CMAC Rendez-Vous with Patrick Herron: "Visualizing Discursive Formations: Computing Archaeologies of Knowledge"

How might a person read and express a library, understand what it does and does not say, what it favors and what it discounts? How might we begin grasping how media makes us who we are collectively and individually? Senior Research Scientist Patrick Herron has struggled with these questions since the 90's when working in a government cancer research lab and developing augmentative computational methods for constructing and deconstructing poems. Herron will first give a brief review of his interdisciplinary work applying text mining to a broad array of topics. Herron will then present a method for visualizing specific types of distinctive formations within digital archives both synchronically and diachronically through examples, including an extensive analysis of Hollywood's production of the military entertainment complex.

The talk will take place in room A266 in Bay 10 on the second floor of Smith Warehouse. Free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.