IDSC was pleased to welcome University of Miami Associate Professor of English and Data Humanist Lindsay Thomas, PhD, as the second speaker of the fall 2021 Meet a Data Scientist lecture series on Wednesday, October 20, 2021 (4:00-5:00 PM) via Zoom. This lecture series is co-sponsored by the Miami Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) and is free and open to the public.

The Meet a Data Scientist Lecture Series is a chance to get up-close and personal with top-level experts in a wide variety of fields that use data science.  The purpose of this series is to introduce you to the people behind the data, their lives, interests, career choices, their work, and their passion for how they use data to solve grand challenges in their respective fields.

Prof. Thomas’s research and teaching focus on the digital humanities, cultural studies, and contemporary US literature. She is the author of Training for Catastrophe: Fictions of National Security after 9/11 (2021), a book about how the post-9/11 national security state uses fiction to train people to accept disaster as part of everyday life. From 2017-2021, she was co-director of WhatEvery1Says, a public humanities project that used machine learning to explore the shape of contemporary public discourse on the value of the humanities. She has published articles on post-9/11 national security and contemporary fiction and film, and she is a co-curator of the WhatEvery1Says datasets, which include over 9 million news articles and social media posts about the humanities today.

 

Her Meet a Data Scientist lecture was titled:

“When Are Texts Data? Views from a Data Humanist”

Data is often considered the domain of scientists and statisticians. But the proliferation of data and databases across nearly all aspects of daily life has made the study and use of data a vital concern for humanists as well. This talk will explore the use of data in the humanities today, focusing especially on literary and cultural studies. We will investigate what it means to think of text as data and learn about how scholars are using data to answer new questions about literary history and contemporary culture. Dr. Thomas will also discuss her research as co-director of WhatEvery1Says, a public humanities project that investigated contemporary public discourse about the humanities. WhatEvery1Says collected more than 9 million news articles and social media posts about the humanities and sciences and collected survey data from over 600 participants on two different university campuses, including the University of Miami. Dr. Thomas will survey project findings and discuss how she became interested in using methods in data science in her research.

More about Lindsay Thomas  lindsaythomas.net