Lara Putnam

Information Ecosystems: Creating Data (and Absence) From the Quantitative to the Digital Age

Across the humanities and social sciences, methods of knowledge production are being transformed by an extraordinary expansion of digitized information. This Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Sawyer Seminar brings fourteen field-leading international scholars to Pitt over the course of the 2019-20 academic year, to set the present moment within a century-long history of information supply and its power-laden consequences.

We trace the interlinked processes through which the creation of data (and its absence) has played out both within society as a whole, and within the academic disciplines to which we turn for our understandings of societies, cultures, and individuals. How are information sources generated, to what end, and with what results for our collective ability to see—or to ignore? This in an inquiry into the social and political life of data, both within the academy and in the wider world.

The seminar reflects our conviction that for scholars across the humanities and social sciences, critical analysis of the factors shaping information supply is not an alternative, but rather a crucial complement, to advanced training in the application of quantitative, computational, and digital methods. Indeed, critical knowledge of context is fundamental to our ability to use tools mindfully for maximum leverage on our research questions.

Travels and Terrains: Transnational Approaches to the History of Race and Anti-Racism in the Post-Emancipation Atlantic World

The last decade has seen an outpouring of scholarship on the international history of racism and antiracism. The digitization of ever-greater swathes of the world's printed past, too, has made new research techniques possible.  As a result, the international dimensions of struggles long studied within national frames have received new attention. We have gained vivid portraits of activists, organizations, and publications that linked far-flung sites.  Yet in the process, topics deemed central by a previous wave of scholarship—like labor dynamics, land tenure, demography, and political structures—seem to have taken the back seat.

Which aspects of the historical development of race and capital do we understand better now that we are routinely remembering to look beyond borders? What are we failing to see?  This essay traces different kinds of connections between Venezuela, Trinidad, and South Africa, and uses them as a springboard to examine the contributions and blind spots of recent work on the transnational histories of race and of capitalism.