Month: February 2017

Categories
Announcement DH

Now Hiring! Mellon Digital Humanities Fellow

The Washington & Lee University Library seeks to fill a two-year grant-funded position to facilitate digital humanities teaching and research that promotes the Library’s role as a center of campus-wide academic engagement. As a member of a small organization, this position requires teamwork, collaboration, and self-motivation. The library is deeply engaged in the university’s digital humanities initiatives and is committed to developing and expanding its participation in scholarly communications, digital research methodologies, digital archives, discovery tools, data science, and other critical information services needed for teaching, learning, and research. The Mellon Fellow will participate in developing the digital humanities curriculum and in teaching digital humanities research methods.

We seek a fast learner with the aptitude and passion to thrive in the technologically complex learning and research environment that is the modern academic library. Successful candidates will enjoy the freedom to develop the position in a way that aligns with their own personal and professional interests while serving the core needs of both the library and the digital humanities curriculum. The position carries with it support for research time and funding for professional development.

For more information, see the complete job listing.

Categories
DH Event on campus Speaker Series

DH Speaker Series: Alex Gil

Join us for a talk by Alex Gil, the Digital Scholarship Coordinator of the Humanities and History Division at Columbia University Libraries.

Monday March 13, 2017
12:15-1:15pm
Hillel 101
Lunch provided, please register

The Globe is Not a Circle: The New Life of Words and the Broken Scholarly Record

In this talk, Alex Gil follows the present and possible future of our scholarly production and its uneven flows around the world.Although “the scholarly record” as a concept does not translate well into other languages, and its outlines are difficult to define, its existence is not in question. At a time when our archives and libraries are in a period of transition to hybrid registers—both analog and digital—we see a shift in the divisions of labor and interpretive frameworks resulting from these changes in the production of this record. An opening for understanding these developments and design sensible practices can be found in the idea of an *infrastructural critique* advanced by Liu, Verhoebenand as a recasting of digital humanities as a hermeneutic praxis with material consequences. In particular, Gil will argue for a form of this infrastructural critique which he and others call minimal computing.

Alex Gil Alex Gil specializes in twentieth-century Caribbean literature and Digital Humanities, with an emphasis on textual studies. His recent research in Caribbean literature focuses on the works and legacy of Aimé Césaire, including work in Aimé Césaire: Poésie, théâtre, essais et discours published by Planète Libre in 2013. He has published in journals and collections of essays in Canada, France and the United States, while sustaining an open-access and robust online research presence. In 2010-2012 he was a fellow at the Scholars’ Lab and NINES at the University of Virginia. He is founder and vice chair of the Global Outlook::Digital Humanities initiative and the co-founder and co-director of the Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities and the Studio@Butler at Columbia University. He serves as Co-editor for Small Axe: Archipelagos and Multilingual Editor for Digital Humanities Quarterly. Alex Gil is actively engaged in several digital humanities projects at Columbia and around the world, including Ed, a digital platform for minimal editions of literary texts; the Open Syllabus Project; the Translation Toolkit; and, In The Same Boats, a visualization of trans-atlantic intersections of black intellectuals in the 20th century.

Categories
Event on campus Speaker Series Summer Research

DH Speaker Series: Barton Myers on Civil War + DH

Join us for a lunch time talk from Prof. Barton Myers, Associate Professor of History. He’ll report on his summer research experience and share his work on DH methods in Civil War military history.

Wednesday, March 1, 2017
12:15-1:15pm
Hillel 101
Lunch provided, please register

Guerrilla Wars: Rethinking Civil War Military History Through the Digital Humanities

Most of the American Civil War’s practitioners of guerrilla warfare were not famous. They were unknowns, nameless and faceless to history. Forgotten. This Digital Humanities session reframes the American Civil War’s military history around these “other” Civil Warriors. Reevaluating Confederate military history from the perspective of the complex but critically important world of Confederate irregular soldiers, specifically the Confederate government’s authorized partisan rangers. Here we see a different war than the one we think we know. Not the great conventional battlefield war, but irregular conflicts, involving raiding “Thunderbolts,” deceptive “Gray Ghosts,” and vigilante outlaws, a collection of wars within a war that is absolutely essential to our study of America’s bloodiest armed conflict. In the session, Prof. Myers will be discussing the research that he and his W&L Mellon-funded, summer, research students conducted in the military history database Fold3.com and the implementation of that work through DH mapping technology.

