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In: Sabina Leonelli
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On November 15th, Dr. Sabina Leonelli spoke to the participants of the Sawyer Seminar. As a historian and philosopher of science, she is currently the Co-Director of the Exeter Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences and has recently worked on a five-year grant about data access, openness, and infrastructure entitled The Epistemology of Data-Intensive Science. In her conversations at the Friday seminar, Dr. Leonelli focused on practices surrounding data collection and reuse, aiming to move towards a future of Open Data as the standard. One of her recent publications, an op-ed entitled “Data Shadows: Knowledge, Openness, and Absence,” spoke directly to many of the themes central to the Sawyer Seminar. She defines shadows, beyond being mere absences in data, as “the multiplicity of motives, goals, and conditions through which data may be construed as (in)significant, partial or complete, (un)intelligible, or (in)accessible.” Consequently, the degree to which these shadows exist depends on the context in which the data is considered, especially when data is being reused by parties other than the original creators. In her conversation with seminar participants, Dr. Leonelli discussed her vision for data use and distribution today, which involves most data being open-access, rather than owned by companies or individuals, as well as having the necessary metadata and methodological descriptions to make it valuable to others. This allows data to be reused, recontextualized, and further studied as more information becomes available, potentially allowing for discoveries in numerous fields. Dr. Leonelli identified several challenges in creating and maintaining open data, as well as some Read More

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In: Matthew Jones
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Who lets math organize their life? Drawing of the top view of the Pascaline and overview its mechanism, 1779, Oeuvres de Blaise Pascal. “…technical practices in mathematics and philosophy in turn offered important tools for cultivating truer forms of spiritual and mental nobility. These practices enabled mathematics and natural philosophy to transform, discipline, and train the intellect, the senses, and the affects, and they put these trained faculties at the heart of organizing one’s life.” (PG9-Good Life Scientific Revolution) On October 9th, 2019, Dr. Matthew Jones, visited the Mellon Sawyer Seminar group to discuss how his work in the history of science and technology relates to, makes use of, and critically examines “data” and its artefacts. Themes of collaboration and ethics are two threads that run throughout Dr. Jones’ work, though these terms take on radically different meanings as a result of shifting socio-temporal contexts. His work covers an expansive time period, ranging from early modern inventions to contemporary concerns about digital privacy and surveillance. The social nature of knowledge production and innovation were woven throughout our conversations with Dr. Jones. Highlighting collaborations between artisans and inventors in the mechanization of calculation (rather than narratives about exceptional individuals) is representative of a broader shift in historical study. Scholars from many fields have been moving away from the figure of the individual genius towards recognizing a more complicated and collaborative model of innovation. Similar reconceptions are happening within the contemporary discipline of digital humanities, as scholars strive to repatriate the credit for early experiments with computing to Read More

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In: Matthew Edney
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A version of our world where we are not dependent moment-by-moment on GPS tracking and Location Services is quickly becoming more and more unimaginable. So it was fascinating, then, that in his September 5th and 6th talks—delivered as part of Information Ecosystems: A Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar at the University of Pittsburgh—Matthew Edney asked that audience members think critically about these various mapping services and how deeply reliant we have become on them as a source of supposed “truth.” Long before GPS—and even long before TomTom, if you’re old enough to remember those—Edney pointed out that mapping and the so-called “field” of cartography has fundamentally shaped our conceptions of the world: how we visualize and are capable of visualizing it, how we are able to move and think about moving around it, and the many iterations of land-as-property documented over many centuries of maps. Edney’s new book, Cartography: The Ideal and Its History, does an excellent job of providing readers with a timeline of then-to-now. Cartography utilizes an impressively apt epilogue to the “Introduction”: “there is no such thing as cartography, and this is a book about it.” He helpfully framed his talks with this same quotation. By “there is no such thing as cartography,” he explained, he means that what cartography as a “field” purports to be is too loosely defined, too widely varying, too steeped in political motivation to cohere as a truly organized area of thought and practice; to quote Edney again, “the ideal of cartography is the entire belief system, while cartography Read More