Ethical Visualization in the Age of Big Data: Contemporary Cultural Implications of Pre- Twentieth-Century French Texts

FAIN: HAA-266490-19

University of Nevada, Reno (Reno, NV 89557-0001)
Christopher Michael Church (Project Director: January 2019 to July 2023)
Katherine Hepworth (Co Project Director: April 2019 to July 2023)

A two-day workshop and follow up activities on approaches to developing ethical data visualization techniques and interactive cartographic interfaces with a particular focus on text mining colonial-era French newspapers.

This project advances work toward generating ethical visualizations of historical corpora comprising the European cultural imagination prior to the twentieth century without reproducing ethnocentrism. Visually representing the historical place of misrepresented peoples and locales throughout the world requires interdisciplinary collaboration focused equally on critical theory, data visualization, ethics, machine learning, and text analysis. We seek $49,851 of level-1 funding for a workshop that unites top experts in the fields of information design, computational linguistics, and history to address the conceptual and logistical challenges in realizing this goal. This project will address two key issues: 1) how to create ethical data visualizations--and their underlying forms of training and analysis--that grapple with inherent source biases; and 2) how to computationally process non-modern, non-English languages for humanities research in a critically engaged way.

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