(fällt aus!) Blake Walker: Playing Quanti: Praxis and Pragmatism in Digital Spatial Data Analysis

The Department of Digital Humanities and Social Studies would like to invite you to the following talk in our DH Colloquium:

Blake Walker: »Playing Quanti: Praxis and Pragmatism in Digital Spatial Data Analysis«

Abstract:

The use of digital data and methods to understand the human condition and the spaces we experience continues to fundamentally transform the research practice, both at broad systemic scales and in our everyday interactions with the tools and materials themselves. In this talk, I seek to instigate critical-reflective engagements with the methodological banalities of quantitative data analysis in the social sciences and digital humanities at the individual scale by turning attention towards the researcher as a covert subjective actor in a methodological epoch that promotes and elevates scientific objectivity.

Drawing on recent debates under the banner of digital geographies, I seek to reignite longstanding, yet increasingly relevant tensions quantitative data analysis by promoting a reorientation of the digital subject-object relation. By casting the researcher as a playful digital subject, pursuing an epistemologically inclusive, pluralist engagement with the data and tools of digital research, we discuss recent insights into a hybrid heuristic/algorithmic reasoning of individual and shared knowledges.

Informed by the cyborg and firmly embedded in a Rortian pragmatic paradigm, I highlight examples from applied geographical research in which a critical resituating of quantitative data analysis and the analyst transform common applied procedures in spatial analysis, concluding with potential routes towards embracing the playfulness and curiosity of everyday scientific practice, reflecting on the implications of these reframings for the digital humanities as a transactional arena.

Further information and other upcoming talks in the Colloquium can be found here.