Visiting Speaker: Rachel McBride Lindsey

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#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

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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

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 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

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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.

dSHARP Digital Research and Publishing Seminar

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dSHARP will be offering it’s first for-credit undergraduate course in the fall of 2018.

66224: dSHARP Seminar: Evolution of AI and Ethics of Creation

T/R 10:30-11:50AM
Dr. Rikk Mulligan
 
Isaac Asimov coined the term “Frankenstein Complex” in his 1947 robot stories to not only warn of humanity’s tenuous control over technology, but also to caution against the profit-based replacement of human labor with automation. The humanoid android and the cyborg blend man and machine, evoking some of the most dire variants of warnings of the Frankenstein Complex.
This course will use digital publishing tools and digital humanities techniques including text analysis and data visualization to explore the evolution of AI and the ethics involved in its creation in contemporary science fiction and American culture. Students will use digital research tools to analyze materials and digital publishing platforms to produce and share their scholarship.

THATCamp Pittsburgh 2018 A Great Success

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THATCamp Pittsburgh 2018 met this past weekend and was a great success. Thanks to our organizing team (Jessica Benner, Susan Grunewald, Jessica Otis, Abigail Owen, and Emma Slayton) as well as our awesome sponsors (dSHARP, CMU’s Department of History, the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, and the DHRX).

Jupyter Notebooks Workshop @CMU

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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

THATCamp Pittsburgh 2018

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Please join us for THATCamp Pittsburgh 2018, with our theme of Mapping and GIS.

When: Sat. March 3rd, 8:30-5pm
Where: Hunt Library
Cost: free!
Registration: required because of space limitations

THATCamp stands for “The Humanities and Technology Camp.” It is an unconference: an open, inexpensive meeting where humanists, artists, and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot.
 

Scholars and citizens have long been interested in using maps and mapping techniques to convey information about the world, with innovative maps dating back centuries. The rise of Geographic Information Systems in the latter half of the 20th century have further provided us with new tools and methods for interpreting spatial information. These techniques and tools can be used for great analytic effect by a range of scholars, from humanists to social scientists to artists and beyond. Therefore, the intended audience for our THATCamp is not just digital humanists but anyone who is interested in the intersection of mapping and GIS with humanistic lines of inquiry.

Examples of this intersection include

  • exploring the history of red-lining in American cities, such as was done by the University of Richmond’s Mapping Inequality project
  • studying how GIS changes our relationship with space and the cities where we live
  • mapping Stonehenge and examining how this activity affects our understanding of neolithic construction processes
  • … and more!

So if you’re interested in mapping, GIS, or broadly technology in the humanities, please register to join us on March 3rd, 2018 for THATCamp Pittsburgh 2018!

Visiting Speakers: Mark Newton and Alex Gil, February 15

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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

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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.