Author: Mackenzie Brooks

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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.

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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.

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DH Event on campus

Open Office Hours in the DH Workspace

openofficehours

Happy New Year! We have something new on offer here at DH @ WLU. Starting in January, we’ll be holding open office hours in the DH Workspace (Leyburn 218). Every other week we will have two time slots open to students, faculty, and staff to drop by, ask questions, bring project work, or simply learn what others are working on. If you’d like to learn more about a particular DH method, just let us know and we’ll tap the Digital Humanities Action Team or our DH Undergraduate Fellows for a workshop. Potential workshop ideas include command line, Git and Github, HTML/CSS, Markdown, text analysis, TEI, or video editing. Bring your laptop and we’ll hack/yak away!

Meeting times

  • Tuesdays, 1:30-3pm
  • Thursdays, 3-4:30pm

Schedule

  • January 10 & 12
  • January 24 & 26
  • February 7 & 9
  • February 21 & 23 (Washington break)
  • March 7 & 9
  • March 21
  • March 28 & 30
  • April 4 & 6
  • April 11 & 13
  • April 18 & 20
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DH Event on campus

DH Workspace Open House on October 21

DH Workspace Open House 10/21/16 1-4pm Leyburn 218

Join us as we celebrate the opening of our new Digital Humanities Workspace. Located on Lower Level 2, this workspace provides dedicated office and collaboration space for our two DH-dedicated faculty: Mackenzie Brooks (Digital Humanities Librarian) and Brandon Walsh (Mellon Digital Humanities Fellow). Planning for the space began over a year ago, inspired by a visit to DHi at Hamilton College.

Stop by Friday afternoon to check out our cool desks or just to share what you’ve been working on recently. We are planning to hold more open office hours in the future so stay tuned!

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Event on campus Speaker Series

Video Now Available for “Civil War History and Digital Humanities” with Dr. Ed Ayers

Civil War History and Digital Humanities with Dr. Edward Ayers from Washington and Lee News on Vimeo.

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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.

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Event on campus Incentive Grants Speaker Series

Day of DH @ Fall Academy 2016

With the fall semester looming, the W&L campus is abuzz with preparations, including the annual Fall Academy. Two weeks of workshops on technology and pedagogy help faculty and staff get up to speed for the new academic year. We have chosen August 31st as our “Day of DH” – a chance to hear from our colleagues and guests about their DH course projects and methods. Don’t forget to register!

10-10:15am The Mellon Grant and You!
Come hear about the $800,000 Mellon Digital Humanities Grant and learn about new ways to fund your innovative teaching ideas, conference travel, research and undergraduate research assistants, as well as graduate student teaching support from UVa.
10:30-11:30am Incentive Grant Winners Panel
Owen Collins, Holly Pickett, Laura Brodie, and Claudette Artwick will discuss the nature of their projects, how the projects were structured, and what the outcomes were.
11:45am-1:30pm Writing: A Digital Humanity
The history of writing is intertwined with the history of it as technology, and its history as a humanity is intertwined with that of rhetoric and literature. Patricia Suzanne Sullivan and James P. Ascher offer a range of a easily adoptable assignments and activities to prompt experimentation, exploration, and reflection on writing as a technology in first-year (and other) writing courses.
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Summer Research

Spotlight on Summer Research

If the humidity is any indication, we are well into summer here at W&L. While we do not hold classes in the summer, a number of students remain in Lexington to conduct research with faculty. To enable this research, we awarded four Summer Research Grants to faculty and students. Congrats to all – we can’t wait to see how your projects grow!

The Ancient Graffiti Project

Perhaps you’ve heard of this project before? Perhaps while reading The Atlantic or browsing Forbes? The Ancient Graffiti Project is one of our long-standing DH projects led by Profs. Rebecca Benefiel and Sara Sprenkle. Students have been integral to this project’s development and this summer is no different. Lillian MacDonald ’19 and Nathan Brewer ’18 joined Prof. Benefiel in Italy for fieldwork in June and have spent the remaining weeks of the summer processing the data they gathered. Alicia Martinez ’18 has been working with Prof. Sprenkle to refresh the APG website and develop new mapping functionality (supported by Lenfest funding). All three students presented their work at the Summer Research Scholars Brown Bag Lunch Series on July 12, 2016.

Visualizing Partisan Rangers During the American Civil War

This fledgling project is led by Barton Myers, Associate Professor of History. With the ultimate goal of visualizing spatial data on the Confederate government’s authorized guerrilla units of partisan rangers, Hannah Austin ’17, John Crum ’17, Zachary Howard ’17, Alex Kirven ’17 are spending their summer gathering data on these guerrilla units from the Fold3 database of historical military records. This project is also supported by the History in the Public Sphere Mellon Grant.

A Thanatography of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex

Another long-standing DH project, Prof. Hank Dobin’s timeline and “LifeMap” of the 2nd Earl of Essex continues to grow. Cecilia Weingart ’19 is focusing on gender relations in contemporary novels about Essex as her contribution to the project. Additionally, Prof. Dobin has been working with Jeff Knudson, ITS, and Brandon Walsh, DH Mellon Fellow, to develop a crowdsourcing component to the timeline.

Steinheil: Sex, Scandal and Politics in Belle Époque France

Sarah Horowitz, Associate Professor of History, is joined by Sam Gibson ’17 and Brandon Walsh, DH Mellon Fellow, on this project to study the language of sensationalism in the French press of the early 20th century. Focusing on the Steinheil Affair, the team began by creating clean OCR transcriptions of newspaper articles for topic modeling and other text analysis methods. Sam presented at the Summer Research Scholars Brown Bag Lunch Series on June 29th, 2016, and the entire team will travel to Hamilton College in July to participate in the Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship. Check out their progress on Github!

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

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Announcement DH Project Update Publication Research Projects

In Case You Missed the News

We’re caught up in the craziness of our four week spring term here at W&L, but we wanted to make sure you were caught up on some recent news from our DH community.

Ancient Graffiti Project wins NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant

Heralded as the “epitome of liberal arts,” the Ancient Graffiti Project was recently awarded $75,000 to continue work on their database for textual and figural graffiti. Learn more from the W&L press release or the Atlantic Monthly article. Congrats to Sara Sprenkle, Rebecca Benefiel, and the rest of their team!

Stephen P. McCormick wins Mednick Fellowship from the Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges

Stephen P. McCormick, Assistant Professor of French, has been awarded the 2016 Menick Fellowship by VFIC for his work on the Huon d’Auvergne project. Learn more about McCormick’s work on one of the last unpublished Franco-Italian Romance Epics from this article or dig into the digital edition yourself.

Joel Blecher publishes chapter on Digital Humanities pedagogy

Joel Blecher, Assistant Professor of Religion, won a DH Incentive Grant in fall of 2014 for incorporating data visualization into a History of Islamic Civilization course. You can now read about this experience in a new title from De Grutyer, The Digital Humanities and Islamic & Middle East Studies. Blecher’s chapter is titled, “Pedagogy and the Digital Humanities: Undergraduate Exploration into the Transmitters of Early Islamic Law” which you can read in print or electronic form through Leyburn Library.

Look forward to reports on our summer activities coming soon. We have teams going to DHSI, ILiADS, the Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference, and more!