Datafication in the Historical Humanities: Reconsidering Traditional Understandings of Sources and Data

Historians outside the field of quantitative social history rarely consider their objects of study to be "data," even when viewing documents or images digitized on a screen. These testimonies of people's lives usually require emotional, imaginative, and empathetic engagement, and therefore cannot be reduced to mere commodities to fuel a new kind of computational research, despite what the slogan "data is the new oil" might suggest.

On the other hand, it is easy to see that collecting, organizing, sorting, and retrieving selected information from (digital) sources are routine processes of historical research. From this perspective, data-centered research appears to be a continuation with updated tools and technologies rather than a radical departure from traditional research methods.

CONFERENCE THEMES:

• How are archives for such projects defined, created and managed?
• How do we select primary sources, handle collections, and create data models for their digital representation?
• What standards guide our datafication processes, which tools support us, and what metrics are appropriate to use?
• What might be the general design principles that guide our process of datafication in the historical sciences?

KEYNOTE LECTURES:

• Keynote I: "Table for One: Anecdotes on the Cultures and Challenges of Data(fication) for Historians," Zoe LeBlanc, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, School of Informatics, USA
• Keynote II: What's in a Footnote? Datafication and the Consequences for Quality Control in Historical Scholarship," Pim Huijnen, Utrecht University, Netherlands