CIRSS Seminar: Catherine Blake

Catherine Blake, associate professor and associate director of CIRSS, will present "Research Trends in Digital Scholarship and Digital Humanities."

Abstract: Scientists and humanists often bring profoundly different perspectives, even to the same research object. Consider how each of these communities describe the virtues and vices of a bridge. While an engineer will remain focused on the structural integrity and reliability of a bridge, a humanist will consider the evolution of social and cultural norms that are transformed after a bridge literally connects two communities. And while we typically applaud bridges that can resist force, bridges have also been deliberately designed to collapse under the weight of an invading army. The presentation will use two case studies from the digital humanities to illustrate the different perspectives of computational models provided by an engineer and humanist. Despite these different perspectives many of the big data trends that have been embraced in the sciences are now starting to emerge in digital humanities.

Blake is an associate professor in the iSchool with affiliate appointments in the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Medical Information Science. At the School, she serves as associate director of the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship and is an active member of the Socio-technical Data Analytics group. Her primary research goal is to accelerate scientific discovery by synthesizing evidence from text. Her techniques embrace both automated and human approaches that are required to resolve contradictions and redundancies that are inevitable in an information-intensive world. She earned master's and doctoral degrees in information and computer science at the University of California, Irvine and bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science at the University of Wollongong.

Questions? Contact Janet Eke

 

This event is sponsored by CIRSS