Upcoming Event: The Refugee Project

Posted on by

The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures invites you to attend the following event:

The Refugee Project: An Outreach and Digital Humanities Student Faculty Initiative at Hamilton College

John Bartle, Associate Professor and Chair
Dept. of German and Russian, Hamilton College

WHEN: Monday, February 16, at 4 p.m.

LOCATION: Lincoln 1092

Professor Bartle, a specialist on Dostoevsky and Book Review Editor for Slavic and East European Journal, will be speaking about a faculty and student public engagement project with the refugee community of Utica, N.Y. The Refugee Project received funding from a Mellon grant through the Digital Humanities Initiative at Hamilton, and has involved collaboration between Hamilton faculty and students, colleagues from Utica College and Mohawk Valley Community College, as well as local refugee communities and organizations serving them.

The presentation will include the screening of two short films, Genesee Lights (about the Bosnian refugee community in Utica) and The Newcomers (featuring Karen refugees from Southeast Asia and other recent arrivals).

Cosponsored by: Office of Public Engagement, Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS), Center for East Asia and Pacific Studies (CEAPS), and Russian, East European and Eurasian Center (REEEC)

Register for the Illinois Digital Humanities Symposium, Feb. 27-28

Posted on by

Register now for the 2015 Illinois Digital Humanities Symposium on February 27-28!

The symposium is hosted by the University Library’s Scholarly Commons and the Institute of Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS).

The keynote speaker will be Dr. Jennifer Guiliano, assistant professor of history at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, who will deliver the keynote address, “Challenging the Academy: the Future of the Humanities in a 21st Century Digital World.”

Hands-on workshops will be held on the evening of Friday, February 27th at the Main Library, and will feature leading digital humanities practitioners from UIUC teaching on topics such as text analysis, geographical information systems, and data visualization.

A day-long research symposium on Saturday, February 28th at 1000 Lincoln Hall will feature the keynote by Professor Guiliano, followed by research presentations by leading UIUC researchers in digital humanities presenting on current digital research and methodologies.

Learn about digital humanities tools and research methods from UIUC faculty and experts, and join us in building a research community for digital humanities practitioners at Illinois.

This event is made possible thanks to generous support from the Graduate College, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, the Department of Communication, and the Department of English.

 

REGISTER:  https://eventbrite.com/event/15364430425/

For more information, visit http://publish.illinois.edu/digitalhumanities/dh-symposium/

CFP: Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives conference, April 2015

Posted on by

CFP: “Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives: Filling the Void”

Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN, USA)

April 11, 2015

The Graduate Student Association of Modern Languages (GSLMA) at Vanderbilt University has released a Call for Papers for its inaugural conference titled “Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives: Filling the Void.” Held on April 11, the conference, hosted at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN, will feature keynote speaker Dr. Carl Blyth, an applied linguist at University of Texas at Austin.

According to the organizers, “the title of the conference problematizes Scott Prensky’s 2001 terms “digital native” and “digital immigrant.” Although these terms attempt to explain the generational gap and its technological divide, our conference looks to the ways in which the reality of technology in the language classroom and in our research defies such classifications.”

Conference organizers welcome submissions related to:

  • Digital Humanities and the arts
  • Digital Humanities in dissertations
  • Digital Humanities and pedagogy
  • Digital Humanities and race
  • Digital Humanities and disability
  • Digital Humanities and gender studies
  • Digital Humanities as multicultural and multilingual
  • Applying specific instructional models in CALL
  • MOOCS and other open online courses for language learning
  • Outcome based frameworks in CALL design
  • Gaming and virtual worlds
  • Online Intercultural Exchanges
  • CMC and OCMC in the language classroom
  • Specific CALL tools and their implementation in the classroom
  • CALL project designs (and evaluation)
  • The direction of Digital Humanities as a field
  • Crowdsourcing scholarly research

Proposals may be submitted in English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Proposals should be sent to VanderbiltGSMLA@gmail.com with an abstract of 250-350 words and a separate title page that includes name, email, phone and university affiliation. For more information on the conference, please see the GSMLA blog’s Call for Papers.

Abstract submission deadline: January 26, 2015

Call for Papers: New Directions in the Humanities

Posted on by

The University of British Columbia will host the Thirteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities in Vancouver, British Columbia on June 17-19, 2015. The organizers recently issued a CFP with a special focus on “From ‘Digital Humanities’ to a Humanities of the Digital.”

