On March 25-27, WIPCAD doctoral fellow Basanta Thapa attended the Herrenhausen Conference, “Big Data in a Transdisciplinary Perspective” in Hannover. The conference, hosted by Volkswagen Foundation, convened more than one hundred scholars from academic disciplines as diverse as computer linguistics, information science, digital humanities, complexity science, law, and social sciences to discuss new research questions, methods, and fields of inquiry brought about by the rise of Big Data. Keynote speeches included topics from Digital Humanities by Andrew Pescott, the role of data in research by Christine L. Borgman, to legal questions of privacy and data use by Nikolaus Forgó and Big Data research infrastructure by Volker Markl (all of which are accessible at the VolkswagenStiftung homepage).
Basanta Thapa received a travel grant by Volkswagen Foundation as one of 30 junior researchers from all over the world to present his ongoing work at WIPCAD on Big Data in policymaking with a poster and a three-minute lightning talk. In his lightning talk, he used the Christmas story of Mary and Joseph to convey his thoughts and questions regarding the way Big Data Analytics changes the legitimacy attributed to different knowledge sources and the power shifts this entails. For this creative effort, the conference attendants voted to honor Basanta Thapa with a Best Lightning Talk Award. (the presentation and a transcript are available on Slideshare).
For further details on the conference, VolkswagenStiftung has published a longer conference report.