Standardizing Culture: Data Archeology & Biographies

Structure for Discussion

• What is Newspaper Navigator?
• What are data archeologies vs. data biographies?

Newspaper Navigator

• What is Newspaper Navigator?
• What did it do and what problem was it built to solve?
• What has happened to the project?

Beyond Words & Crowdsourcing

• What was the Beyond Words Project? Why and how did Lee use this in Network Navigator?
• What are some of the benefits and drawbacks to crowdsourcing? What is Mechanical Turk?

Chroncicling America & Digitization

• What is the Chronicling America project and who funds it?
• What criteria determine which newspapers get digitized?
• What decisions made decades ago are now embedded in what researchers can find?

Technical Pipeline

• At which stages are choices being made?
• Where does interpretation enter the pipeline?

How does visual searching work?

Technical Challenges

• What is the importance of thresholds?
• How did Lee discuss his interpretative choices when it comes to datafication?

What is Data Archeology? What is a Data Biography?

• What does autoethnographic mean? What does it mean to “get to know” your data?
• How do these two approaches overlap or differ?

How does interpretation get structured into data?