"Evidence: The Use and Misuse of Data" Papers

June 8-12, 2020

Papers for "Evidence: The Use and Misuse of Data" can be found below.  You will be required to enter a password provided by conference organizers to access them. Please contact Adrianna Link at [email protected] if you are attending the conference but have not yet received the password.

Papers are not to be cited or circulated without the written permission of the author

All events will be held via Zoom (times listed in EDT)

Monday, June 8

1:00 p.m.: Opening Keynote 

“The Weighing of Evidence Requires Expert Judgment and Consensus”
Richard Shiffrin, Indiana University, Bloomington 
Stephen Stigler, University of Chicago
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, The University of Pennsylvania

3:00 p.m.: Panel 1: Evidential Standards

"Archival Profusion, Archival Silence, and Analytic Invention: Reinventing Histories of Nineteenth-Century African American Debate"
Angela Ray, Northwestern University 

"President Andrew Jackson: Fake Quotations, False Facts, and the Debasement of History" 
Daniel Feller, University of Tennessee, Knoxville 

"Bunk History and the Standards of Historical Interpretation"
Andrew Schocket, Bowling Green State University

Tuesday, June 9

1:00 p.m.: Panel 2: How do We Know: Reading Evidence in the 18th Century

"What did eighteenth-century readers know, and when did they know it?"
Gordon Fraser, University of Manchester 

"The Morbid Lives and the Afterlives of the Elizabeth (1737) Reproduction, Data, and Enslaved People's Lives in History of the Intra-American Slave Trade"
Elise Mitchell, New York University 

“Peculiar Blue Spots: Evidence and Causes around 1800”
Jutta Schickore, Indiana University, Bloomington 

Thursday, June 11

1:00 p.m.: Panel 3: Making Data: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

“Bad Data: Settlers Measuring Dust, 1930-1940” 
Sara Grossman, Bryn Mawr College 

“In Search of Data Cleaning: Making Demographic Regularities Between Theory and Observation”
Alexander Kindel, Princeton University 

“Narrative Data and the Psychiatric Method”
Lindsey Grubbs, The Johns Hopkins University, Berman Institute for Bioethics

3:00 p.m.: Panel 4: Envisioning Evidence

"How Not to Analyze Data: John W. Tukey Against the Mechanization of Statistical Inference"
Alexander Campolo, The University of Chicago 

“‘Aren’t we kind of splitting hairs?’: Reframing the Pascua Yaqui Tribe and the Anthropology of Edward Spicer in the United States Congress”
Nicholas Barron, Mission College 

“How the Universe Went Missing in 1974”
Jaco de Swart, University of Amsterdam

Friday, June 12

1:00 p.m.: Panel 5: Data in the Digital Age

"The Use and Misuse of Anthropological Evidence: Digital Himalaya as Ethnographic Knowledge (Re)Production"
Mark Turin, The University of British Columbia 

“When Voices Become Data: Reading Data Documenting Contemporary Reading”
Jennifer Burek Pierce, The University of Iowa

“Historical Evidence in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”
Joshua Sternfeld, Unaffiliated Independent Scholar