Mellon Sawyer Seminar Series: Ancient Data and Its Divisions

Описание: On May 30th, 2024, as part of the Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Series, The Data that Divides Us: Recalibrating Data Methods for New Knowledge Frameworks Across the Humanities, at Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) at Stanford University, Chiara Palladino from Furman University, Chris Johanson from University of California, Los Angeles, and Eric Harvey from Stanford University talked about the ways they envision 'Ancient Data' and the challenges they face working with it.

Previous seminars in our series have attended to divisions, but also possibilities, engendered by data along various fault lines and contexts (from 19th-century statistical thinking to biases in archives, from the challenges of quantification to the history of data governance). With this seminar on ‘Ancient Data’ we focus on what happens to ancient sources—textual, material and visual--when digitized and turned into data, and what it means for the study of antiquity to operate in a digital environment and making use of digital tools. How do we work and reimagine the data and information lost? What can the recent digital and computational technologies offer as answers to such questions? How do we develop new software or programming that serves the specific questions of ancient data? How do we work with the divides between the temporalities and data-sizes of our contemporary world and the Classical world?

Dr. Eric Harvey, Professors Chiara Palladino and Chris Johanson examine and analyze ancient texts and artifacts through a variety of digital programs, from Ancient Greek and Latin spatial narratives to Biblical psalms and archeological sites.