Sally Wyatt and Lev Manovich were our two keynote speakers at the DARIAH Annual Event 2019, held on May 15-17 in Warsaw, Poland. Centred around the topic of Humanities Data, Sally Wyatt and Lev Manovich shared their own views and insights in two keynote speeches that marked the beginning and end of the 2019 Annual Event.
Sally Wyatt is Professor of Digital Cultures at Maastricht University, The Netherlands. Between 2011–2017, she was the Programme Leader of the eHumanities Group of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. For many years, she has been doing research about what digital technologies mean for the production of knowledge in the humanities and the social sciences.
Sally Wyatt, Keynote speech at the DARIAH Annual Event 2019, May 16, Warsaw
“Data as a term is too flat an ontology for the kinds of things that we are all dealing with. It reduces people, events, objects to things, bits, to be imagined as impersonal, scientific and neutral. Also, the use of the word ‘data’ tends to assume that everything is digital. This is wrong.”
Dr. Lev Manovich is a Professor of Computer Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Director of the Cultural Analytics Lab that pioneered analysis of visual culture using computational methods.
Lev Manovich, Keynote speech at the DARIAH Annual Event 2019, May 17, Warsaw
“Many academic disciplines use data science to analyse contemporary culture. The question is: Shall we continue to aggregate big cultural data and reduce it to a small set of patterns? Or shall we refuse this dominant paradigm instead and focus on diversity, variability and differences (including tiny ones), i.e., work on big cultural data without aggregation and with attention to what is infrequent and outliers?”
Manovich is the author and editor of 13 books including “AI Aesthetics”, “Theories of Software Culture”, “Instagram and Contemporary Image”, “Software Takes Command”, “Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database” and “The Language of New Media” which was described as “the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan”.
