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DH Undergraduate Fellows

Third and Final Fellow Intro: Hayley!

Hi all! My name is Hayley Soutter and I’m the most recent student to join the Digital Humanities Fellowship program. I want to start off by saying that, before I was offered a spot on this team, I really wasn’t sure what it would entail. I thought I might be required to code (which I did not know how to do whatsoever) or design a webpage all on my own. But because I am a Mass Communications and Art History major, I figured I would apply for the program to see if it would combine my humanity-driven interests with my desire to learn more about digital media.

I have always been a student who favored the humanities. I was never very good at science or math growing up. In high school, I was heavily involved in the photojournalism department; I worked as both a reporter and an editor for our yearbook- writing stories, designing page layouts, taking photographs or proofreading copy. While I loved working for my yearbook during high school, I wasn’t sure how I wanted to continue my passion at W&L. I knew early on that I didn’t want to pursue a degree in journalism, but I wanted something that combined writing, creativity and technology under one umbrella.
This past summer, I was an intern at The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. During my eight weeks there, I enjoyed working on many social media and technology-related projects. I wrote Instagram and Twitter posts for the museum, in addition to enhancing their Tumblr presence. I also helped the digital technology team redesign the museum’s entire website. I loved the digital media aspect of my internship and I wanted to develop my technological skills further once I got back to school. I learned of the DH Fellowship through an outreach to the journalism department and thought it sounded like the perfect opportunity for me! I’m only a few weeks in, but so far, the internship has been a great experience and I have learned a ton already (including how to code a little). I know the skills I am learning will help me when I enter the “real world” in just a few short months by opening up more opportunities for me in my prospective career path. The DH team is awesome, and I’m so excited for the projects and collaborations to come this year.

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DH Undergraduate Fellows

DH Fellows Intro: Aidan V.

Hello! I’m Aidan Valente, a sophomore from Sanford, Florida and the second of the three Mellon Fellows this year. I’m a Medieval and Renaissance Studies and Art History double-major who fell down the rabbit hole that is Digital Humanities rather recently, but I’ve enjoyed the crazy and decided to stay.

When I first entered W&L, I thought I would declare a Computer Science major (mostly due to my belief that it would ensure a viable career four years later). I have since then “seen the light” and dedicated myself to the humanities, preferring Italian art and manuscripts to dry lectures on writing code. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy programming—I do, just not to the extent that a CSCI degree requires.

I first discovered Digital Humanities by chance rather than through any concerted effort on my behalf. As I looked through the course catalog for Winter ’16 classes, I noticed a 1-credit course entitled “DH Studio: Text Encoding.” The description, though somewhat vague, piqued my interest enough for me to sign up for it; what I didn’t know was that the course acted as a co-requisite for another class I was completely unaware of. Despite this initial registration faux pas, I stuck with it and learned about XML, TEI, and digital humanities in general under Mackenzie Brooks. My experience indirectly led to an amazing summer opportunity with Special Collections, which in turn has allowed me to set the groundwork for my work this year on several DH projects I have envisioned.

What I enjoy most about DH are its collaborative nature and the applicability it has in so many areas, both in and out of the classroom. Many of the professors I’ve had utilize DH projects as part of their research, and several of my friends spent this summer working on initiatives such as the Ancient Graffiti Project. My own project ideas involve a number of Italian manuscripts and early print books found in Special Collections. As an MRST major with Professor McCormick for an advisor, I also hope to contribute to his Huon d’Auvergne project in the near future. I’ve still got a lot to learn, both in terms of code and humanities studies, but I hope to continue my DH experience throughout the rest of my college career and, hopefully, long after I graduate, too.

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DH Undergraduate Fellows

Hello World! I’m Abdur ✌🏾

Hey everyone! My name is Abdur Khan and I’m a senior from Perrysburg, Ohio. I’m a French major, originally pre-med but I think it’s time to declare myself on the DH path instead.

When I came to W&L, I accidentally got into the habit of taking classes that connect really well with each other. One semester, my intro biology class was about drugs and how they act, and I also took a psychology class about psychoactive drugs. Another semester, genetics and biochemistry overlapped just as well. Last winter term, I took intro to programming and learned the basics of programming with Python, while for my French class, I learned the basics of HTML, CSS, and XML. This latest overlap is what really brought me to the digital humanities. I was aware of the field and I vaguely knew what it involved, and even had friends taking the intro course, but I never really realized what “digital humanities” really meant until I started exploring it for myself.

Lately, it seems like everything I do is centered around technology and computers. I worked at the ITS HelpDesk over the summer and worked with Professor McCormick on his Huon d’Auvergne project. I’ve never really thought about this but it was interesting working on two different aspects of technology. There was the hardware and the professional side at work, and during and after, I would work on the software and the academic side of things. There’s not as much overlap as you’d expect between the two sides, but having those experiences has been extremely valuable and I think they’re steadily pushing me towards a career in technology. My command of Python and knowledge of command line (hacking stuff) has already come in handy. I wrote a script in Python, with a lot of help from Brandon, that made my work with Prof. McCormick easier, and later wrote another code that simplified another process for us. Writing my own code that wasn’t for an assignment for a comp-sci lab was honestly exhilarating, as nerdy as that sounds. I can’t remember applying knowledge from a class and using it the same way for a practical solution, so doing that for the first time and now doing it on a regular basis makes things feel real in a way that being at college hasn’t before.

Getting so heavily involved in DH so fast makes me think that I should keep exploring the opportunities in this field. That’s why I applied for a DH fellowship and how I wound up writing an honors thesis that’s about half DH-based. I’m really excited to keep learning about the digital humanities and their applications and I’d like to see where they take me after graduation.

