GSLIS doctoral student Sarah T. Roberts delivered the inaugural lecture for the Illinois Institute of Technology’s newly formed lecture series on digital humanities, which was held on September 21.
Her lecture, “Digital Humanity: Foregrounding Human Traces in Technological Systems (and Why We Should Care),” addressed practical applications of technology and ethical issues involved in seemingly automated processes that actually require a human touch:
Roberts spoke about several practical applications of technology that foreground humanity in the digital, such as Fab Lab, a low-cost lab that lets people build things they need using digital and analog tools . . . She [also] raised ethical issues involved in ostensibly seamless automated processes, which are really accomplished by human beings, such as those used by Google in its project Google Books. Her research, and other current research cited in her lecture, “unveils hidden or obfuscated traces of humans within digital systems and the implications that such erasures engender.”
The ITT lecture series, “Defining Boundaries and Goals in the Digital Humanities,” is a sequence examining the current state-of-the-art developments in the emerging field of digital humanities, encouraging exploration of disciplinary issues.