an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University and core faculty at the NuLab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. His research interests are in the digital humanities and the intellectual and cultural history of the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. His digital humanities research focuses on large-scale text analysis, humanities data visualization, and the challenges and opportunities of reading data itself as a historical source. His current project focuses on re-analyzing the data collected by the 19th-century American state. He also contributes to popular conversations on topics including higher education in the United States, computational detection of anachronisms in historical fiction, and the “crisis” of the humanities.
He has a Ph.D. and M.A. in history from Princeton University, and an A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard University. Further information is available at benschmidt.org.
Come early to join us for a pre-talk reception, which will begin at 2:30pm.

Details

Date:
January 29, 2018
Time:
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
Event Category:
Website:
http://calendar.lib.unc.edu/event/3933753

Organizer

Davis Library Research Hub

Venue

Davis Library Research Hub, Second Floor
208 Raleigh St
Chapel Hill, NC 27514 United States
+ Google Map