Opening Archives with Digital Humanities Approaches

TRANSITION Data Lab with Peter Leonard

What happens when humanistic research meets large-scale digital data? And how can computational approaches help us see cultural history, language, and literature in new ways? These are some of the questions we will take up in this Data Lab with Peter Leonard.

This Data Lab is an invitation to discuss the promises and challenges of digital methods across the humanities. From text analysis to cultural data infrastructures, we will reflect on what these approaches can do for the humanities — and on the kinds of questions they open for future research.

Peter Leonard is an academic librarian with fifteen years’ leadership experience in American research libraries, including Columbia, Yale, and Stanford universities. He founded the Yale Digital Humanities Lab, where he also taught in the department of Statistics and Data Science. He received his PhD in Scandinavian Literature from the University of Washington and was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Uppsala University in support of his doctoral research on Swedish literature. His postdoctoral work on text mining Nordic literature was funded by Google.

TRANSITION Data Labs are hands-on sessions where researchers come together to explore and analyse data from current research on rural–urban transitions. The labs are also a forum for discussing methodological questions and experimenting with approaches across disciplines.