Associate Professor Bonnie Mak will return to The Pennsylvania State University to participate in the inaugural Information + Humanities conference on October 28-29. The conference is sponsored by the Center for Humanities and Information, where Mak was visiting senior fellow in 2015-2016.
Mak is among twelve invited speakers from across the country who will offer their perspectives on a set of terms especially associated with information, including infrastructure, classification, interface, keyword, and design. In her presentation on the topic of metadata, Mak will discuss how the descriptive practices of natural historians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can shed light on questions about metadata in the twenty-first century.
"I look forward to joining my colleagues to discuss how the notion of information might be usefully interrogated from a humanistic perspective. It is now urgent for us to develop a nuanced understanding of the historical and social conditions that have contributed to today’s emphasis on 'data', and how such an emphasis has already begun to reconfigure what is perceived as scholarly activity and knowledge," Mak said.
At Illinois, Mak holds a joint appointment in the School of Information Sciences and the Program in Medieval Studies. She teaches courses in the history and future of the book and offers doctoral seminars on authenticity, reading practices, and knowledge production. Her first book, How the Page Matters (2011), examines the interface of the page as it is developed across time, geographies, and technologies. A second book-length project, Confessions of a 21st-Century Memsahib, explores the historical circumstances that shape the digital materials with which scholarship is increasingly conducted, and thereby examines the notions of data and information in the humanities. In 2011, she was named the School's Centennial Scholar in recognition of her outstanding accomplishments in the field of library and information science.