AIUCD Conference 2017

6th AIUCD Conference 2017 Il telescopio inverso: big data e distant reading nelle discipline umanistiche Roma, 26-28 January 2017.

This January I attended the AIUCD Conference 2017 in Rome, Italy. The AIUCD (Association for Humanities Informatics and Digital Culture) is the Italian member of ADHO and the conference brought together researchers and students not only from Italy, but also from Europe.

At the conference I gave two papers with others:

  • With Marco Passarotti, I gave a paper on “The Index Thomisticus as a Big Data Project” where we looked at what we can learn from the Busa Archive about digital humanities projects and their study.
  • With Domenico Fiormonte, I gave a paper on “Palantir: Reading the Surveillance Thing: Critical Software Stories as a Way of the Digital Humanities” that looked at how we can read systems like Palantir as bearing interpretative theory and culture.

The opening keynote was given by Teresa Numerico on “Data versus interpretation: an imaginary epistemic conflict?” She was critical of the uncritical turn to big data in the digital humanities. She reminded us that we have a choice and that we should care about the complexity of “data.”