An introduction to humanities data and data curation presented at the 2014 CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Fellowship Summer Seminar, Bryn Mawr, PA, July 30, 2014.
@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 … 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 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 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 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 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 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