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Event on campus Speaker Series

DH Speaker Series: Jeffrey Witt

Join us for the final DH Speaker of the 2016-2017 academic year. Jeffrey Witt, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Maryland, will be speaking on “The Scholastic Commentaries and Texts Archive: Reconceiving the Medieval Corpus in a Linked Data World.”

Monday, May 8, 2017
12:15-1:15pm
Hillel 101
Lunch provided, please register.


photo of jeffrey witt
Jeffrey Witt is an assistant professor of philosophy at Loyola University Maryland. He is the founder, designer, and developer of the Scholastic Commentaries and Texts Archive and the LombardPress-Web publication system. He is working on several editions of previously unedited Latin texts, aiming to make them freely available and searchable on the web. He sits on the advisory board of the Digital Latin Library and is co-chair the IIIF Manuscript Community Group. In 2016, he was awarded a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania to develop TEI transcriptions of the Sentences commentary of William de Rothwell and to incorporate those transcriptions into the Scholastics Commentaries and Texts Archive. Jeffrey Witt completed his graduate work in the philosophy department at Boston College in the spring of 2012. His dissertation focused on issues of faith, reason, and theological knowledge in the late medieval Sentences commentaries. He is the co-editor of The Theology of John Mair (Brill 2015) and the co-author of a monograph on the 14th century philosopher and theologian Robert Holcot (Oxford University Press, 2016).

This program made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Italian Studies, and Medieval and Renaissance Studies

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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.

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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 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.

 

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DH Event on campus Speaker Series

DH Event: Digital Humanities, Data Analysis and Its Possibilities

Visiting us from University of Richmond, Assistant Professors Lauren Tilton and Taylor Arnold will give a talk on exploratory data analysis methods, which have received limited visibility in DH. In this talk, they will give an overview of the historical developments of exploratory data analysis and statistical computing. They will show, through examples from their work on visual culture, how both have the potential to shape digital humanities projects and pedagogy.

Thursday, February 2nd, 2017
12:15-1:15
IQ Center (Science Addition 202A)
Please register



Lauren Tilton is Visiting Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Richmond and member of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab. Her current book project focuses on participatory media in the 1960s and 1970s. She is the Co-PI of the project Participatory Media, which interactively engages with and presents participatory community media from the 1960s and 1970s. She is also a director of Photogrammar, a web-based platform for organizing, searching and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI). She is the co-author of Humanities Data in R (Springer, 2015). She is co-chair of the American Studies Association’s Digital Humanities Caucus.


Taylor Arnold is Assistant Professor of Statistics at the University of Richmond. A recipient of grants from the NEH and ACLS, Arnold’s research focuses on computational statistics, text analysis, image processing, and applications within the humanities. His first book Humanities Data in R, co-authored with Lauren Tilton, explores four core analytical areas applicable to data analysis in the humanities: networks, text, geospatial data, and images. His second book, the forthcoming A Computational Approach to Statistical Learning (CRC Press 2018), explores connections between modern machine learning techniques with connections in statistical estimation. Numerous journal articles extrapolate on these ideas in the context of particular applications. Arnold has also released several open-source libraries in R, Python, Javascript and C. Visiting appointments have included Invited Professor at Université Paris Diderot and Senior Scientist at AT&T Labs.

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Announcement DH Event on campus Pedagogy Speaker Series

Day of DH @ Winter Academy 2016

As the term wraps up, join us on Tuesday, December 13th for our “Day of DH” at W&L’s annual Winter Academy. You’ll have the chance to hear from both your colleagues and guests from the University of Virginia about digital projects and pedagogy. There will be lots to chew on, including lunch, so don’t forget to register!

10:30am-11:30am Mellon Summer Digital Humanities Research Grant
Come hear the inaugural awardees of the Mellon DH Summer Research Grants discuss the application process and their research. You will also learn about the benefits of the Mellon Summer DH Research Grant, as well as how to go about becoming a Mellon researcher. With the application deadline less than two months away, this is the perfect time to begin considering summer funding options for you and your students.
12:15pm-1:45pm Digital Humanities in a Liberal Arts Context

With support from ACS and the Mellon Foundation, W&L professors have invited UVA graduate students to facilitate workshops on digital humanities topics in their courses. On Tuesday, December 13, speakers from UVA will discuss digital humanities, pedagogy, and the collaboration. UVA graduate students, faculty, and staff will discuss their experiences working with W&L courses and also present on a variety of topics related to their research and experience teaching with digital humanities. We will have ample time for conversation, as we hope the event will seed future collaborations between people at both institutions. Lunch will be provided.
Speakers from the Scholars’ Lab at UVA include Jeremy Boggs, Nora Benedict, and Shane Lin.
Categories
Event on campus Speaker Series

Suzanne Churchill to speak October 17

Monday, October 17, 2016
12:15-1:15
Science Addition 201
Lunch provided. Please register. 


Avant-Garde Feminism and Digital Humanities

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Suzanne Churchill has published books and articles on modern periodicals, poetry, and pedagogy, including The Little Magazine ‘Others’ and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry (Ashgate 2006) and Little Magazines and Modernism: new approaches, co-edited with Adam McKible (Ashgate 2007). Several recent articles are products of collaborations with students at Davidson College, who also contribute to the ongoing expansion of the website, Index of Modernist Magazines.

Her current scholarly projects include co-editing a special Harlem Renaissance edition of Modernism/Modernity; collaborating with students on a study of racial silencing in the little magazine Contempo; and investigating Mina Loy’s migration from Italian Futurism to New York Dada.
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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.