 Okay, and I think with that we are live. Let me give it just a second. Get the attendees moved into this introductory session. I believe we are on the air. Hello, welcome everyone to the to the first conference kickoff for the digital studies of digital science meeting DS squared 2021 I am one of the two co organizers of the conference if you don't know me. I'm Charles Pence assistant professor here at the University Catholic to live in the Valley of Belgium. So I'm I've been on questions around digital humanities and sciences for for a number of years now so let's see let me start by going ahead and introducing my my fellow co organizer Luca Revelli so Luca do you want to want to introduce yourself say a little say a little something. Luca, Luca is not hearing me I guess. Okay, hang on. That's odd. Let me let me let me we'll come back to that in a second. Let me let me send a message. So, okay, sorry. Little technical hiccups will get these ironed out. So, oh yes Luca, can you hear me now. Yes, yes, go ahead and introduce yourself. Thanks for being here. I'm a postdoc working with Charles Pence here or they're probably in because I'm in Italy now that I'm really happy to start this conference with him. I'm really looking forward for great things to hear from all the speakers. So please, let's go with the conference in a moment. All right. Oh, hang on. Luca cut your okay Luca's on mute is there still in is there still an echo I'm actually not hearing any echo on my side that's very strange if so. My apologies you'll also note that I'm on I'm on tape delay. So my apologies if there is if there's some technical trouble do do let me know ASAP and we'll we'll see about we'll see about getting that sorted out okay it looks like it might have been okay it's just just somebody local cool all right. So, thank you for being here let me let me say a little bit about the meeting and then a little bit about the technical aspects of running conference here on Crowdcast, just so that you have an idea of how this will work. Thanks a lot. This meeting was something of a gamble, I think, when so this this comes at the end of a three year project that I've been running here at at the van la neuve with the gracious funding let me let me thank I think more than once our funding provider, the FNA rest is for national research scientific the Belgian, the Wallonian research financing organization who's who's underwriting our virtual meeting today these platforms, these platforms aren't free, but thanks thanks very much to them for that. This has been a three year project on the digital history and philosophy of biology and I promised them a conference at the end without really thinking what that would look like I wasn't really sure what we wanted to do. But that said, as I as I got closer to the end of this I started to realize that I feel like there are multiple communities around to connected changes in the way that we've started to study the sciences on the one hand, changes that have been made in the process of doing science itself by the advent of digital methods and big data. And on the other hand changes in the way that we as people who study science I'm a philosopher and historian of science but as well a number of disciplines I'll come back to that in a second has started to study the products of science the processes of science at the meta level, they've also been changing as a result of digital approaches, digital methods and the application of those in. Now now on our side of the table, if you will. So I think, I think what's the gamble that I that I that I tried to make that I've hoped to pay off for this meeting is is two fold on the one hand, this idea that all of us need to be talking to a computer so not just people who are doing big data type science but then all the different disciplines that are studying big data type science and studying it with digital tools and so this is philosophers and historians of science. This is sociologists of science, this is corpus linguist computational linguist scientifics bibliometrics. There's a there's a whole host as well as the classical digital humanities as a whole host of fields that I think could really profitably be put into dialogue and I haven't found a time for us to all sit around in the same place and talk to each other. So I figured I could make a time for us to all sit around in the same place and talk to each other. That was, that was sort of half the gamble the other half of the gamble is, I think there's a great chance to sort of stretch in terms of area. So what you find when you look at at the conference program here that there are areas of the sciences and arts, just about as disparate as you can imagine so math there's there's mathematics. There's life science there's physical science, there's pure arts we've got a poetry talk coming up on Thursday, and I think that that's another way to kind of expand the way that we think about what we're doing when we engage in this kind of work and stopping this will pay off. We will see. I don't. This is the first time that a meeting like this has been run that I'm aware of and so we'll see we'll have to see how it how it goes over the next four days. Let me talk a little bit about technical stuff. So the furniture of of crowdcast here on your screen. There's two things. So for you as an attendee there's basically two things. On the one hand, there's the chat over here on the right which I see is already kicking off this is awesome. This is a sort of live, you know, latest message posted shown it's it's not threaded it's not complicated it's just a live chat and this is something really for you as the attendees you know there's a nice. It's hard to rebuild some of the kind of conviviality and networking that can be available when we, when we talk together at a proper conference but I think one way to do that is yeah, this is a sort of open forum, you know, feel free to run to run your discussions during the talks. Don't however ask questions to the speaker there so there's