Human culture increasingly takes machine-readable forms. Identifying and categorizing people and cultural works is endemic to digital representation and yet both individual identities and cultural understandings of those identities change over time and with different contexts. Cyborg identities produced by humans and machines arise from connecting data across multiple online sites. Such identities can interlink meaningfully the large cultural heritage collections of galleries, libraries, archives and museums with scholarship needed to make sense of those materials. They can enable trustworthy alternatives to the capitalist-driven systems that dominate our information landscape. Such identities can also be weaponized.

In this virtual webinar, Susan Brown highlights how we categorize and represent people and cultural materials online has profound implications in an increasingly politicized knowledge environment that requires unambiguous identification.

Please register for the Zoom webinar via the link provided.

This event is part of the Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts' 2025-26 Distinguished Lecture Series. 

Susan Brown is Canada Research Chair in Collaborative Digital Scholarship and Professor of English at the University of Guelph. Her research focuses on semantic technologies, intersectional feminism, and literary history. She is a founder of the ongoing Orlando Project on women's writing in the British Isles, two online infrastructures for creating and linking digital scholarship, and The Humanities Interdisciplinary Collaboration (THINC) Lab. She was awarded the Roberto Busa Prize for digital humanities in 2024.