Mapping your story with story maps

Posted on October 23, 2018November 2, 2018 by Rikk

October 30^th 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

Posted on September 26, 2018September 26, 2018 by Rikk

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

Posted on February 21, 2018February 21, 2018 by Rikk

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

Scoping Digital Scholarship @CMU

Posted on January 30, 2018January 30, 2018 by Rikk

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.