Categories
DH Pedagogy

Text Analysis Workshop: Four Ways to Read a Text

[Cross-posted on my personal blog.]

On Monday I visited Mackenzie Brooks‘s course on “Data in the Humanities” to introduce digital text analysis to her students. I faced a few challenges when planning for the visit:

  • Scope – I had two hours for the workshop and a lot of material to cover. I was meant to introduce anything and everything, as much as I wanted in a general overview of text analysis.
  • Background – This course is an introductory digital humanities course that counts as a science credit at W&L, so I assumed no prior knowledge of programming. Mackenzie will be covering some things with them later in the course, but at this stage I needed to avoid anything really technical.
  • Length – Two hours was both a lot of time and no time at all. It was certainly not enough time to teach anyone to program for the first time. As an aside, I often find it hard to gauge how much material is appropriate for anything longer than 75 minutes.
  • Content – Since this was meant to be a general overview of the field, I did not want to lean too heavily on analysis by tools. I worried that if I did so the takeaway for the students would be how to use the tools, not the underlying concepts that the tools aided them in exploring.

I wound up developing a workshop I called “Introduction to Text Analysis: Four Ways to Read a Text.” Focusing on four ways meant that I felt comfortable cutting a section if things started to go long. It also meant that I was developing a workshop model that could easily fit varying lengths in the future. For example, I’ll be using portions of this workshop throughout my introduction to text analysis lectures in my own course this fall. The approach would necessarily be pretty distant – I couldn’t go into much detail for any one method in this time. Finally, I wanted the students to think about text analysis concepts first and then come to tools that would help them to do so, so I tried to displace the tools and projects from the conversation slightly. The hope was that, by enacting or intuiting the methods by hand first, the concepts would stick more easily than they might otherwise.

The basic structure of the workshop was this:

  1. I introduce a basic methodology for reading.
  2. Students are presented with a handout asking them to read in a particular way with a prompt from me. They complete the exercise.
  3. We talk about the process. We clarify the concept a little more together, and the students infer some of the basic difficulties and affordances of the approach.
  4. Then I show a couple tools and projects that use that method for real results.

The four ways of reading I covered were close reading, bags of words, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis. So, to use the topic modeling portion as an example, any one of those units looked something like this:

  1. I note how, until now, we have been discussing how counting words gives us a sense of the overall topic or scope of the text. Over time and in close proximity, individual words combine to give us a sense of what a text is about.
  2. I give the students three paragraphs with the words scrambled and out of order (done pretty quickly in Python). I ask the students to get in groups and tell me what the underlying topics or themes are for each excerpt. They had to produce three single-word topics for each paragraph, and paragraphs could share topics.
  3. We talk about how were able to determine the topics of the texts even with the paragraphs virtually unreadable. Even out of order, certain words in proximity together suggest the underlying theme of a text. We can think of texts as made up of a series of topics like these, clusters of words that occur in noticeable patterns near one another. We have human limits as to how much we can comprehend, but computers can help us run similar, mathematical versions of the same process to find out what words occur near each other in statistically significant patterns. The results can be thought of as the underlying topics or discourses that make up a series of documents. A lot of hand waving, I know, but I am assuming here that students will examine topic modeling in more detail at a later date. Better, I think, to introduce the broad strokes than lose students in the details.
  4. I then share Mining the Dispatch as an example of topic modeling in action to show the students the kinds of research questions that can be explored using this method.

So, in essence, what I tried to do is create a hands-on approach to teaching text analysis concepts that is flexible enough to fit a variety of needs and contexts. My handouts and slides are all up on a github repository. Feel free to share, reuse, and remix them in any way you would like.

 

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DH Event on campus Speaker Series

Ed Ayers to speak September 22

Ed Ayers portrait
September 22, 2016
7pm
Lee Chapel
Open to all, no tickets required.

We are thrilled to welcome Ed Ayers to campus as a distinguished guest in our Speaker Series.

The title of Ayers’ talk, which is free and open to the public, is “The Puzzle of the American Civil War and Reconstruction.”

Ayers has written and edited 11 books including “The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction,” which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. “In the Presence of Mine Enemies: Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863” won the Bancroft Prize for distinguished writing in American history. A pioneer in digital history, Ayers’ website, “The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War,” has attracted millions of users and has won major prizes in teaching of history. He serves as co-editor of the Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States at the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab and is a co-host of BackStory with the American History Guys, a nationally syndicated radio show and podcast.

This program is made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

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DH Event on campus Speaker Series

Geolocation: Tributes to the Data Stream

Artists’ talk and reception:
Thursday, September 15, 2016
5:30pm
Wilson Hall/Concert Hall and Lykes Atrium

The exhibit runs September 1-24, 2016 in Staniar Gallery.


We are partnering with the Staniar Gallery to present this collaborative project by photographers Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman who use publicly available GPS coordinates from Twitter messages to find and photograph the location where the Tweet originated. The pictures are then presented with the text that inspired them to create poetic pairings, which range from sorrowful to humorous, confessional to cheeky. The project has garnered much attention for its exploration of contemporary cultural dichotomies such as public/private, real/virtual, analog/digital. Geolocation has been widely exhibited and featured in such publications as Wired Magazine, The New York Times Lens Blog, VICE Magazine, Discover Magazine, The Washinton Post and Utne Reader. Larson and Shindelman will be visiting Journalism and DH courses during their visit.

This program is made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in partnership with the Staniar Gallery.