Levis Faculty Center
919 West Illinois Street, Urbana, Illinois

As the impact of computational methods on all aspects of ordinary life accelerates, humanists and artists are grappling with how big data is understood and how the cultures arising from it are shaping up at this moment in the history of technological innovation. This conference tackles questions of scale, visuality, application, representation, textuality, materiality, aesthetics, preservation, epistemology and experimentation at the intersection of big data and research and thinking in the arts and humanities. Our aim is to place these issues at the heart of conversations about big data and its institutional locations at Illinois and to advance a genuinely interdisciplinary set of approaches to the field.

Free and open to the public.

A livestream of the conference will be available beginning Thursday, October 4 at 7:30 pm Central Daylight Time at go.illinois.edu/livestream.

Thursday, October 4th Evening Plenary, featuring:

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English, Michigan State University, Trevor Muñoz, Interim Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and Assistant Dean for Digital Humanities, and Lisa Nakamura, Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor of American Cultures, U of Michigan.

Friday, October 5th day-long panel sessions

View the full Friday session schedule, featuring:

• Catherine D’Ignazio/kanarinka, Assistant Professor of Civic Media and Data Visualization at Emerson College, (a Faculty Director at the Engagement Lab and a research affiliate at the MIT Center for Civic Media & MIT Media Lab)
• Erik Loyer, Creative Director of The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture and Founder and Director of Opertoon
• Matthew Jones, Professor of Contemporary Civilization, Columbia University
• Safiya Noble, Assistant Professor, School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California Annenberg
• Liz Losh, Associate Professor of English and American Studies, William and Mary
• Virginia Eubanks, Associate Professor of Political Science, University at Albany, SUNY
• Richard So, Assistant Professor, English and Cultural Analytics, McGill University
• Jo Guldi, Assistant Professor of History, Southern Methodist University

Sponsored by the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, Offices of the Provost and the Vice Chancellor for Research, NCSA, and the Trowbridge Initiative in American Cultures.