Lecture: Tackling Data Gaps in Digital Humanities, 09.09.26, online

We invite you to the online lecture by Dr. Sarah Lang (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) on 09.09.2026 from 10:00 to 11:30, organised as a part of the seminar series ‘Legal History Meets Digital Humanities’ at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory.

Digital humanities (DH) has long presented itself as a field committed to openness, collaboration, and innovation. Yet, alongside its many achievements, it also exhibits a number of persistent „dark sides“, ranging from infrastructural inequalities and invisible forms of labour to exclusionary data practices and the reproduction of historical and contemporary biases through digital methods. This chapter argues that one of the most pressing challenges currently facing the field is the persistence of data gaps, understood not merely as missing information but as the result of social, historical, and technical processes that systematically privilege some forms of knowledge while marginalising others. Building on work in critical digital humanities, critical archival studies, critical data studies, critical code studies, and feminist scholarship (including feminist AI ethics), the chapter examines how these traditions have conceptualised and addressed such absences, and considers how their insights can be mobilised more systematically within DH research and practice. It further situates these discussions within the recent shift towards data-centric approaches in artificial intelligence (DCAI), where the quality, documentation, and representativeness of datasets have become central ethical and technical concerns. By bringing these conversations into dialogue, the chapter argues that DH can benefit from engaging more directly with emerging debates on datasets while simultaneously contributing its own long-standing expertise in historical sources, documentation, and critical interpretation.

Please register here: https://plan.events.mpg.de/event/802