Narrative Data, University of Sussex – 12-13 June 2018

June 14, 2018 | james

James was fortunate enough to be invited to an annual two-day event hosted by the Humanities Lab at the University of Sussex – which this year was organised and run by our superb Co-I, Alex Butterworth. The name of the event itself provides so much scope for considering the simple premise of data use that is so easy to accidentally overlook – covering researchers with all manner of thoughts, practices, fields, and approaches – and the days did not diasappoint in the slightest!

Openly billed as a ‘sandbox forum’, the days were filled with lightning talks (kept firmly in line with a boating horn *honk*), provocation talks, working practice rundowns, and group work to practically design a means of examining how data can be used to present narratives. Or vice-versa.

The cohort was incredibly diverse, covering journalism (The Times), performance design (the RSC), mixed and virtual reality art, and experimental poetry (although the artist may shoot me a wither glare for classing it as such, sorry JR!) and all manner of projects that categorise, tag, and re-shape information into new forms. Audio, visual, tactile, and experimental text formats – all of which fed into our team project design. It was a pleasure getting to work with materials in ways we had never considered before – and really opened our eyes to new approaches to re-presenting materials within the digital humanities.

The team would like to thank our gracious hosts – Alex and everyone else from the labs that worked to keep things running smoothly – at the Humanities Lab once more for inviting us down. We made a number of valuable new contacts from the event, that we hope may lead to some interesting developments in the near future…