Event

Data Science Forum | Prof. J. A. Bateman: Data & Interpretation: Digital Humanities & the missing link with Multimodal Semiotics

Organizer : Data Science Center
Location : Zoom
Start Time : 06. May 2021, 12:00
End Time : 06. May 2021, 13:00

About the Data Science Forum
The Data Science Forum offers scientists from all disciplines and faculties the opportunity to present and discuss their research, interests, and challenges related to data science in front of an interdisciplinary audience. All topics in the field of data science can be addressed including general aspects of big data and data-intensive research, the development of state-of-the-art data science methods such as artificial intelligence, the application of data science methods in various research areas as well as the investigation of legal, ethical, and social aspects.

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About the Talk
Digital Humanities (DH) has established itself worldwide as a rapidly expanding web of activities with many research centres and international associations. The field has both practical and more theoretical, philosophical dimensions. On the one hand, the explosive growth in ‘data’ of all kinds, and from all areas, raises the need to manage and support interaction with that data. On the other hand, the driving theoretical notion of DH is that (usually large) bodies of digitally managed data can be leveraged for research questions of interest to, and in the best case defined by, the humanities. ‘Doing humanities digitally’ is thus often proposed as opening up new methods and possibilities for hermeneutic interpretative inquiry.

In this talk I offer a brief sketch of some current initiatives and directions taken in DH, suggesting something of the breadth of data, models, infrastructures and methods under development and giving pointers for further information. The very breadth of this enterprise is not, however, unproblematic: accounts too often end up limiting themselves to suggestive visualisations of sets of formal features. Questions of which formal features may be significant and why demand closer engagement with more humanistic notions of data interpretation. I conclude the talk, therefore, arguing this to be a major challenge, perhaps the major challenge, now facing the future development of DH. I do this by drawing on a complementary approach to meaning in diverse media proposed more recently within (multimodal) semiotics.

About the Speaker
More information coming soon!