Algorithmic Ethics: Racism and Sexism in Digital Humanities Databases

How have digital humanities databases changed the nature of scholarship? How have racism and sexism distorted those databases and the scholarship based on them? Professor Block will address these and other questions related to digital humanities research in her lecture.

Professor Block has researched and taught the history of sexuality for over two decades. She is the author of Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (OIEAHC Imprint, University of North Carolina Press, 2006) and Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) and numerous essays and articles. She pioneered applying new data- mining technologies to historical sources, including data-mining 80,000 eighteenth-century newspaper articles and evaluating the place of women’s history in a half million abstracts of historical publications. She is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine.