Brandon Locke is Guest Faculty at the University of Washington iSchool, and was formerly the Director of LEADR (Lab for the Education and Advancement in Digital Research), a student-focused digital research lab at Michigan State University. He is also the founder and co-organizer of Endangered Data Week, an annual series of events to raise awareness of threats to publicly available data and to critically explore the world of public data creation, sharing, and use. He holds an MA in American History of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and an MLIS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Speaker Series Talk
“The Path of Most Resistance: Embracing ‘Messy’ Humanities Data and Unpolished Projects” (Feburary 19, 2019)
When instructors develop digital projects for their classrooms, it can be very tempting to opt for pre-“cleaned”, pre-prepared datasets with an attractive deliverable in mind. However, by embracing messiness and unease, and by focusing on process over product, instructors can help students think more critically about humanities materials and equip students with data literacies and skills that are useful in their civic lives.
