Friday 22nd May 2015: History Faculty, Lecture Theatre, George Street, University of Oxford

A one-day symposium on the subject of images, objects and data.

Through eight short presentations from many different perspectives, this workshop will offer an occasion both to celebrate and to build upon the diversity of work surrounding images that is currently in progress across the wide spectrum of the University of Oxford. The workshop is free and all are welcome to attend.
For the purpose of planning, and because places are limited, please indicate your intention to attend before Thursday 14th May by emailing adminhoa.ox.ac.uk.

Programme:

11:00
Coffee (History Faculty Common Room)

11:15
Welcome (Mirjam Brusius, History of Art)

11:30
Data Overflow
Chair: Craig Clunas

Alexandra Sofroniew (Classical Archaeology)
Too much data? The “Great Curse of Archaeology”’

Felix Hofmann (Engineering Science)
‘X-ray diffraction images: From Data to Information’

12:15
Data and Space
Chair: Hanneke Grootenboer

Benjamin Hennig (Geography)
‘Visualizing Space and Place: New Geographies of the Anthropocene’

Stefano de Sabbata (Internet Institute)
‘Internet Population and Penetration’

13:00
Lunch (provided in the History Faculty)

14:00
Data and Authority
Chair: Matthew Walker

Oren J Margolis (History)
‘Of Cetaceans and Citations, or Pierre Belon and the Renaissance Dolphin’

Camille Mathieu (History of Art)
‘Data in the Nude: The Statistics of Studio Modeling in Napoleonic Rome’

14:45
Hidden Data
Chair: Gervase Rosser

Thomas Harty (Physics)
‘Small Data: Telling the Time from Photographs of Single Atoms’

Tyler Goodspeed (Economics/History)
‘Why Ireland Starved: Evidence from the Relief Commission Papers’

15:30
Roundtable Discussion
Chair: Geraldine Johnson

followed by tea (History Faculty Common Room)

In the last three decades or so, huge databases have become a ubiquitous feature of science, while Big Data has become a buzzword for describing an ostensibly new and distinctive mode of knowledge production. But are data-gathering and knowledge production phases today more explicitly separate than they have been in the past? Here, the tools and subjects of art history become eminent and they can be made fruitful for the future: Data depends on an understanding of the material culture—the tools and technologies used to collect, store, and analyze data. This precise relationship between technologies, practices, material and epistemologies is complex: What is the connection between data and the physical objects they represent? Can an object be both, a carrier of data and data itself? How can data be collected? How much data is an object when it is “found”? Will the object be turned into “better” data once it has arrived its final destiny where it becomes an object of study? The workshop will stress the importance of material culture in data production and the transformation of knowledge across the humanities and the natural sciences. Above all, attention must be paid to visualizations and representations of data, both as working tools and also as means of communication. What role do epistemic practices, such as the application of visual media play to turn “raw data” into data of another order?

Dr Mirjam Brusius
Convenor, Image and Object 2015

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of History of Art, University of Oxford