Conference Agenda

DH seeks to adopt concepts and methods from data science and software engineering (web development and digital data processing) in order to address research questions within the humanities, thereby developing a research practice informed by STEM. With its interpretive and iterative methods, ethnography enhances understanding of socio-technical contexts, and has supported user-centered software design, and sustainable, reusable software. In data science, research that integrates rhetorical and critical approaches based on ethnographic theory and methodology help uncover how data shapes knowledge and power. Yet, critical ethnographic perspectives are still largely lacking in DH. As a trading zone among humanities disciplines with a focus on digital practices, DH should integrate ethnography, as it is well positioned to serve as a conceptual and methodological bridge between digital humanities and research software engineering and data science, thereby reversing the often-assumed unidirectional flow of knowledge from STEM to the humanities.