a lovely system in crowdcast you'll see it down there at the bottom just to the left of your chat box a button labeled ask a question. And the ask a question button here pops up your opportunity to ask a question or suggest a topic if you click that you will be able to post a question. You'll be able to see the questions that other people have already asked and you can vote for questions that you'd like the speaker to answer. You can also comment on a question so if you for example think someone should clarify their their remarks or something. Feel free that that you can you can comment on a question that someone has posed to. I wanted to ask for clarification or something like that so that's how we're going to handle the Q&A session after every talk. You guys can feel free to post in the in that Q&A section in for questions that you have for the speakers and I'll be the emcee for actually every talk. So that's a small conference I can I can do that. So I'm going to sit with those Q&As and relay them back to the speaker so that you guys can get answers to your questions. Also let me just say again I'm on a tape delay so you'll take you guys a while to see this but I'm actually super excited I love seeing how how geographically spread everyone is well we got to be enough we have Mars reporting in good. So thanks thanks very much to everyone is I think it's it's a really great opportunity for us to get to be in dialogue with people that we might not normally get to see it at local conferences when when travel and expenses is a bigger problem if this is at least one of the real advantages that I think we can take from the pandemic. Oh, without further ado, let me see. Ah, yes. There are no official Twitter ambassadors yet but you are welcome to be one we do not have anyone who is officially designated to live tweet the meeting. So that is that's a that's that's a perfectly awesome thing I would love to I would love to see more folks who are interested in spreading the word on social media. We have a we have a hashtag let me it's again with the tape delay this is going to be weird but I'm putting the hashtag in the chat now so by the time you hear this hashtag will already be in the chat. There's our hashtag for social media so please do feel very free to post. Also, almost all not quite all the presenters wanted to do this but almost all of the talks will be posted on YouTube and I'm going to do my best to do that the day after so tomorrow. Tomorrow morning, European time before the conference starts. I'm hoping to spend my morning uploading all the talks on to on to the YouTube channel for our center suffice so you'll find a link to that from the conference page. One more thing that is technically important so the one event for this conference that's not taking place here on crowdcast tomorrow evening will have a live tour through the places and spaces exhibit. This is a mapping science project from the lab of our first keynote speaker Katie Warner who'll be who'll be joining us in just a second the first talk of the conference. The groups places in spaces exhibit is going to give us a little tour that'll be on zoom. So I encourage you if you're interested in that that will be at the end of the day Europe time so mid afternoon American time tomorrow. If you're interested in joining us for that. Go ahead and get your zoom client installed and updated if you haven't already I know I know most of us probably have. I'm not going to share the link to that zoom yet it's about the only thing I can know of to do to prevent zoom bombing right at like an hour before that session starts. That zoom link in the chat a few times here on crowdcast and I'll place it on the website for the conference which you've probably seen if you haven't seen it yet you can click full conference program down there at the bottom center of your screen and that will take you to the full program. That zoom link will be there right before that event starts so you can come come join us in zoom. But not only do we get a cool. Virtual tour of their exhibit they're going to have a couple of people from that project there to show us around to give you a link to click through their website and check out the various the various projects that they've been involved in. But I'm hoping to kind of open it up into a little social hour. We can go out into some breakout rooms and and hopefully have a chance to chat with each other in a bit more of a kind of relaxed and unstructured way you can grab a time zone appropriate beverage depending on where you where you are in the world and and hopefully meet some other people here at the meeting and discover a little bit more about what we all what we all have in common that I think is really really my goal, really my goal in running this conference. So, with that, let me let me see if there's any I don't see any other questions coming in yet. The first speaker will be on in about 15 minutes I wasn't sure how long this introduction would take so I wanted to give and I wanted to give people the enough time to be able to connect and be ready etc etc so we'll have a little bit of a break here and now about a 15 minute break I'll go handle the the technical support for getting our next speaker on onto the platform if there aren't any further questions I'll I'll I'll mill about for 10 or 15 seconds here just to be sure. Okay, in that case, I think I will go ahead and call it so. Thanks very much again really excited to see everybody here I never in a million years would have expected we would have 173 people registered for this meeting that is extremely cool I am absolutely over the moon about it. I will see you all back here in about 15 minutes you'll be automatically pulled into pulled into the next session so just hang out there in your in your browser window and when when we when we're ready to go live for the next meeting you'll automatically the next talk you'll automatically be be transferred to the appropriate room so with that. Thanks very much. Alright, cheers.