Sussex Humanities Lab Annual Lecture
Date and time
SHL Annual Lecture by Tim Hitchcock, Professor of Digital History at the University of Sussex
About this event
The Worlds of the Dead Reimagined: Close reading, humanist understandings and the challenge of data science.
Join the Sussex Humanities Lab for our first ever SHL Annual Lecture which will be delivered by lab member and former SHL director Professor Tim Hitchcock.
The lecture will be followed by a social gathering at SHL lab and gardens (Silverstone SB211) to celebrate Tim's contribution, and his imminent retirement.
Synopsis:
In the creation of a new digital version of the archive – of print and image, maps, space and place – we have turned all the objects of study that pre-occupy the humanities into data. Each word can now be mapped, each building reconstructed in three dimensions, and each image projected onto the space it purports to depict.
The boundaries between types of data have collapsed, and we are challenged to rethink how we understand the worlds of the dead. At the same time, how we organise that data has itself changed out of all recognition. We have moved beyond the human conceit of universal order that preoccupied post Enlightenment thinking, and replaced it with dynamic systems that designate meaning on the fly.
This lecture asks, how these developments have changed the humanist project? And how we can bridge the divide between humanistic close reading of inherited data, and data science's dependence on data at scale?
