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Humanist Archives: Oct. 11, 2019, 8:10 a.m. Humanist 33.311 - events: role of the humanities (Leiden)

                  Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 311.
            Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
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        Date: 2019-10-10 16:43:17+00:00
        From: Leiden University Libraries 
        Subject: Invitation Public Lecture Ted Underwood

Invitation to a Public Lecture: 
"The Role of the Humanities in an Information Age"
by Ted Underwood, Visiting Scaliger Professor

Leiden University Libraries invites you to the public lecture by Ted
Underwood, Visiting Scaliger Professor. This lecture will be held on
Thursday 21 November, from 16.00-17.00 in the Academy Building,
Klein Auditorium, Rapenburg 73, Leiden. Afterwards you can meet the 
new Visiting Scaliger Professor and drinks will be served.

Register

Please register before 15 November via
aanmelding@library.leidenuniv.nl (subject
'Underwood' and number of participants).


The Role of the Humanities in an Information Age

In an age of print media, it was easy to see how scrutinizing novels and
historical documents prepared students to scrutinize arguments in the
newspaper. It is harder to feel confident that the humanities are
preparing students for civic life now that influence is exerted through
algorithmically filtered social media and microtargeted ads. Many
observers have concluded that the scholar's role in our era is simply to
oppose the infiltration of culture by algorithms. In this talk Ted
Underwood will try to sketch a more optimistic vision of the future,
pointing to places where humanists are joining hands with data science
to create a form of public reflection that fuses the scale of machine
learning with the historical self-consciousness of humanistic tradition.

Ted Underwood

Professor Ted Underwood teaches both in the School of Information
Sciences and in the English Department at the University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign. His research focusses on statistical and computational
modeling of humanistic evidence, machine learning and text mining, book
history, digital libraries, sociology of literature, computational
social science and digital humanities.

Underwood was trained as a Romanticist, received his Ph.D. at Cornell
University, but at this point his research is as much about information
science as literary criticism. Underwood is especially interested in
applying machine learning to large digital collections.

He recently finished his third book about the new perspectives opened up
by large digital libraries, called Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence
and Literary Change (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Other recent
publications of Underwood are "Algorithmic Modeling: Or, Modeling Data
We Do Not Yet Understand" (2018), "The Historical Significance of
Textual Distances" (2018) and "Why Literary Time is Measured in Minutes"
(2018).

Leiden University Libraries (UBL) thanks Elsevier for the generous
support it has provided allowing the Library to appoint two Digital
Scholarship Fellows and the Visiting Scaliger Professor during 2019.

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Universitaire Bibliotheken Leiden · Witte Singel 27 · Leiden, Zuid
Holland 2311 BG · Netherlands





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