In her closing lecture for the series, Christine Borgman explored the stakes and stakeholders in research data, in interdisciplinary humanities research, and implications for policy and practice. Drawing upon her article ‘The digital future is now: A call to action for the humanities’ (Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2009) and her book, Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World (MIT Press, 2015), she discussed her recent research by highlighting two specific cases:
- Whose text, whose mining, and to whose benefit? (Quantitative Science Studies 1/3, 2020)
- Digital data archives as knowledge infrastructures (Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 70/8, 2019)
The lecture concluded with a discussion on research data, infrastructure requirements in the humanities, the need for social studies of the digital humanities and how we could enviagse the value proposition for digital humanities.
Recording of the conference
The slides can be found here.
Interview
In this online video interview, Christine Borgman discusses the disciplinary roots of her work in information science and her career more generally. She then shares more details on some of the projects of the Center for Knowledge Infrastructures at UCLA of which she is Director. One of these projects involved a collaboration with the Dutch national centre of expertise and repository for research data DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services). Given her experience with both the sciences and humanities, the interview then explores some of the differences in the engagement with ‘data’ and the research practices of scholars from both domains, and concludes that there might be more similarities then is often assumed.
Biography
Christine L. Borgman, Distinguished Research Professor and Director of the Center for Knowledge Infrastructures at UCLA, is the author of more than 250 publications in information studies, computer science, and communication. These include three books from MIT Press: Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World (2015), winner of the 2015 American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Award) in Computing and Information Sciences; Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet (2007); and From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in a Networked World (2000). The latter two books won the Best Information Science Book of the Year award from the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIST). Professor Borgman is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Association for Computing Machinery. Her activities in information policy include service on the Advisory Board of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC); the University of California Privacy and Information Security Initiative; UC Academic Computing and Communications Committee (Vice Chair / Chair); UC Cyber Risk Governance Committee; UCLA Board on Privacy and Data Protection; and UCLA Data Governance Task Force (Co-Chair). Prof. Borgman earned a PhD in Communication from Stanford University, an MLS in information science from the University of Pittsburgh, and a B.A. in mathematics from Michigan State University. She also holds the title of University of California Presidential Chair in Information Studies, Emerita.
With the support of
