Yale Mellon Sawyer Seminar: January Newsletter
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to the January newsletter of The Order of Multitudes, Yale’s 2020-2022 Sawyer Seminar on the long history of big data.
With the spring term upon us, we have a series of exciting activities in store. The first is a virtual talk on February 5 with Professor Sara Wylie, entitled “Enacting Environmental Data Justice”. You can register for the event here. Wylie is cofounder of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), a network of academics and non-profits working to preserve federal environmental data and monitor changes to federal environmental policy through website tracking and interviews. Her award-winning book Fractivism: Corporate Bodies and Chemical Bonds addresses extractive research systems that precede and enable extractive industries.
Look out for upcoming interviews, as we continue our “Conversation” series. We start off with Professor Manan Ahmed, from the Department of History at Columbia University, conducted by our graduate associate Louis Lu. Amongst other topics, Ahmed works on digital archives and the global south. There is also more great material to check out on The Order of Multitudes website, including interviews with Elaine Ayers on museums and collecting, Paul Messier on collections as databases, and Nancy Yunhwa Rao on the material lives of archives.
Our theme for our February “Conversation” series is Digital Storytelling. With that in mind, take a look at the Scrolls & Leaves podcast. We are supporting four undergraduate interns for Spring 2021. Each intern will produce a “chatroom,” which is a short 10 minute podcast associated with each episode. The interns will be working closely with the podcast creators, Mary-Rose Abraham and Gayathri Nathan in an international collaboration with the Archives at NCBS.
For news, events, and much more, follow @OMultitudes on Twitter, as we kick off a new year of activities.
All the best,
Travis Zadeh
Associate Professor
Department of Religious Studies
Yale University