{"id":6540,"date":"2025-03-07T09:29:34","date_gmt":"2025-03-07T08:29:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/c2dh-en\/?post_type=events&p=6540"},"modified":"2025-05-02T14:31:24","modified_gmt":"2025-05-02T12:31:24","slug":"so-everything-is-biased-now-what","status":"publish","type":"events","link":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/c2dh-en\/events\/so-everything-is-biased-now-what\/","title":{"rendered":"So everything is biased \u2026 now what?!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Hands-on History lecture with Mrinalini Luthra, Huygens Institute, Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The contemporary moment seems to be one of “enchanted determinism”\u2014a constructed belief that technology will inevitably \ufb01nd the right answers if fed enough data. Yet the familiar principle of “Garbage In, Garbage Out” remains as relevant as ever. The “garbage” in this equation increasingly takes the form of bias, manifesting in algorithms that discriminate against marginalized populations and (digital) systems that reproduce harmful content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For digital humanities researchers, this challenge is compounded by multiple intersecting forms of bias they must navigate: archival biases in source selection, historical power structures in interpretation, representational biases in digitisation, and algorithmic biases in analysis. Despite growing attention to \u2018bias mitigation\u2019, the term carries different meanings across disciplines, complicating systematic approaches. This conceptual instability, if left unexamined, has the tendency to render bias both omnipresent and at a risk of becoming meaningless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Combatting Bias <\/em>project focuses speci\ufb01cally on datasets as its primary unit of study, as a critical intersection point where creators, users, and digital infrastructures meet. It acknowledges that eliminating bias entirely is an impossible task. Instead, it examines the vocabulary of bias, how it transforms across research stages and contexts, using it as a category of analysis and tool for critical re\ufb02ection. The project is developing a framework with three components:<\/p>\n\n\n\n