Events
Advanced Topics in Digital Korean Studies
19 to 29 May 2022 International Symposium & Project IncubationSeoul National University 26 to 28 June 2022 Publication Workshop & Debut PresentationsUniversity of Copenhagen The uses and application of digital methods have become commonplace in Korean studies. Despite the challenges caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the extraordinary collection of online archives and digital libraries enabled…
MoreSeminar on Big Data Studies
September 2021 to February 2022
Deep Fake Geography? When Geospatial Data Encounter Artificial Intelligence
25 September 2021 Bo Zhao, Associate Professor of Geography and GIScience, University of Washington The developing convergence of Artificial Intelligence and GIScience has raised a concern on the emergence of deep fake geography and its potentials in transforming human perception of the geographic world. Situating fake geography under the context of modern cartography and GIScience,…
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Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage
13 November 2021 10:00 KST Matthew G. Kirschenbaum (University of Maryland) What are the future prospects for literary knowledge now that literary texts—and the material remains of authorship, publishing, and reading—are reduced to bitstreams, strings of digital ones and zeros? What are the opportunities and obligations for book history, textual criticism, and bibliography when literary…
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Blockchain Technology, Decentralized Finance, and the Road to Web 3.0
27 November 2021 10:00 KST Hossein Azari (CEO, cmorq) Joseph Kim (CEO, LSJ Technologies) Is humanity creating a new economic system? Will blockchain technology and the move toward decentralization manage to overcome performance bottlenecks and the troubles of surveillance capitalism? Big Data Studies Lab invites two business experts in the digital asset space for a…
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The Uses and Potential of Blockchain in Records Management and Archival Applications
26 January 2022 10:00 KST Victoria Lemieux (University of British Columbia) In this talk, Dr. Victoria Lemieux presents an overview of the uses and potential of blockchain in records management and archival applications, along with some perils and pitfalls. The presentation will draw upon Dr. Lemieux’s work as a member of the International Standard’s Technical…
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The Pulse of the Data Center: AI, Emotions, and Planetary Destruction
23 February 2022 10:00 KST Mél Hogan (University of Calgary) As media objects, the ‘data center’ and ‘the cloud’ serve as a kind of oracle; they are buildings that embody much of the hype and many of the anxieties that stem from our now globally wired planet, as well as our growing dependence on all…
MoreBig Data and the Historian’s Craft
January to June 2021
Big Data and History: Some Provocations
21 January 2021 The advent of big data challenges long-held assumptions in historical research. The 59 zettabytes of data generated until 2020 reside in fragile storage devices with an average life span of 7 to 30 years. Unlike paper documents, the networked existence of big data across hundreds of thousands of servers in power-hungry data…
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Archives of the Future
18 February 2021 Historians and archivists have expressed concerns about the Digital Dark Age for decades. The short life span of storage hardware (about 7 years for SSDs under stress, 30 years for HDDs, and 100/200 years for optical discs under climate-controlled conditions only) inverts our relationship with primary sources. Advanced encryption methods employed in…
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Securing Big Data Archives
18 March 2021 The topic of our March roundtable is security as physical infrastructure and personal data protection. Future historians will have access to only what we choose to archive for them. We need to consider anonymizing and classifying selections of today’s social media data that may prove useful for researchers of the 2010s and…
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Energetics of Big Data
15 April 2021 In “Energetics of Big Data,” we will discuss big data as energy. Data centers are energy gobblers that consume anywhere between 1% to 5% of the world’s electricity, depending on how you run the estimate. While historians have known that the carving of woodblocks, mass printing, and climate-controlled archives consume energy, we…
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Big Data Epistemology
20 May 2021 The May session of Big Data and the Historian’s Craft shifts our attention to data science and methodological reflections. Text analysis, GIS, network analysis, and machine learning have become part and parcel of digital methods training. However, historians used cadastral surveys, census records, ledgers, maps, and genealogies in their research long before…
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History of the Future
17 June 2021 History of… the Future? As we saw in Archives of the Future, the fragility of digital storage media and the rise of big data have reverse the historian’s relationship with our primary sources. Future historians will have access to what we choose to save for them. Historians have been trained to stress…
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