Supercomputer recovers black women's history

Chicago Inno (March 16) -- A new collaboration between University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign sociology researchers and the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) uses supercomputing to recover the stories and experiences of black women thought to be lost to history. "A lot of times when people think about big data, they think about it in ahistorical times…outside of this political context," said Ruby Mendenhall, an associate professor of sociology at UIUC. "It's really important to think about whose voice is digitized, in journals and newspapers." Also: Phys.Org (Feb. 25).