Yale Mellon Sawyer Seminar: September Newsletter
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to the September 2021 newsletter of The Order of Multitudes, Yale’s 2020-2022 Mellon Sawyer Seminar on the long history of big data.
We are launching the 2021-2022 academic year with some exciting initiatives. Throughout the fall semester, we will be publishing a conversation series on four themes that engage the organization of knowledge in diverse institutional, technical, political, and aesthetic contexts: Repair/Reparation in Collections, Atlasing, Labor of Data, and Erasure/Corruption.
The two first interviews on the topic of “Repair/Reparation in Collections” are available on our website:
- Ricardo Roque, a historian of collections, colonization, and race at the University of Lisbon, discusses institutionalized violence in anthropological collections and introduces a new project on Indigenous cultures of archiving.
- Samuel Redman, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, speaks about his research on human remains collections in the United States and engages the museum through its ethical dimensions.
Additional contributions to our “Conversations” series will be posted soon—stay tuned! Meanwhile, two recipients of the Sawyer Seminar’s seed grant program share their research:
- Matthew Dudley, a PhD Candidate in Yale’s History Department, looks at Cairo Geniza fragments from the sixteenth-nineteenth centuries as preservational “palimpsests” that reveal distinct historical layers of reusage.
- Colton Valentine, a PhD candidate in English at Yale, tells us how new digital humanities tools can expand our understanding of cross-cultural literary exchanges, with a focus on the reception of French literature in Victorian England.
Later this semester, we will convene a panel discussion with social scientists and scholars whose work addresses the stakes of private, corporate data archives on public knowledge — official announcement to come soon!
We are also pleased to share a series called Trade Winds, which is part of Season 1 of the podcast Scrolls & Leaves, co-sponsored by our Sawyer Seminar and Bangalore’s National Center for Biological Sciences. Launching on September 30, “Trade Winds” narrates the changes made by trade and migration across the Indian Ocean. It spans 2,000 years and 5 nations.
As always, 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