This event is made possible by a Dean of the College Cohort Grant.

Categories
DH Event on campus Speaker Series

Report on “Digital Humanities, Data Analysis and Its Possibilities”

As part of the DH Speaker Series, I attended the talk by University of Richmond Assistant Professors Lauren Tilton and Taylor Arnold in which they discussed data analysis and how they have used it in different ways in their digital humanities research. Lauren and Taylor’s presentation of the critical role of statistics and data analysis in DH was really interesting. They pointed out that statisticians often just throw out data without analyzing the information critically and presenting their findings in an interesting manner to a larger audience. They posed the question: how do we communicate our results to a PUBLIC audience? I think that their project, titled Photogrammar, is an awesome website that effectively communicates statistical analysis in a really cool way.

Taylor and Lauren were interested in analyzing the Library of Congress’ archive of photography from the FSA era. The photographers hired by the FSA were tasked with documenting poverty, largely in the American South, during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Taylor and Lauren worked closely with the Library of Congress staff in order to turn their photographic collection into a user-friendly database. They computed the data and began to analyze the statistics. Lauren said their analysis caused a “fundamental change in our understanding of this collection” and opened up a whole news series of questions. For example, the data analysis showed that the number of FSA photos from the war era and the number from the New Deal era are actually quite similar. Many people associate the FSA photographers with the Great Depression and the New Deal, and may not even know that the FSA continued their photographic endeavor into World War II.

The database is super user-friendly and much easier to find what you are really looking for than the search engine on the Library of Congress webpage for the collection. On Photogrammar, you can find images based on the county they were photographed or even find images based on color palette. In the most recent segment of the project, Taylor and Lauren used a computer software to identify faces and certain images in a photograph, looking for repetition or patterns, in order to rebuild entire photo strips from a specific photographer’s camera. This feature is amazing because it allows the user to track the photographer’s line of vision, tying the visual images and story of their production together.

I became really interested in photography after taking a History of Photography course during my sophomore year winter term. Taylor and Lauren’s discussion of their project was so helpful because it showed me how data analysis (a term that somewhat intimidates me) can help people better understand and engage with a topic in the humanities. Photogrammar answers so many research questions, just through the different features of its interactive map of the U.S. It lets me see the main regions that Walker Evans photographed in or the counties that were photographed the most during the Dust Bowl. As Lauren and Taylor stated in their talk, photographs can tell us a lot about the culture and background of an era. Their project provides a simpler yet more interesting way of understanding these photographs and the culture that surrounded them.

-Hayley Soutter, DH Undergraduate Fellow

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

 

Categories
Conference DH Event on campus

Report on UNRH Conference 2017

This year’s UNRH (Undergraduate Network for Research in the Humanities) Conference was hosted at W&L. For those who are not familiar with them, UNRH is a group of undergraduate students interested in learning about and experimenting with innovative research methods in the humanities. Two W&L students, Lenny Enkhbold (’17) and Lizzy Stanton (’17), were part of the founding group that started the conference in 2015. “Having worked on this project for over two years, it was very rewarding to have received so much support and being able to actually experience the results. I know Lizzy feels the same way as well,” Lenny said. “We listened to the feedback from last year and tried to make the adjustments on any category that the participants from last year thought we could improve on.”

The various sessions for this year’s conference were hosted in the new Center for Global Learning. Over the weekend of January 20-22, students from different colleges and universities across the country gathered to discuss their projects and to attend DH workshops.

