Yale Mellon Sawyer Seminar: May Newsletter
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to the May 2022 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 new additions to our Conversations series:
Armando Perla, Chief Curator for the Toronto History Museums at the City of Toronto, discusses how to build a human-centered museum and the relationship between activism and museum work.
Martien de Vletter, Associate Director of Collection at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), discusses born-digital archiving and how the shift away from traditional “paper” archives has opened new questions about architectural history, curating, and the relationship between technology and culture at large.
Alana Kumbier, Research and Instruction Librarian at Amherst College, discusses the importance of queer and community archives and the meaning of archival ephemerality.
Kelly Baker Josephs, Professor of English at York College/CUNY, shares her insights on enacting social change through the Digital Humanities.
Paula Harper, Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, discusses the pleasures and pains of “digital virality” and the platformization of public life.
Brad Bolman, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge at the University of Chicago, excavates the strange canine-centered history of twentieth-century science.
In her piece on “Pixelating William Blake,” Sarah T. Weston, PhD Candidate in the English and History of Art Departments at Yale University, discusses BlakeTint, a digital humanities project that examines William Blake’s intricate approach to color in his illuminated books.
In April, we concluded a four-part series on “Digital Praxis in the Humanities,” which focused on the digital transformation of the practices of Editing, Archiving, Mapping, and Databasing. We thank our participants as well as the DHLab and the Whitney Humanities Center for their collaboration on this initiative. Please be on the lookout in the coming academic year for further conversations about the digital reorganization of scholarship.
Stay tuned for more news from the Sawyer Seminar in June. Do not hesitate to contact us at admin@orderofm.com with ideas, responses, or pitches.
Sincerely,
Michael Faciejew