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Digital Evidence event series

  • 1.  Digital Evidence event series

    Posted Apr 13, 2021 04:21 PM
    Below please find information for the series of events that James Hodges has co-organized with Thorsten Ries (UT Austin, Germanic Studies) and the UT iSchool colloquium series.

    Series Description:
    This series features international subject expert talks from the libraries and archives sector, a digital investigation collective and from the cybersecurity sector to consider born-digital evidence from a Historical Scholarship and Humanities perspective. Our digital present poses challenges to long-term preservation and curation of born-digital archives, but also to their cautious selection, critical appraisal and methodological analysis and interpretation as historical evidence. Establishing, proving and maintaining the chain of digital evidence, evaluating the evidential status of born-digital sources and interpreting the traces of historical digital events will be the daily practice of historians studying our present time. The talk series Born-digital Evidence and Historical Scholarship is a starter for the conversation about how we establish this practice and build the skillsets, standards and procedures for Historical Scholarship and the Humanities in coordination with libraries and archives.   

    Born-digital Evidence and Historical Scholarship: Aric Toler and Charlotte Godart - Event #1
    Date: April 12, 10-11:30am CST

    Aric Toler is the training and research director at Bellingcat, an online publication specialized in open-source intelligence. Aric's research including Russian intelligence operations, the war in the Donbas, and the 2014 downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine. Aric received his Master's degree in Slavic Languages & Literatures from the University of Kansas in 2013 and has since been working with Bellingcat.

    Charlotte Godart is an open source investigator & trainer for Bellingcat. She researches conflict zones, breaking news events, and the spread of disinformation. She creates online training material that is available for anyone interested in pursuing digital verification through the Bellingcat website. She also travels globally to teach online verification techniques and methodology to journalists, researchers, activists, and lawyers. Before Bellingcat, she was at the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley.

    Born-digital Evidence and Historical Scholarship: Euan Cochrane and David A. Bliss - Event #2
    Date: April 19, 10-11:30 CST

    Euan Cochrane is Digital Preservation Manager for Yale University Libraries. He has a particular interest in software preservation and the use of emulation to maintain access to born digital information. Before joining Yale, Euan helped to establish the data archive for official statistics at Statistics New Zealand, in addition to working in the Digital Continuity team at Archives New Zealand and consulting for Deloitte in Australia on Information Management.

    David Bliss is the Systems and Digital Archivist at UT Libraries, where he is responsible for a variety of digital preservation infrastructure and processes for libraries collections. Prior to April 2021, he was the Digital Processing Archivist at the Benson Latin American Collection at UT Austin, focused primarily on implementing and supporting post-custodial digitization projects based at partner repositories in Latin America. David is a 2017 graduate of the UT School of Information.

    Born-digital Evidence and Historical Scholarship: Matthias Vallentin - Event #3
    Date: April 23, 10am CST

    Matthias Vallentin is founder and CEO at Tenzir. His PhD work at UC Berkeley about network forensics laid the foundation for the software that Tenzir now develops an open security analytics platform to empower defenders. Prior to founding Tenzir, Matthias worked on high-performance network monitoring to provide security operators with in-depth visibility about their infrastructure.

    --
    JAMES A. HODGES, PH.D.
    Bullard Postdoctoral Research Fellow
    The University of Texas at Austin
    School of Information

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    Ciaran B. Trace
    Associate Professor

    Editor, Information & Culture

    Faculty Affiliate, Center for Health Communication

    The University of Texas at Austin

    School of Information

    1616 Guadalupe St., Suite 5.202 | D8600
    Austin, TX 78701-1213

    Phone:  512-232-3508

    Web:  https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~cbtrace/