Formal presentations began Saturday morning. (check out the full schedule here) During the morning session, four different groups presented the cool projects they have been working on.

In the first presentation, titled “Digitizing a Church,” two students from Lake Forest College told us about their four week endeavor of creating a virtual reality of a church near their campus. The most interesting aspect of their project was it’s interactive nature; you could simply click on the stained glass windows of the church and a pop-up window would detail their importance. The students demonstrated their belief that virtual realities can help change the education industry, by allowing students to really engage with the material in a digital representation and could even replace field trips in the future.

Students from the University of South Carolina presented their app called “Ward One,” which they created in a classroom setting. The students wanted to heighten awareness about Ward One, a historically African American community that has been destroyed by development. The app allows people to explore the community as it was and highlights historical monuments in the area. The students have received immense positive feedback from the city. During the presentation, a taped interview showed a woman who had lived in the neighborhood stating that the app made her feel like “finally someone cares.”

One group, who detailed their experience creating their online game titled “Chronicle of Swashbuckling Rubbish,” were asked why they created the project. In response, they replied, “We wanted to create something and so we did.” Although the two presenters are English and music education majors at Cornell College, they found a way to manifest their different skills into a digital project.

The afternoon consisted of round robin sessions, which I was unable to attend. But Lenny, a host contact for this year’s conference, said that the afternoon was a great way to wrap-up the day. “It was nice to change up the presentation style and keep everyone fresh rather than having two more hours of sit-down formal presentations,” he said. (see photos from this year’s conference here)

Lenny, Lizzy and the rest of the leadership team seemed really excited about their progress and are already seeking volunteer’s for next year’s conference. I thought the conference was a really awesome event that allowed students to present their work to a wider audience of their peers from different schools, majors, backgrounds, etc.

Check out all the tweets from the conference here: https://storify.com/hsoutter/unrh-conference-2017

[View the story “UNRH Conference 2017” on Storify]
Categories
Undergraduate Fellows

Call Me Will

I’m the new guy. My name is Will Tucker and I’m currently a sophomore here at W&L. I come from Minneapolis, Minnesota (so I know what a cold winter feels like), and I’m currently the first Fellow to be admitted after 1st Semester–having not applied for the yearlong fellowship. I will be majoring in Politics with an emphasis in Political Philosophy, and while my minor has yet to be figured out, I hope to take a minor in German or even Digital Humanities–if DH gets approved as a minor in time for me to do so.

Politics and DH sound like an unlikely duo; however, I can assure you otherwise. The massive amount of data currently being demanded and processed by DC think tanks,  lobbying groups, the bureaucracy, the media, and the data that influences election-time decisions is at a high in this Digital Age. For example, one of the largest scandals of 2016’s election was the release of ~70,000 emails lifted from John Podesta (the campaign chair for Hillary Clinton) and published in full to WikiLeaks. What was inside the emails shocked many US citizens, and I am confident that the evidence of corruption put on WikiLeaks was on many minds inside the voting booths. My project this year will be focusing on this data, and I hope to be able to definitively say how corrupt the Clinton campaign really was. Perhaps the pandemonium induced by the emails actually carried more weight than the contents of the emails–or maybe the Clinton’s were just as corrupt as many thought.

I found DH this past fall through the advice of my academic advisor, Paul Youngman. Dr. Youngman suggested around mid-July that a new class was coming to W&L in the fall. It was called “Intro to Data in the Humanities”, and after reading the description I thought I had found a fun, easy way to get my Science FDR credit. I was very wrong. Within the first week, I was hooked on the opiate of making large projects on my computer. I was almost instantly addicted to the satisfaction that comes from getting a program to work that has been giving problems, to the pride of seeing a finished project–one that I started. It was because of this class that I found out about the Fellows program, and I couldn’t wait to start. Instead of waiting until May, I asked Ms. Brooks if I could do it starting 2nd semester–and here I am.

Here’s to a good next two years of this Fellowship.

-W