Professor Johanna Drucker is presenting on the Digital Humanities.

Visualizing Temporality: Modelling Time from the Textual Record

What does time look like?  We are all familiar with the standard timeline than measures out events with neat tick-marks, like the divisions on a ruler.  Yet whilst very few of us really think about the past in this sort of methodical way, the tools we use in the digital realm impose an artificial sense of order and regularity to the unfolding of events.  Taking an eighteenth-century reference work, Edmund Fry’sPantographia, as her case study, Professor Drucker will examine the various overlapping frameworks that authors use when assembling and organising historical events.  Her lecture will argue that the development of digital tools must be guided by humanities scholars if we are to represent the human past faithfully.