2020 Marvin Zelen Memorial Symposium

This event will now be virtual. Click here to complete registration. In December of 2019, we planned the next Marvin Zelen Symposium for March of 2020. At that point, the year ahead seemed to be a data spectacle waiting to happen. Think about all the events planned for 2020! Here’s what we wrote.The topic of this year’s Marvin Zelen Symposium has to do with the year itself — 2020. This first year of a new decade brings with it statistical spectacles on a massive scale. From the Decennial Census and the Presidential Election in the US, to the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, to the Summer Olympics in Tokyo. These big events are bristling with data and its analyses — shaping how they are experienced, discussed, debated, and even litigated. Their time scales range from fractions of a second (the difference between gold and silver) to millions of years (the length of the geological record needed to understand our changing climate). They can be influenced by the actions of one person or the cumulative behaviors of hundreds of millions (as voters, as competitors, as spectators, as consumers). The Marvin Zelen Symposium will look at the major data spectacles of 2020, each one having synergy with the others, but also adding something new in our understanding of how data establish and reinforce systems of power on our planet.Well, since we organized the 2020 Symposium, the entire world has changed. The original Zelen event was replaced with a “Zoomposium” on Covid-19, attracting nearly 500 attendees, and we moved the program covering everything from the Olympics to Earth Day to September, 2020 — this month.But now that the date of the rescheduled event is upon us, think about what Covid-19 has done to many of the events mentioned in our abstract — we have seen everything from complications to cancellations. Still, we have decided to go forward with the 2020 Zelen Symposium as we had originally planned it.We expect the difficulties of this year will inflect each of the talks on the program. Marvin Zelen embraced the complexity of data and its relationship to lived experience — the same is true for this edition of the Symposium bearing his name.Speakers:Ben Hansen, University of MichiganBrendan Nyhan, Dartmouth CollegeRegina Nuzzo, Gallaudet UniversityAmy O’Hara, Georgetown UniversityAndrew Revkin, Columbia UniversityCharles Stewart, Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyDaniel Webb, United States Olympic CommitteeJeremy White, New York TimesRegister by September 29, 2020.Audience is capped at 500 participants.