“Data Transliteracy: Creativity and Cooperation across Knowledge Cultures“
This talk focuses on the notion of transliteracy and its relationship to the creation, manipulation and sharing of data in digital humanities. I argue that data literacy is not only a means for achieving analytical rigor for discipline-specific interpretative contributions, but a means of forming bridges between knowledge cultures with different sets of actors, ecosystems of exchange, conceptions of public and measures of impact. The talk is framed around a discussion of three seemingly unconnected research projects: (1) experiments done in handwritten text recognition (HTR) of the so-called „Parisian Bible“ of the 13th century with the Louvre Abu Dhabi, (2) urban culture mapping in the classroom in Beirut and (3) art research projects about datification and performance with my own university’s arts center. The reflective creation and integration of data–geospatial, temporal and textual–from and across the disciplines has profound implications not only for research and knowledge production, but also for pedagogy and new realms of creativity and collaboration in learning.
David Joseph Wrisley is Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at NYU Abu Dhabi (UAE). He was trained as a medievalist and during the early part of his career published in comparative literature, history of translation and court culture. His current research interests include spatial humanities, handwritten text recognition (HTR) across writing systems and digital humanities community building in the Middle East. His research has appeared in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Digital Studies / Le champ numérique, Speculum, Egypte/Monde Arabe, Le Moyen Français as well as in computer science conferences, IEEE VIS, NAACL, COLING, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications. He has lived in the Middle East since 2002, where he co-founded two digital humanities training institutes–the Digital Humanities Institute Beirut in 2015 and the NYU Abu Dhabi Winter Institute in Digital Humanities (wp.nyu.edu/widh) in 2020. In 2018 with colleagues he launched an annual conference named „RTL“ collocated with DHSI concerned with computing and right to left language cultures. In 2019 he also co-founded the OpenGulf initiative at NYU Abu Dhabi (opengulf.github.io) as a way of bringing the Gulf Studies and digital humanities communities into dialogue.
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