Speaker: Berenike Herrmann
Affiliation: University of Bielefeld
Title: Externalizations. On data and insight
Abstract: The impact of datafication on today’s world is enormous. Data tracking, data mining and digitization of cultural heritage, including millions of (fictional) books – we’re dealing with a digital transformation so radical that the presence and affordances of data have found their way into the mundane. Within academia, data-driven approaches are now widely institutionalized for example as ‘digital humanities’. From the perspective of the empirical study of literature and the media, these developments have a great appeal. Answering questions about cultural artifacts (such as books) and readers has never been so easy. Or has it?
In my talk I will discuss what it means to approach literature as data. I will address the readerly as well as the authorial dimension, together with the contextual and textual ones, from a praxeological perspective. This allows me to raise questions about the everyday practices of academic insight, addressing the role of digital infrastructure and the ‘trust in numbers’ that still seems at odds with certain ideas about the humanities. Drawing on my research in computational literary studies, I will pay attention to forms of nonlinear (‘distant’) reading, the externalization of procedure, as well as data literacy as competence not only in ‘reading’ and ‘writing’, but also in thought. By example of a field that could be called ‘data-driven literary studies’, but which is really ‘just literary studies’, I will address the role of data in the past and future of the Humanities.