Deleting the Archive: Will the Challenge of 'Big Data' Mean the End of History as We Know It?
14 Agosto 2014 ·
- Quem: Matthew Connelly
- Onde: FGV - Praia de Botafogo, 190, sala 317
- Quando: 14 de Agosto de 2014 às 16:00h
More than forty years ago, U.S. government officials already felt overwhelmed by the amount of information gathered by the vast apparatus of the national security state. Beguiled by the promise of harnessing all of it for data-driven analysis, the State Department became an early-adopter of electronic record-keeping. It quickly lost tens of thousands of documents in the transition. Vastly more information was purposefully deleted decades later, when crude forms of statistical sampling led officials to delete whole classes of records on everything from passports and visas to cultural diplomacy and international sport. Since all governments will eventually face the same problem, exploring the archive of the U.S. State Department - or what’s left of it - indicates the kinds of challenges researchers will face when more and more history leaves no paper trail. It also shows how important it will be to develop new and better computational methods for analyzing these large corporae of textual records.
Speaker
Matthew Connelly, professor, works in international and global history. He received his B.A. from Columbia (1990) and his Ph.D. from Yale ( 1997). His publications include A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (2002), and Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (2008). He has written research articles in Comparative Studies in Society and History, The International Journal of Middle East Studies, The American Historical Review, The Review francaise d’histoire d’Outre-mer, and Past & Present. He has also published commentary on international affairs in The Atlantic Monthly and The National Interest.
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