Matthew Battles will present the Otlet Lecture in Library and Information Science, "Data and Deep Time: Addressability in a Dappled World":
In the era of big data, we want to believe that all things, all the phenomena of the world, are documentable, trackable, addressable. This ideology is captured by Jeffrey Pomerantz in his book Metadata for the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, where he writes that "[i]t's metadata's world. You're just living in it." This talk will probe the limits of that assertion. For despite big data's wonted ubiquity, the world is dappled: there are patches where addressability shines brightly, and zones where people and things move and shift without address. By looking at the fate of human artifacts in deep time—stretching over epochs beyond even the scope of written history—we might find clues to what happens, and what is possible, beyond the edges of the data we keep.
To learn more about Matthew battles and the Otlet Lecture in Library and Information Science, visit the iSchool website at https://ischool.illinois.edu/events/2017/04/25/otlet-lecture-library-and-information-science-matthew-battles.
Thanks to the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities for this information item.
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