Visiting Speaker: Rachel McBride Lindsey

#ArchCityReligion
Local Religion and Digital Humanities in Classrooms and Beyond

November 12, 2018
4:30 PM – 6:00 PM
501 Cathedral of Learning
Rachel McBride Lindsey
Saint Louis University

What does the Study of religion look like, sound like, feel like, even small, and taste like…

when we shift public attention from shared beliefs (be they theological, moral, or civic) to shared spaces? How do the tools and insights of digital humanities inform the ways we encounter, study, and analyze local religion? What are the points of intersection between
“digital religion” and social justice?

ArchCityReligion and Lived Religion in the Digital Age are two projects, one teaching centered and the other research focused, that anchor these questions and begin to offer responses in the local contexts of St. Louis.

Rachel McBride Lindsey is assistant professor of American Religion at Saint Louis University and co-director of Lived Religion in the Digital Age, a Public Understanding of Religion project supported by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Her book, A Communion of Shadows: Religion and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (2017), is published by the University of North Carolina Press.

Spatial Storytelling Series Kick-off

Spatial Storytelling Series Kick-off November 1 at 5:00 pm
This event will bring together spatial thinkers from CMU and beyond, who will speak to their work around creating and communicating spatial narratives. Our speakers were asked to engage critically with how they use spatial data or communicate stories through their use of or representations of space. 
 
Speakers include:
 
Spatial Storytelling Series Kick Off
  • November 1, 2018
  • 5 – 8 p.m.
  • Cohon University Center, Connan Room
 
The event will be held from 5 – 7 p.m. and will be followed by a reception with light refreshments.
 
More information about the Spatial Storytelling Series:
 
The Spatial Storytelling Series is a series of events and workshops on spatial storytelling. These events support broader interaction between members of the CMU community who engage in any aspect of spatial storytelling. We hope to promote critical engagement with spatial data and concepts and learn how we can best support research and student learning by supporting the creation of spatial narratives. 
 
Spatial inquiry and analysis is of growing interest in multiple disciplines. At CMU, courses in geographic information systems (GIS) are taught in the Heinz and Dietrich Colleges and a course on Spatial History has been offered through the History Department. In addition to instruction, researchers in every College of CMU, from the College of Engineering to the Tepper School of Business, are leveraging spatial tools and techniques in their research. Although the application of many of these tools and techniques differ between disciplines, spatial storytelling crosses over disciplinary boundaries. Students and scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences can all utilize spatial narratives to tell stories and provide context to their research. To foster the use of spatial narratives across campus, the proposed series of events – open to everyone – will promote the use of digital storytelling methods and methodologies across disciplines.
 
The planned series of events will end in a competition and expo that will showcase student work in these cross disciplinary applications of digital storytelling. Our events focus on storytelling and aim to support students through the entire process from identifying a research problem, data collection, learning specific tools, and finally crafting a narrative.
 
To learn more about the series, visit:http://library.cmu.edu/gis/events

Mapping your story with story maps

 October 30th at 10:00 am –register here
Join geographer and Esri education manager Joseph Kerski for a lively, hands-on session where you will combine multimedia (audio, video, narrative, photographs) with interactive web-based maps and tools to create story maps.  These maps (https://storymaps.arcgis.com) can be used in teaching and research at any scale from local to global, and cover a multitude of themes and issues such as population change, economics, business locations, water quality, energy, natural hazards, current events, biodiversity loss, land use, and many more.   These maps can be shared, accessed on any device, embedded in presentations or web pages, and combined with other multimedia. 

Visiting Speaker: Brent Seales on The Digital Restoration Initiative

Dr. Brent Seales will be visiting CMU on Wednesday, September 26, to give a talk on The Digital Restoration Initiative: Reading the Invisible Library.

Dr. Seales will give his talk in the Danforth Conference Room of the Cohon Center at CMU from 4 – 5 pm.

Progress over the past decade in the digitization and analysis of text found in cultural objects (inscriptions, manuscripts, scrolls) has led to new methods for reading the “invisible library”.  This talk explains the development of non-invasive methods, showing results from restoration projects on Homeric manuscripts, Herculaneum material, and Dead Sea scrolls.  Premised on “virtual unwrapping” as an engine for discovery, the presentation culminates in a new approach – Reference-Amplified Computed Tomography (RACT) – where machine learning becomes a crucial part of the imaging pipeline. You will leave this talk considering that RACT may indeed be the pathway for rescuing still-readable text from some of the most stubbornly damaged materials, like the enigmatic Herculaneum scrolls.

