CERES and the ANR-DATARights project will host the GARNET seminar in 2025. The seminar is dedicated to exploring some of the key issues related to the use and development of digital methods in the social sciences and humanities, whether they are implemented to study digitised corpora (history, semiotics, litterature) or to study interactions and communication in/via digital environments, which have become central to almost all fieldwork today.
To this end, the seminar will focus on presentations that articulate the material conditions of the use and development of digital tools with the theoretical consequences of methodological innovations.
This approach relies on a practical interdisciplinary conversation, as suggested by this year's topics: the implementation of infrastructures and methods for analysing multisemiotic corpora, the new ways of accessing and collecting data for research purposes when data has become a commodity and a means of surveillance, and the identification of power relations specific to socio-technical systems whose growing complexity defies traditional methods of investigation.
Organized by :
For the first session of this seminar, we are pleased to welcome Taylor Arnold and Lauren Tilton for a presentation entitled ‘Seeing with Computers: Distant Viewing in Theory and Practice’.
Their book, Distant Viewing: Computational Exploration of Digital Images, came out in 2023.
It presents a new theory and methodology for the computational analysis of digital images, offering a lively, constructive critique of computer vision. What does it mean to say that computer vision “understands” visual inputs? Annotations never capture a whole image. The way digital images convey information requires what researchers Taylor Arnold and Lauren Tilton call “distant viewing”.In the tradition of visual culture studies and computer vision, their interdisciplinary perspective encompasses film and media studies, visual semiotics, and the sciences to create an accessible guide for an international audience working in digital humanities, data science, media studies, and visual culture studies.