Thomas Padilla
Our 2018 Keynote Speaker will be Thomas Padilla, and his address is titled “Speculative not Spectral: On Latent Library Potential.”
This talk will advance the argument that conditions of uncertainty and a speculative orientation to collections constitutes a disposition that empowers libraries and the communities they serve. As the poet a. maxwell reminds us, uncertainty is not the same as not knowing – uncertainty indicates the presence of alternatives. This talk is a call to embrace those alternatives.
Thomas Padilla is Visiting Digital Research Services Librarian at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. He publishes, presents, and teaches widely on digital scholarship, digital collections, Humanities data, data curation, and data information literacy.
He is Principal Investigator of the Institute of Museum and Library Services supported, Collections as Data. Thomas is a member of the Association for Computers and the Humanities Executive Council (2017-2021), the Global Outlook::Digital Humanities Executive Council, the Integrating digital humanities into the web of scholarship with SHARE Advisory Board, and the ARL Fellowship for Digital and Inclusive Excellence Advisory Group. Thomas serves as an Editor for dh + lib Data Praxis. Thomas is a regular instructor at the Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching Institute (HILT).