Abstract

Data science has begun to have impact in a broad range of disciplines from biomedicine to the humanities. Our view of data science is often highly abstract and mathematical. This view is in contrast to the lived experience of data scientists, who spend much more time collecting and curating datasets than optimizing loss functions. In this talk I will argue that the humanities have a lot to say to data science. Using some examples from text analysis, I will show that scholarly perspectives can inform data science practices, from a focus on robustness and data context and provenance to ethics and the specificity of individual experiences.

Bio

David Mimno is an associate professor in the department of Information Science at Cornell University. He holds a PhD from UMass Amherst and was previously the head programmer at the Perseus Project at Tufts and a CRA Computing Innovation Fellow at Princeton University. His work is supported by the Sloan foundation and the NSF.