Sean Takats: Encoding Enlightenment
How do researchers take ownership and responsibility for the work that we increasingly do with digital data, digital tools and digital methodologies? How do we peer inside technological and intellectual black boxes, and expose those inner workings to the outside world? This talk will examine the development and activities of diverse and collaborative research teams which have tried to address these problems through the creation of software tools for research. While today’s technological opportunities and challenges might appear new, we can trace such concerns back to the Enlightenment, when knowledge production and dissemination first began to operate on a similarly confounding scale. This historical perspective will inform our exploration of current research innovation.