Event Details

• Date/Time:
  • Thursday October 1, 2015 - Friday October 2, 2015
    11:30 am - 12:59 pm
• Location: Technology Square Research Building Room 132 (Ballroom)
• Phone:
• URL:
• Email:
• Fee(s):
  N/A
• Extras:
  

Contact

No contact information submitted.

Summaries

Summary Sentence: The GVU Center Brown Bag Seminar Series is free and features guest speakers presenting on topics related to the use of computing technology in everyday living.

Full Summary: No summary paragraph submitted.

Media

• Yanni Loukissas
  (image/jpeg)

Speaker: 

Yanni Loukissas
Assistant Professor, Digital Media in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech

Title:

A Field Guide to Local Data

Abstract:

Despite their proliferation, data are surprisingly limited in scope. Even the largest data sets—promoted as ‘big data’—are merely aggregated indexes to what ethnographers call “local knowledge.” This talk calls attention to the myriad ways in which data are local: bounded by places, moments, communities and rituals. It asks, what are the implications of data provenance? Moreover, it offers a set of models for visualizing data in ways that highlight their specificity, rather than cleaning, filtering or effacing those characteristics. Making space for regional categories, historical terminology, place-based values and workplace errors can help us interpret data as an aggregate, rather than a monolithic source of information.

Consider the following cases: NewsScape, an academic initiative based at UCLA, has accumulated video and transcripts for over three hundred thousand broadcast news programs from around the world; the Digital Public Library of America, a non-profit organization, has linked together millions of digitized resources from libraries, archives and museums; Zillow, an online real estate marketplace, has amassed sales data on more than one hundred million homes in the United States. Each of these endeavors draws together data from disparate locales, enabling panoramic views across distributed sites of collection. However, such vistas also evoke anxiety about the loss of cultural context for data and the material limits of its encoding. Though our capacity to amass diverse sources of data continues to expand, I argue that data can never fully transcend their traditional roles as tokens for more intimate forms of knowledge. This talk will offer insight into the heterogeneous structure of aggregated data sets, challenge dominant narratives around big data, and help audiences think about the varied ways and places in which data are made.
 Bio:
Yanni Loukissas is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. His research draws together design and social studies of media technologies. Before coming to Georgia Tech, he was a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he co-coordinated the Program in Art, Design and the Public Domain. He was also a principal at metaLAB, a research project of the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society that explores digital futures for the arts and humanities. Additionally, he has taught at Cornell, MIT, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Originally trained as an architect at Cornell University, he subsequently received a Master of Science and a PhD in Design and Computation at MIT. While at MIT, he worked with the Initiative on Technology and Self, the Media Lab, and the Center for Bits and Atoms. He also completed postdoctoral work at the MIT Program in Science, Technology and Society. He is the author of Co-Designers: Cultures of Computer Simulation in Architecture (Routledge, 2012). 
 

Additional Information

In Campus Calendar

No

Groups

IPaT

Invited Audience

Undergraduate students, Faculty/Staff, Public, Graduate students

Categories

Seminar/Lecture/Colloquium

Keywords

GVU Brown Bag

Status

• Created By: Alyson Key
• Workflow Status: Archived
• Created On: Sep 28, 2015 - 7:02am
• Last Updated: Apr 13, 2017 - 5:18pm