Humanities Data

Humanities Data 2014 CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Fellowship Summer Seminar Trevor Muñoz
University of Maryland 30 July 2014

@trevormunoz What is data? in the humanities for curation? What
are the implications

@trevormunoz Data is not a scientiﬁc concept

@trevormunoz Data” is our common rhetorical tool for tracing epistemic
practices … “ thus, “data” does equally important work as a concept for the humanities as for the sciences, and better equips us to think critically and creatively about the digital

@trevormunoz Data Curation is stewardship of knowledge

@trevormunoz Data curation is … the active and ongoing management
of data of data throughout its entire lifecycle of interest and usefulness to scholarship.” “ —Cragin et al, 2007

@trevormunoz Cragin, Melissa H., P. Bryan Heidorn, Carole L. Palmer,
and Linda C. Smith. “An Educational Program on Data Curation.” In Science and Technology Section of the Annual American Library Association Conference, Vol. 25. Washington, DC, 2007.

@trevormunoz usefulness interest critical terms:

@trevormunoz Data curation for the humanities must engage with humanist
ways of making knowledge

@trevormunoz Some Definitions

@trevormunoz Data

@trevormunoz From the beginning, data was a rhetorical concept. Data
means—and has meant for a very long time—that which is given prior to argument. As a consequence, the meaning of data must always shift with argumentative strategy and context. The rise of modern economics and natural science created new conditions of argument and new assumptions about facts and evidence.” “ — Daniel Rosenberg, 2014

@trevormunoz Rosenberg, Daniel. “Data before the Fact.” In “Raw Data”
Is an Oxymoron, edited by Lisa Gitelman, 2013.

@trevormunoz Putting “data” in historical perspective means we can untangle
the concept from techno-science and think about how it relates to argumentative strategy and context of a range of disciplines including the humanities.

@trevormunoz Information in the role of evidence

The humanities

@trevormunoz The disciplines that investigate the expressions of the human
mind — Wilhelm Dilthey, 1883

@trevormunoz By which are generally meant studies of: literature art
music philosophy history

@trevormunoz These studies may be empirical theoretical

@trevormunoz theory*

@trevormunoz Cultural Studies and more

@trevormunoz study of cultural practices and their relationship with power”
— from Rens Bod, 2014 “

@trevormunoz Bod, Rens. A New History of the Humanities: The
Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present, 2013. For more see:

@trevormunoz It is useful to bring some of these humanities
approaches to how we understand and practice data curation

@trevormunoz inscription devices and media technology … but simultaneously to
particular social, economic, and political orders on the other — Lenoir citing Derrida understood as linked to the content of science, literature, and philosophy on the one hand

@trevormunoz Lenoir, Timothy. Inscribing Science: Scientiﬁc Texts and the Materiality
of Communication. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998.

@trevormunoz become entrenched and articulate themselves in a wider ﬁeld
of epistemic practices and material cultures Objects of investigation including instruments, inscription devices, model organisms, and the ﬂoating theories and boundary concepts attached to them.” “ — Rheinberger, 1997

@trevormunoz Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing
Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997.

@trevormunoz Data Curation as a shift in perspective from working
on creating knowledge as researchers in some particular humanities discipline to working on the same endeavor from the perspective of the library or the digital humanities center, etc.

@trevormunoz What can we see trace or from this perspective?

@trevormunoz Digital Objects in the humanities

@trevormunoz scholarly editions

http://shelleygodwinarchive.org/contents/frankenstein

@trevormunoz models networks visualizations

http://orbis.stanford.edu/

http://www.poms.ac.uk/

@trevormunoz thematic research collections

https://mbda.berry.edu/

@trevormunoz new scholarly communication

http://mallhistory.org/

http://www.stampingamericanmemory.org/

@trevormunoz These may come in the form of software text
files images databases

@trevormunoz stewardship, including preservation, of information in digital form is
a shared concern

@trevormunoz data curation must be concerned with the way objects
of investigation function in particular epistemic communities In addition to this shared concern with digital preservation

@trevormunoz usefulness interest critical terms:

@trevormunoz Data Curation is stewardship of knowledge

@trevormunoz Case Study

http://nbviewer.ipython.org/gist/trevormunoz/8358810

http://www.curatingmenus.org in collaboration with Katie Rawson

Thank You. Trevor Muñoz [email protected] trevormunoz Email: Twitter:

@trevormunoz The humanities have their own ways of making knowledge
To serve the humanities, data curation must engage humanist research practices Preservation of digital information is a shared concern

Humanities Data

Humanities Data

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