The John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, the Brown University Library Center for Digital Scholarship, and the John Carter Brown Library present a series of events that ask us to think about the uses of maps, data, and visualizations in the stories we tell about place, identity, and migration. Entitled, Reading, Resisting, and Reimagining The Map, the series consists of three workshops:
Visualizing Precarious Lives in Torn Apart / Separados
Thursday, November 1 from 12 – 1 p.m.
Lecture Room (1st Floor), Nightingale-Brown House (357 Benefit St.), John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage
Dr. Roopika Risam (Assistant Professor of English, Salem State University) discusses her work on Torn Apart / Separados, a highly-collaborative project that uses digital tools to reveal troubling stories about immigration policy, incarceration, and the humanitarian crisis caused by the work of ICE in the United States.
Before There Were Lines Along the Rio Grande
Friday, November 2 from 12 – 1 p.m.
MacMillan Reading Room, John Carter Brown Library
Drawing on the rich collection of rare books and maps at the JCB, curators, librarians, and researchers will provide a critical context for how northern Mexico and what would become the southern United States was experienced during a colonial era that predated the modern nation-state. A historical perspective enables us to understand how these liminal spaces were imagined in an era before electronic surveillance and satellite imagery.
Thinking Critically About Data
Tuesday, November 6 from 3 – 4 p.m.
Digital Scholarship Lab, Rockefeller Library
Data sets tell stories, support arguments, and help us map and visualize information, but they aren’t neutral. How do you create and visualize data points that aren’t stable, such as data models of identity (e.g. race, gender)? How can we create data models that reflect people’s lived experiences? In this workshop, we’ll analyze and create a dataset, exploring what our data says and what it doesn’t.