Yale Mellon Sawyer Seminar: October 2020 Newsletter
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to the newsletter of The Order of Multitudes, Yale’s 2020-2022 Sawyer Seminar on the long history of big data. Generously funded by the Mellon Foundation, this seminar explores the contemporary information boom through the prism of three time-honored modes of ordering knowledge: the atlas, the encyclopedia, and the museum.
We are grateful to have you as our subscriber and promise not to over-impose on your time and eyesight: this newsletter will only go out once a month. We will use it to highlight upcoming events as well as to direct you to talks, interviews, and other content that we have made available online. Since most of our gatherings will take place via Zoom, we hope that you might be able to join us wherever this email finds you.
Earlier this month, we held the seminar’s first two invited lectures and discussions. Hosted by Deborah Coen, one of our project’s Primary Investigators, they featured Professors Safiya Noble and Christopher Kelty, both of UCLA. We will release highlights from both talks on our Youtube channel soon.
In tandem with the first of these events, we officially launched our project website. Huge thanks to our web designer, Narayan Gopalan, whose vision and effort has made it possible, as well as to our graduate student associates Efe Igor, Yi Lu, Allison Chu, and Sarah Pickman, who worked tirelessly with Narayan to test the website, edit, tweak, and populate it. We encourage you to click through the site and send us feedback.
Currently up on The Order of Multitudes are interviews with our project Primary Investigators: Deborah Coen, Marta Figlerowicz, Lisa Messeri, Richard Prum, and Ayesha Ramachandran. Moreover, throughout the month of October, we uploaded a series of featured interviews with five other scholars: Holly Rushmeier, Bill Rankin, William Watson, Hussein Mohsen, and John Durham Peters. The theme of this series of interviews was Data Diversity. Going forward, we hope to feature such thematic interview clusters every month. In November, we will focus on Contesting Archives; stay tuned for interviews with Nancy Rao, Nientara Anderson, Lucy Caplan, Paul Messier, and Elaine Ayers.
Finally, October 30th 2020 was the final deadline for the first round of our Seminar’s seed grant applications. We invited submissions from Yale undergraduates and graduate students whose research projects dovetail with the themes of this Sawyer Seminar. We will review these applications over the next few weeks and hope to feature some of the winning projects on our website. If you or your student missed this deadline but could be eligible for this grant, please know that we will accept another round of submissions in the spring.
In the meantime, do not hesitate to contact us at admin@orderofm.com with ideas, responses, or pitches.
All the best,
Marta Figlerowicz