Tag Archives: speaker series

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.