W. Brent Seales is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Computer Science and Director of the Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments at the University of Kentucky. Seales’ research centers on computer vision and visualization applied to challenges in the restoration of antiquities, surgical technology, and data visualization. In the 2012-13 he was a Google Visiting Scientist in Paris, where he continued work on the “virtual unwrapping” of the Herculaneum scrolls. In 2015, Seales and his research team identified the oldest known Hebrew copy of the book of Leviticus (other than the Dead Sea Scrolls), carbon dated to the third century C.E. The reading of the text from within the damaged scroll has been hailed as one of the most significant discoveries in biblical archaeology of the past decade.

Jupyter Notebooks Workshop @CMU

Matt Burton from the University of Pittsburgh will be offering his Jupyter Notebooks workshop at the CMU Libraries on March 2, 2018. This event is open to all. Registration is required and seating is limited to 40. Please register here: https://cmu.libcal.com/event/4011538

Documenting Reproducible Research with Jupyter Notebooks

This workshop will introduce Jupyter Notebooks, a platform for interactive computational research and data science. Jupyter Notebooks interweave code, data, and prose into an executable “notebook” that can be published or shared. Jupyter Notebooks are also a powerful tool for teaching programming, data science, and computational literacy. This workshop introduces participants to the Jupyter project, how to author Notebooks to create research workflows and computational narratives.

Instructor: Matthew Burton, University of Pittsburgh, School of Computing and Information

Date: Friday, March 2, 2018

Time: 1:00pm – 3:00pm

Location: The Den in Sorrells Library, 4400 Wean Hall, CMU

Register here: https://cmu.libcal.com/event/4011538

Visiting Speakers: Mark Newton and Alex Gil, February 15

Digital Scholarship at Columbia University Libraries:
Past, Present, and Future

Thursday, February 15
4:30 – 6:00 pm
The Den in the Sorrells Library
4400 Wean Hall
Carnegie Mellon University

Description:

Over the course of several years, the Columbia University Libraries have built a comprehensive program of digital scholarship across its campuses—connecting with faculty and student scholars to support learning needs and research agenda with access to technologies, systems, and expertise in digital workflows. From scholarly communication to computational support to the emergent methods and tools of the digital humanities, the libraries have moved from innovation and experimentation to maturing models for doing this work. Mark Newton will explore select scholarly projects and technical development around digital publishing and archiving workflows, highlighting the outcomes for library and scholars in partnership to advance knowledge from both within the institution and communicated to broad audiences beyond.

 

Dr. Alex Gil will follow Mark Newton’s presentation with an introduction to the life and mission of the Butler Studio. The Studio was founded five years ago as a tech-lite, co-working library space in order to foster digital scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Though the United States boasts many digital humanities and digital scholarship labs, centers and now library divisions, the Studio is one of the few to have achieved the much desired active intersection between faculty, students and librarians—a true hybrid space of intellectual production within a large research library. In this presentation, Gil will offer perspectives on what makes that achievement at Columbia particularly unique, how it was accomplished and what other collectives may learn or avoid from it.

Bios:

Mark Newton is the Director of Digital Scholarship at Columbia University Libraries. His work focuses on the development of the library’s scholarly publications partnership program, the Academic Commons institutional repository, and a variety of faculty- and student-led digital scholarship projects. He currently serves on the project staff for Humanities CORE, an NEH-funded digital humanities project with the Modern Language Association, pairing repository infrastructure with the MLA Commons community hub.

 

Alex Gil is Digital Scholarship Coordinator at Columbia University Libraries and Affiliate Faculty of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He collaborates with faculty, students and library professionals leveraging computational and network technologies in humanities research, pedagogy and knowledge production. He is among the founders of several ongoing, warmly received initiatives where he currently plays leadership roles: Co-director of the Studio@Butler at Columbia University, a tech-light library innovation space focused on digital scholarship and pedagogy; faculty moderator of Columbia’s Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities, a vibrant trans-disciplinary research cluster focused on experimental humanities; current chair of Global Outlook::Digital Humanities, an interest group connecting scholars around the world; senior editor of sx archipelagos, a journal of Caribbean Digital Studies, and co-wrangler of The Caribbean Digital conference series. Current projects include Ed, a digital platform for minimal editions of literary texts; Aimé Césaire and The Broken Record, a minimal computing experiment in long-form digital scholarship; and, In The Same Boats, a visualization of trans-Atlantic intersections of black intellectuals in the 20th century.

