Category Archives: speaker

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.

Visiting Speaker: Shannon Mattern, Feb. 1-2

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Shannon Mattern will be giving a talk on Thursday, February 1st at 4-5:30pm at CMU’s Sorrel Library Den (Wean Hall, 4th floor).
Ether/Ore: An Atlas of Urban Media
Studded with sensors, optimized by algorithms, interfaced via dashboards and apps, cities are imagined as computers writ large, planned “from the Internet up.” Yet this new age of sentient urbanism — in which place-based intelligence is reduced to “smartness” — has a long and deep lineage. This talk, drawing on my new book, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: 5000 Years of Urban Media, will take us on a world tour of cities that embody various materialities of intelligence: both code and clay, data and dirt, ether and ore.
She will also be giving a workshop, in Pitt’s Digital Scholarship Services on Friday February 2nd at 10am.
Willful Transgressions: Transdisciplinary Teaching
In this workshop, we’ll look at the various motivations and ambitions behind campaigns for transdisciplinarity — and we’ll explore the opportunities and challenges of transforming trans- or post-disciplinary aspirations into program building, curricular design, and pedagogical practice.

Visiting Speaker: Heather Froehlich, Oct. 26-27

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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.