MAX-PLANCK-INSTITUT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTSGESCHICHTE Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Event

Jun 10, 2020
The Crowd: Digital Prosopography of Public Participation in Science

This BBL will take place on Zoom

 

Digital humanities are offering new ways of “finding out who the guys were,” as Lewis Pyenson put in in 1977, leading to a review of prosopography in history. In this seminar, I will discuss a research journey, lasting almost five years, in search of the “crowd” of online participation in science or “citizen science.” We constructed a database of digital-born traces from about 10 million individuals —perhaps the largest such database ever constituted in the history of science. This collection has allowed us to answer a small number of questions, redefine a few, and open up many more. It has also been one of the least efficient use of research resources imaginable. But the process of amassing such a vast amount of data has taught us many things about online worlds and their inhabitants, the opportunities and limitations of digital humanities, as well as about the unforeseen technical, personal, social, and ethical challenges of such research approaches. Surprisingly, the attempt to draw a quantitative picture of the crowd brought us to rediscover the value of individual trajectories, the possibilities of a digital “history from below,” and the richness of personal and intimate online narratives.

Organizer(s)
Address
Boltzmannstraße 22, 14195 Berlin, Germany
Contact and Registration

Please email Research IT Group for the Zoom link.

All are welcome to attend, regardless of prior experience of the digital humanities. Registration is required for external participants. To register, and for further information on the Digital Humanities Brown Bag Lunch series email Research IT Group.

About This Series

Brown Bag Lunch is a bi-weekly meeting of researchers at the MPIWG who use or want to learn more about digital research methods, broadly encompassed by the term Digital Humanities. In the Brown Bag Lunch meetings, researchers can discuss tools, share ideas and experiences (good and bad), and learn from each other. Each session explores a new topic; workshops are usually interactive, and we often invite external speakers. Please feel free to bring your lunch, and a laptop or notebook in order to participate!

2020-06-10T14:00:00SAVE IN I-CAL 2020-06-10 14:00:00 2020-06-10 15:30:00 The Crowd: Digital Prosopography of Public Participation in Science This BBL will take place on Zoom   Digital humanities are offering new ways of “finding out who the guys were,” as Lewis Pyenson put in in 1977, leading to a review of prosopography in history. In this seminar, I will discuss a research journey, lasting almost five years, in search of the “crowd” of online participation in science or “citizen science.” We constructed a database of digital-born traces from about 10 million individuals —perhaps the largest such database ever constituted in the history of science. This collection has allowed us to answer a small number of questions, redefine a few, and open up many more. It has also been one of the least efficient use of research resources imaginable. But the process of amassing such a vast amount of data has taught us many things about online worlds and their inhabitants, the opportunities and limitations of digital humanities, as well as about the unforeseen technical, personal, social, and ethical challenges of such research approaches. Surprisingly, the attempt to draw a quantitative picture of the crowd brought us to rediscover the value of individual trajectories, the possibilities of a digital “history from below,” and the richness of personal and intimate online narratives. Boltzmannstraße 22, 14195 Berlin, Germany Shih-Pei ChenRobert CastiesDirk WintergrünFlorian KräutliPascal Belouin Shih-Pei ChenRobert CastiesDirk WintergrünFlorian KräutliPascal Belouin Europe/Berlin public