Newsletter Volume 9 Issue 18 - May 24, 2023 | |
Lunch Colloquium -- TUESDAY, May 30, 2023 | |
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“The Line Chart and the Slave Ship: Rethinking the
Origins of Data Visualization”
Lauren Klein
Winship Distinguished Research Professor and
Associate Professor of English and Quantitative Theory and Methods
Dr. Klein will describe how data visualization tools such as pie charts, timelines, and other graphic representations of information can often reflect deep and unsettling bias. What we see in “simple” data visualizations can easily be laden “with implicit assumptions—and, at times, explicit arguments—about how knowledge is produced, and who is authorized to produce it.” Dr. Klein will provide a fascinating update on Data by Design, a major new work in the field, in which she is drawing on historical examples, for example from the British colonial era, to illuminate the influence of data visualizations. Some of the examples in the book will reveal the deep cultural and social bias of the times, sometimes at the expense of human dignity. Klein will explain how her project seeks to “create counter-visualizations that can imbue more humanity into the data and to show the broader scope of who can and did create knowledge,” lessons for our own time.
About Lauren Klein:
Lauren Klein is Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor of English and Quantitative Theory and Methods at Emory College. She is also the 2023-2024 Emory College recipient of the Chronos Faculty Fellowship. The focus of her work as Chronos Fellow will be a major new work, Data by Design, emphasizing how the modern visualizing impulse emerged from a set of complex intellectually and politically-charged contexts in the United States and across the Atlantic. She is also working on the tentatively-titled Vectors of Freedom, which employs a range of quantitative methods in order to surface the otherwise invisible forms of labor, agency, and action involved in the abolitionist movement of the nineteenth-century United States. Klein is the author of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and co-author with Catherine D’Ignazio of Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020). With Matthew K. Gold, she edits Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press). She received her A.B. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In 2017, Klein was named one of the “rising stars in digital humanities” by Inside Higher Ed.
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Lunch Colloquium -- Monday, June 12, 2023 | |
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"The Emerging Science Behind Our Children’s Growth Spurts"
Michelle Lampl
Professor and Director of Emory Center for the Study of Human Health.
Co-Director of the Emory-Georgia Tech Predictive Health Institute
For more than a century doctors and scholars accepted that children grew like the charts on pediatricians’ walls: slowly and consistently, a little bit every day. These graphs became an iconic model for the biology of how healthy children should grow.
This is not, however, either a correct representation of growth biology or the experience of children, who grow erratically and in tandem with other biological episodes in health. Science has lagged behind the observations of generations of wise observers. Grandmothers’ adage that “children wake up taller after a fever” was not recognized for what it truly represented. We will take a look at data providing insights into this emerging science.
About Michelle Lampl:
Michelle Lampl PhD MD is a physician/scientist, academic, and author. She is a distinguished professor and the Director of Emory University’s Center for the Study of Human Health. She is also the co-director of the Emory-Georgia Tech Predictive Health Institute.
Dr. Lampl is internationally recognized for her discovery that children grow by saltation and stasis, a process characterized by sudden jumps in size abruptly interrupting days of unchanging size. The observation that more than 90% of the time healthy infants and children are not growing at all prompted a paradigm shift in the fundamental understanding of normal growth biology and launched a science seeking the mechanisms that control such a process. These studies have significant health implications, and led to collaborations with David Barker and the new field of the developmental origins of health and disease, and a focus on fetal growth with colleagues at the perinatal research branch of NICHD. Dr. Lampl lectures widely internationally and has served as a consultant to a number of panels involved in healthy growth and development including the WHO, NIH, and Gates Foundation. Dr. Lampl earned her M.D. and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, and she was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010. Lampl has written and edited four books and over 130 scientific articles.
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Upcoming Events of Interest at Emory | |
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MUSIC CAMP SPOTLIGHT
20TH ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL EUPHONIUM TUBA FESTIVAL
Each summer, the Schwartz Center is home to several music camps under the artistic leadership of Emory Department of Music faculty and artist affiliates. For the past 20 years, Emory Euphonium Artist Affiliate Adam Frey has led the International Euphonium Tuba (IET) Festival—hosting more than 150 performers from around the globe.
For its milestone anniversary year, the IET festival runs June 18–24 with a week of concerts, master classes, lessons, camaraderie, and workshops. Experience a different kind of heavy metal music with performers from Norway, England, Switzerland, the US, South America, and more. The public is invited to two free concerts during this summer's festival: Wednesday, June 21, 7:30 p.m., featuring the Georgia Brass Band; and the closing Gala concert on Saturday, June 24, 7:30 p.m., with more than 150 participant performers partnering with the amazing Jaeckel Organ. This tour-de-force sound is not to be missed as you experience the beauty, majesty, and virtuosity of the tuba and euphonium!
The festival welcomes participants who play the tuba and euphonium as a hobby as well as high school and college students. Tuba players are some of the most welcoming people in the world and we just want to share our love of the instrument with you. More information on the IET Festival is available online here.
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“What’s the Point of Saying Destroy?”:
Punk and the Do-It-Yourself Ethos
Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry
Emory University
1635 N. Decatur Rd.
Wednesday, May 31, 2023, 6 – 7pm EDT
The band The Minutemen usually ended their show with the exhortation, “Start your own band!” Those simple words encapsulated the power and allure of punk and the do-it-yourself (DIY) movement—a call to get involved and create your own culture. In this seminar we will examine how these ideas and practices inspired music, creativity, and community for over 40 years. The seminar moderator, Randy Gue, initiated the Rose Library’s Atlanta punk collection and co-founded Emory’s annual Art, Punk, and DIY Fest.
This Great Works Seminar will meet biweekly at The Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry @ Emory University from 6pm-7pm on the following Wednesday evenings: May 3, 17, 31, June 14 & 28. Participants are expected to attend all five sessions. For further information and to reserve a spot on a “first-come basis,” email the Fox Center at foxcenter@emory.edu. Everyone from the Atlanta community is welcome and invited to join us for this free seminar.
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Details and other information, as well as additional campus events, can be found on the Emory Events Calendar.
If you'd like to share an event/program of interest before the next newsletter
(May 10, 2023), please contact Dianne Becht Dianne.becht@emory.edu
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Walking the Campus with Dianne | |
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The empty swimming pool we looked at on our last walk can be found on the Clairmont campus. It is part of the Student Activity and Academic Center (SAAC). The SAAC is one of two recreational and fitness complexes on campus. The other is located at the Woodruff Physical Education Center (WoodPec) on the main part of campus.
The Aquatic Center at the SAAC is a premier outdoor swimming facility offering Emory members a wide range of swimming opportunities. It consists of a 50-meter pool with two 1-meter diving boards, a separate 25-yard 4-lane teaching pool, and children’s pool.
The SAAC also encompasses a recreation field, basketball courts, beach volleyball courts, and tennis courts in addition to the Olympic pool. It also features indoor facilities which include a multi-sports court, fitness center, tennis courts, classrooms, computer labs and a cafe.
They offer memberships to the SAAC for the summer months with rates for retirees.
For more information:
Web: recwell.emory.edu
Phone: 404-712-2430
Email: recwell@emory.edu
I've included a more appealing photo below of what the pool looks like during the summer months.
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Let's continue with a "water" theme and visit another good place on campus to cool down during hot days. You can't swim here, but you can definitely enjoy the shade of the surrounding trees and the soothing sounds of the fountain.
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Where will you find this on the Emory campus? | | | | |
