Yale Mellon Sawyer Seminar: December Newsletter
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to the December 2021 newsletter of The Order of Multitudes, Yale’s 2020-2022 Mellon Sawyer Seminar on the long history of big data.
We are excited to share two new Conversations series, respectively focusing on the “Labor of Data” and “Erasure/Corruption.” On the question of labor, we have interviewed scholars who study the practices through which data is collected, stored, and organized, with special attention to the individuals who perform those data practices:
Craig Robertson, media historian and Associate Professor at Northeastern University, discusses the hidden gendered labor of paperwork and its organization through physical technologies and equipment such as the filing cabinet.
Dan Bouk, an Associate Professor of History at Colgate University who researches the history of bureaucracies and quantification, shares his research on data collection in the US census and the life insurance industry, institutions whose categorization of data shapes human life.
Our Conversation series on “Erasure/Corruption” considers the precarity of knowledge collection and preservation:
Sanchita Balachandran, Associate Director of the Archaeological Museum at Johns Hopkins University, discusses objects in museum collections as incomplete records that can be reanimated by asking deeper questions about their making.
Ella Klik, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the USC Society of Fellows who works on media theory and history, reconsiders the assumed seamlessness of recording media by highlighting the processes of deletion, corruption, and malfunction that are integral to technological experience.
In his piece on the archive of Aurin Bugbee Nichols, Henry Jacob (Yale ’21), a Henry Fellow at the University of Cambridge pursuing an M.Phil in World History, reports on the research he conducted with the help of a Sawyer seed grant earlier in 2021. Jacob discusses Nichols, a civil engineer who managed the construction of the Panama Canal, as the architect of meticulous information management techniques that made possible the construction of a massive infrastructural project.
We are thrilled to announce that the Scrolls and Leaves podcast, which was supported by the Order of Multitudes Sawyer seminar, was listed in the Bello 100, a list of outstanding podcasts from 2021. The Bello Collective highlighted the episode “Nature’s Voice – Tuvan Throat Singing”, which tells the story of a musical form that developed in the mountains of Central Asia. Congratulations to the Scrolls and Leaves team on their fantastic work!
In 2022, our programming will focus on new initiatives in the digital humanities. We are interested in developing a conversation about how the interrelation between the humanities and the digital can broaden the intellectual and theoretical ambitions of scholarly research. Please stay tuned for further information.
As the fall semester and the year come to a close, we would like to take this opportunity to thank all the scholars and students from Yale and beyond who have helped the project grow this past year. It has been a year full of rich collaborations and experiences.
We wish you and yours a restful and restorative break. Happy holidays!
Do not hesitate to contact us at admin@orderofm.com with ideas, responses, or pitches. And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @OMultitudes.
Sincerely,
Michael Faciejew