Series Kickoff: Usual and Unusual Suspects in Data Science

Please join us for three lightning talks by professors and researchers in UNC-Chapel Hill's academic community, centered around how data science is used in a broad range of disciplines. These talks will be followed by a guided panel and an opportunity for questions and answers with the speakers. We hope you will enjoy discovering how data science underpins and influences research and daily life.

Seminar Format:

• (20 mins) Three Lightning Talks
• (20 mins) Guided Panel
• (20 mins) Community Discourse

Speakers:

Our speakers for this month are as follows:

• Kathryn Desplanque

  Assistant Professor of 18th and 19th Century European Art, Department of Art and Art History

  Inglorious Artists: Art-World Satire and the Market Economy for Art, 1750-1850 examines a corpus of 530 satirical images of artistic life in Paris published between 1750 and 1850. These satirical images, produced by practicing visual artists, are an untapped resource that reveals that visual artists criticized their art world primarily via political cartooning, and were urgently preoccupied with the emergence of a free market for art during the Industrial Revolution and emergence of modern financial capitalism. Using Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) software as a personal research tool, the images are associated to bibliographic information and are annotated using a “tagging” system, facilitating the exploration of tropes and motifs through database queries.

• Corbin Jones

  Professor, Department of Biology

  For humans and many other species, data from genomes, metagenomes, transcriptomes, proteomes, RNAi screens, mutagenesis screens, enhancer screens, natural variation, etc. is pouring into databases and repositories. While rich, these datasets are nearly impossible for biologists to synthesize and interrogate. In short, researchers are data rich but insight poor. We are bridging this gap by applying robust data analytics and developing novel algorithms to this ever-growing mountain of data. After briefly reviewing a few key capabilities on campus, today’s talk will focus on an emerging challenge: analysis of spatial genomic data and how to leverage decades of research in Ecology to better understand these exciting new data sets.

• Timothy Shea

  Assistant Professor of Classical Archaeology, Department of Classics

  The Spatial Antiquity Lab will be a space dedicated to research and teaching in Spatial Humanities. Digital Humanities has become a term that encompasses a wide array of research methods, applications, and agendas, and within this vast and evolving research landscape, we would like to focus our endeavors on research projects centering on space, place, and landscape. The Spatial Antiquity Lab will focus on the study of ancient cities and urbanism, as well as the regional cultural landscape, exploring long-term, diachronic human occupation, and migration, resource exploitation, and historical ecology.

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