Presented as a virtual guest lecture at Iona College (12 April 2022). Uses the concept of data fuzziness to argue that we should embrace complexity in our research, showing how we might apply digital humanities methods to do so. Note that some slides are animated and do not present accurately on SlideShare.

1. Let’s Get Digital, Digital 🎶
Using Digital Humanities to
Embrace Data Fuzziness
Leah Henrickson
Lecturer in Digital Media
School of Media and Communication
University of Leeds, UK
L.R.Henrickson@leeds.ac.uk
twitter.com/leahhenrickson

3. ‘Data Science’? ‘Careers in Science’?
Yes, but…
Lecturer in Digital Media
Programme Leader, MA New Media
Digital humanist (AI and DST)
Book historian
Canadian
🍁

5. More often than not, the classes of objects encountered in the real
physical world do not have precisely defined criteria of membership. […]
‘the class of beautiful women,’ or ‘the class of tall men,’ do not constitute
classes or sets in the usual mathematical sense of these terms. Yet, the
fact remains that such imprecisely defined ‘classes’ play an important role
in human thinking, particularly in the domains of pattern recognition,
communication of information, and abstraction.
[…]
The concept in question is that of a fuzzy set, that is, a ‘class’ with a
continuum of grades of membership.
L. A. Zadeh, ‘Fuzzy Sets’, Information and Control, 8 (1965), 338-353 (pp. 338-339).

6. tl;dr:
Black and white thinking
doesn’t always work.
L. A. Zadeh, ‘Fuzzy Sets’, Information and Control, 8 (1965), 338-353 (pp. 338-339).

7. https://ittykitty.com/fuzzy-kitten-or-not-so-fuzzy-kitten-how-to-tell-the-difference

9. Computers run on numbers.
So, information needs to be converted into numbers.
Numbers are often non-representational
(rather than representational).
How do we quantify human experiences?
New constraints, but also new possibilities!
We must use maths, categories, etc.
But the fun is in the fuzziness.
https://www.pexels.com/video/digital-projection-of-the-earth-mass-in-blue-lights-3129957

10. You can’t do digital without data.
The ways we collect data are political.
The ways we manage data are political.
The ways we curate data are political.
The ways we use data are political.
Shout-out to ‘Big Dick Data’! 🍆
‘What gets counted counts’.
Who do these data represent? How/why?

11. You may or may not have heard, but
over the past two decades a secret
and dangerous movement has been
growing in humanities departments
around the world. Sapping all of the
conventional funding out of
traditional humanistic pursuits, the
so-called ‘digital humanities’ (or
‘DH’ to those in the know) brings a
grim entrepreneurialism and
technocratic mindset to English,
history, classics, archaeology — and
any other disciplinary space on
which it can lay its hands.
Martin Paul Eve, The Digital Humanities and Literary Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), p. 1.
https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-people-using-laptop-3194519/

12. Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp, Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), p. 3.

13. Let me hear your data talk,
your data talk. 🎶

14. Leah Henrickson and Eleanor Dumbill, ‘Tangling and Untangling the Trollopes: A Stylometric Analysis of Frances Milton Trollope, Frances Eleanor Trollope, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Adolphus
Trollope, and Charles Dickens’, Victorian Review (forthcoming)
Research: Practice (Representing Data)

15. Research: Theory (Responding To Data)

16. Research: Commercial (Responding To Data)

17. Urban Armour
(Kathleen McDermott)
‘The goal of Urban Armor is to create
an opportunity for viewers and
participants to re-imagine their
relationship with personal
technology. How much do you know
about the devices you use everyday?
How much control do you have over
their functions? In place of mass-
produced, data-focused devices, the
Urban Armor pieces are custom,
customizable, and intervene in the
physical world in ways that are
unexpected and often absurd.’
https://urbanarmor.org
Activism (Representing and Responding To Data)

18. Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp, Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), p. 3.

19. Digital tools for great for play and exploration.
Collaboration is a must.
You’re probably wrong (at least some of the time).
Fail and flail – forward, ideally.
https://www.pexels.com/video/digital-projection-of-the-earth-mass-in-blue-lights-3129957

20. Now, Iona hear your
questions and comments!
Leah Henrickson
Lecturer in Digital Media
School of Media and Communication
University of Leeds, UK
L.R.Henrickson@leeds.ac.uk
twitter.com/leahhenrickson