Digital Humanities Lecture: Tung-Hui Hu, "The Grid vs. the Set: Early Attempts at Classifying Data"

The Society for the Humanities & CNY Humanities Corridor (in partnership with Cornell's Media Studies Colloquium) present: The Annual Digital Humanities Lecture

The world is teeming with objects, and today's AI models rely on datasets such as ImageNet to learn, for example, that a "seat belt" and a "waffle iron" are both types of "commodities". But might an earlier moment of scientific classification hold lessons for how we understand the dataset today? By examining collections of botanical specimens in the 17th century, this talk will track two competing modes of computational logic that tried to contain the disorder of the natural world.

Poet and scholar of digital media Tung-Hui Hu will present new work in the annual Digital Humanities Lecture at the Society for the Humanities, entitled "The Grid vs. the Set: Early Attempts at Classifying Data." The lecture is sponsored by the CNY Humanities Corridor, Cornell's Media Studies Colloquium and the Society for the Humanities. The event is free and open to the public and will be followed by a reception in the A.D. White House. 

Hu, Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, is the author of "A Prehistory of the Cloud" and "Digital Lethargy". The winner of a Rome Prize and a NEA fellowship for literature, Hu has also received an American Academy in Berlin Prize for his research.  https://www.tunghui.hu/

Hu will also lead a space-limited workshop for graduate students on Thursday, October 19, entitled "New Aesthetic Forms, from Lethargy to AI."