The UVa Digital Humanities Speaker Series presents:

John Unsworth on “Idiosyncrasy at Scale: Data Curation in the Humanities”

Friday, March 25 3:00pm (reception follows) South Lawn Auditorium (NAU 101)

This talk is co-sponsored by IATH, SHANTI, and the Scholars’ Lab

Abstract:

Unsworth will argue that, in the past, the humanities have been characterized by data sets that are significantly smaller than those in the sciences, but also significantly more idiosyncratic. Now we face a situation where humanities data, at least in textual form, and soon enough in other forms, is large-scale. Can it still be idiosyncratic? What are the trade-offs between the requirements of curation and the needs of the users for whom that data is curated? What models or initiatives are out there that could help us grapple with idiosyncrasy at scale?

John Unsworth is dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. John was the founding director of IATH at UVa, and remains one of the most prominent figures in the field of digital humanities.