Data Transliteracy: Creativity and Cooperation across Knowledge Cultures

This talk focuses on the notion of transliteracy and its relationship to the creation, manipulation and sharing of data in digital humanities. I argue that data literacy is not only a means for achieving analytical rigor for discipline-specific interpretative contributions, but a means of forming bridges between knowledge cultures with different sets of actors, ecosystems of exchange, conceptions of public and measures of impact. The talk is framed around a discussion of three seemingly unconnected research projects: (1) experiments done in handwritten text recognition (HTR) of the so-called "Parisian Bible" of the 13th century with the Louvre Abu Dhabi, (2) urban culture mapping in the classroom in Beirut and (3) art research projects about datification and performance with my own university's arts center. The reflective creation and integration of data--geospatial, temporal and textual--from and across the disciplines has profound implications not only for research and knowledge production, but also for pedagogy and new realms of creativity and collaboration in learning.