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Examining the digital humanities as a site and ‘peoplescape’ of collecting and collections

31 March 2023, 6:30 pm–7:30 pm

images from a collection

This inaugural lecture from Professor Julianne Nyhan will draw on the research she has conducted over the past years, reflecting also on the 'grand challenges' of collections and absence for digital humanities.

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Organiser

Fernando Santos

Location

Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre and ONLINE
2nd Floor, South Junction, Wilkins Building
UCL, Gower Street, London
WC1E 6BT
United Kingdom

The act of collecting and the making of collections are surely among the most fundamental and most enduring of human actions. Collections, whether of analogue things or of digital data, offer us a rich and complex landscape to explore all aspects of what it has meant, what it now means and what it might in time mean to be human. Through collections, individually and at scale, we encounter all manner of human agency, wonder, curiosity, taxonomic impulse and even cruelty. And even if it seems paradoxical, through collections we also encounter absence, loss and bias. The absences that haunt collections and the documentation that describes them grant important insights into the subjectivities that have shaped collections and their documentation over the longer term, raising questions about whose agency was and was not acknowledged in the creation of a given collection, and the grounds on which such decisions were made. Examining the digital humanities as a site and ‘peoplescape’ of collecting and collections, this lecture will draw on the research Nyhan has conducted on this over the past years, reflecting also on the 'grand challenges' of collections and absence for digital humanities.

Please register, either to attend in-person or to receive the live-stream details: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/506387938957

About the Speaker

Julianne Nyhan

Professor of Humanities Data Science and Methodology at Institut für Geschichte, Technische Universität Darmstadt

She remains a part-time Professor of Digital Humanities at UCL, where she leads the Towards a National Collection AHRC-funded project ‚The Sloane Lab: Looking back to build future shared collections‘. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, she was formerly the Deputy- and Director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (2018-2021) and Director of UCL’s MA/MSc in Digital Humanities (2017-2021). Her primary research interest is in the history of digital humanities, an area in which she has published widely. Her most recent book Hidden and Devalued Feminized Labour in the Digital Humanities: On the Index Thomisticus Project 1954-67 is published by Routledge.

More about Julianne Nyhan