DIGIHUM Talk: Nat Hansen and J. D. Porter

The series TÜ Digihum Talks will continue Friday, 10 February at 2pm – 4 pm. The first lecture of the spring semester is delivered by Nat Hansen and J. D. Porter. The title of their talk is “"Racist", "Sexist", "Voluntary", "Involuntary", and the Rise and Fall of a Philosophical Movement: Philosophical Questions and the Digital Humanities". Nat is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Reading (UK) and co-director of the Reading Centre for Cognition Research. His primary research interest is philosophy of language (experimental semantics and pragmatics). J. D. Porter is a DH Project Specialist at the Price Lab of Digital Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in text mining, American modernism, and race and ethnicity theory.

You can join the lecture via Zoom:

https://ut-ee.zoom.us/j/96404007739?pwd=Y3BwWFZuVUxlek5URVYzQy8zM25Ydz09

ID: 964 0400 7739

Passcode: 984245

We continue with our lecture series on 10 March. More information about the talk series and the centre can be found on our FB page.  

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"Racist", "Sexist", "Voluntary", "Involuntary", and the Rise and Fall of a Philosophical Movement: Philosophical Questions and the Digital Humanities

Abstract

Are we distorting the meaning of terms like "racist" and "sexist" by overusing them? How do we determine who is right and who is wrong when philosophers of language disagree about the meaning of terms like "voluntary" and "involuntary"? Can quantitative measures improve our understanding of the rise and fall of historical philosophical movements? In this presentation, we will discuss three examples of how tools from the digital humanities can be used to help answer philosophical questions.

Bio:

Nat Hansen is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Reading (UK), and co-director of the Reading Centre for Cognition Research. He currently holds a Humboldt research fellowship. Previously, he was a postdoc at the Institut Jean-Nicod in Paris and at Umeå University in Sweden. He got his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2010. His primary research interest is in philosophy of language, with an emphasis on contextualism, experimental semantics and pragmatics, the legacy of ordinary language philosophy, and the meaning of color terms.

J.D. Porter is a DH Project Specialist at the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD in English from Stanford University in 2017 and then worked as the Associate/Technical Director at the Stanford Literary Lab. He specializes in text mining, American modernism, and race and ethnicity theory, with occasional forays into jazz studies, network analysis, and ordinary language philosophy.