Scoping Digital Scholarship @CMU

Digital scholarship at CMU is not a field or discipline, but rather a collection of research practices using web-facing tools and methods that generate research products with online interaction or consumption as required modes of use. Digital scholarship may be born-digital content, depend on digitized content, or use materials and data taken from online interaction and asynchronous activity, networked information, or digitally native interpretation. Methods can include, and are not limited to: data visualization and analysis, GIS data and digital mapping, text encoding and computational analysis, 3-D modeling, curating digital collections and exhibits, or adapting and creating custom digital tools. The affordances of datasets and digital tools can increase access far beyond traditional print publications and generate new possibilities for interactive use and reuse: they allow for hybrid scholarship that uses multiple channels to present research and that can combine print and web-based text, video, audio, and still images, as well as interactive annotations and new modes of multithreaded, nonlinear discourse that can exist only online.

Digital scholarship often involves multidisciplinary teamwork and collaboration to craft tools and systems, as well as its argument, narrative, and scholarly discourse environment. This work requires an iterative process that increasingly turns to library expertise, subject matter experts, and similar resources throughout the research lifecycle. While CMU is known for its computer science and engineering programs, it has fostered the creation of digital tools in numerous departments and interdisciplinary programs including DocuScope (text analysis) and the User Experience Lab of the Department of English and the Knowledge Accelerator (crowd sourcing) of the Human-Computer Interface Institute (HCII) provides information processing support. The Entertainment Technology Center and HCII focus on crossing college and disciplinary boundaries to combine the humanities, arts, and computer technology; models that the library can emulate and expand upon to foster a digital scholarship community at CMU.

Through dSHARP, the University Libraries and the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences are working to support and enlarge the digital sphere of activity at CMU: digital humanities, research product and data management, and scholarly communications and digital publishing, all of which intersect with digital scholarship. Over the coming months, we hope to explore more of these methods, tools, and projects as examples along different points of research lifecycles.

DH Reading Group: October

On Wednesday October 25, the DH reading group will be meeting from 5-6:30pm at Hemingway’s Cafe to read work by Ursula Lutzky and Heather Froehlich (with a probable appearance by Heather Froelich depending on traffic).

Our selections this month:

Visiting Speaker: Heather Froehlich, Oct. 26-27

CMU’s new dSHARP center is kicking off an annual speaker series. We’ll be bringing in scholars for talks and/or workshops on a variety of digital research and publishing subjects which will hopefully be of interest to the greater Pittsburgh DH community.

Our first visiting speaker is Heather Froehlich of Penn State, whose visit is co-sponsored by the English Department’s Digital Media Lab at the University of Pittsburgh and the DHRX. She will be giving a talk on Thursday Oct. 26 and a workshop on Corpus Linguistics with AntConc on Friday October 27th.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 26
4:30-6:00pm • 202 Frick Fine Arts
University of Pittsburgh

In the early modern period, women were passed from father to husband, and in particular were insulted and debased by accusations of ‘whore’ (i.e. not chaste and not silent) when they acted out against an established social order of male empowerment. Kay Stanton, in her chapter in a Feminist Companion to Shakespeare (2010), lists and describes all the ways the word ‘whore’ is used to demean women in
Shakespeare’s plays. In this talk, I will use the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (http://oed.com/thesaurus) to present a larger list of terms synonymous with ‘whore’ in use during Shakespeare’s life. With a larger lexicon for feminine lack of purity, it is possible to show a better picture of how whorishness and feminine dishonour is constructed in Shakespeare’s plays.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 27
10am-12pm • CFA 317

Carnegie Mellon University
Corpus Linguistics with AntConc
Corpus analysis is a form of text analysis which allows you to make comparisons between textual objects at a large scale (so-called ‘distant reading’). This hands-on workshop explores the basic principles of quantitative text analysis using a graphical user interface. We will discuss how to use computers to identify patterns in language by covering a few basic principles of corpus methods, including keywordin-context analysis, very basic statistics, and how computers can be used to generate more nuanced questions for a given dataset.

As is common for visiting scholars, we will be hosting a small dinner for her on Thursday night. We will also be hosting a “kaffeeklatsch” (a small group hanging out over coffee/tea) either Thursday morning or Thursday early afternoon depending on when people are available. We very much want to have a good mix of CMU and Pitt folks at each of these, ideally with both people who are already actively involved in our DH community as well as “DH-curious” folks who’d like to learn more about what we do.

DH Reading Group: May

Who: anyone interested in reading analytical articles encompassing the digital humanities, including but not limited to digital history

What: read some stuff of interest to the group members, get together over food or drinks and discuss the readings

When: May 31th, 5pm-6:30pm and repeated on the last Wednesday of every month, August-May (no meeting in June or July)

Where: We are still questing for the perfect meeting location. Since most of the students are gone, however, let’s go again to Hemingway’s Cafe (3911 Forbes Ave).

Our readings this month will be:

Because a lot of people will be leaving town already, please RSVP to me (jotis *at* andrew.cmu.edu) if you intend to come, so that I know we have a quorum.