The CFP invites paper presentations, workshops/interactive sessions, posters/exhibits, or colloquia on issues such as:

The ‘digital’ as a social imaginary: exploring historical continuities and ruptures in social and cultural practices in the era of digital cultures.
The digital within the humanities: new methods and tools for documentation, research, and representation.
The political economy of digital humanities: e-learning, e-publishing, and the reframing of disciplines and institutions.
Big data and little data; negotiating the public and the private.
Open access and open cultures: developing sustainable knowledge ecologies
Adapting methodologies and focus in the digital age: has the dust settled on the ‘digital humanities’?
From the digital humanities, to a humanities of the digital; rebuilding the humanities in the shadow of the digital, and developing a humanities of the digital.

The proposal submission deadline is December 4. For more information on the conference, including submission information, see the New Directions in the Humanities website.

Library Collections as Humanities Data

Posted on by

Thomas Padilla and Devin Higgins recently collaborated on an essay on “thinking about library collections as Humanities data.” Padilla (Michigan State University) shared the postprint PDF on his blog. From the paper, “Library Collections as Humanities Data: The Facet Effect”:

Many library collections contain digital text, images, and audio. Materials in these forms and the metadata that describe them are frequently the objects of inquiry that Digital Humanists, inside and outside the library, subject to computational analysis to extend their research and pedagogy. Librarians can further enhance use of their digital collections by considering how thinking of them as Humanities data, and promoting them as such, can encourage uses beyond reading, viewing, and listening. For an indicator of what this thinking looks like in practice it is instructive to consider the Library of Congress’ effort to make digitized newspaper data openly available through an Application Programming Interface (API), allowing algorithmic interaction in addition to reading through an interface that stands as a surrogate for an analog reading experience (Johnston, 2011, 2014). Michigan State University Libraries has also made modest steps in this direction by making select digitized collections available as bulk downloads (Michigan State University Libraries, 2014). Both efforts are ground in an understanding that data afford new opportunities for user interaction with library collections.

The essay can be accessed via the PDF (above) or in Public Services Quarterly:

Padilla, Thomas G., and Devin Higgins. 2014. “Library Collections as Humanities Data: The Facet Effect.”  Public Services Quarterly 10 (4): 324–35. doi:10.1080/15228959.2014.963780

 

October 13: Getting Started with R workshop

Posted on by

Jump start your research with R, the open source programming language and software environment for data analysis. On October 13th, Seth Robbins will lead a Getting Started with R workshop at the Scholarly Commons. From the Commons website:

R

“R is powerful, free and extensible statistical software that has become an increasingly important tool for researchers and students engaging in data analysis. In this workshop, we’ll demonstrate how to get up and running with R using RStudio and explore using R’s built-in functions for solving basic statistical problems.”

The event is free and open to all. Participants are encouraged to pre-register on the Scholarly Commons website. Hope to see you there!

WHAT:  Getting Started with R workshop

DATE: Monday, October 13

TIME: 1:00-1:50 p.m.

LOCATION: Scholarly Commons, 314 Main Library (take the stairs/elevator on the Wright Street side of the building)

Getting Started with R is offered through the Scholarly Commons’ Savvy Researcher workshop series. For other Savvy Researcher events, see the SC event calendar.

New Book: The History Manifesto

Posted on by

A new book from Cambridge University press explores the issue of long-range historical study. The History Manifesto, by Jo Guldi and David Armitage, makes the case for long-term historical study through digital humanities tools, such as topic modeling and text mining, alongside traditional scholarship practices. The Cambridge UP website includes the following description for the manifesto:

How should historians speak truth to power – and why does it matter? Why is five hundred years better than five months or five years as a planning horizon? And why is history – especially long-term history – so essential to understanding the multiple pasts which gave rise to our conflicted present? The History Manifesto is a call to arms to historians and everyone interested in the role of history in contemporary society. Leading historians David Armitage and Jo Guldi identify a recent shift back to longer-term narratives, following many decades of increasing specialization, which they argue is vital for the future of historical scholarship and how it is communicated. This provocative and thoughtful book makes an important intervention in the debate about the role of history and the humanities in a digital age.

The History Manifesto is available for free access at the Cambridge University Press website.

See also: review at Inside Higher Ed.

Posted in DH

September 25: Machine Learning workshop in Scholarly Commons

Posted on by

Come join us on Thursday, September 25 (TONIGHT if you read this right away) for the first Computational Social Science Brown Bag workshop on machine learning. The session will be led by Andy Pilny, a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and guest speaker at last spring’s Computational Social Science Workshop.

All levels are welcome, whether you want to find out what exactly “machine learning” is or you have a full-fledged project in the works.  Hope to see you there!

WHAT:  Computational Social Science Brown Bag Workshop: Machine learning, led by Andy Pilny

DATE: Thursday, September 25

TIME: 5:30-6:30 p.m.

LOCATION: Scholarly Commons, 308 Main Library (take the stairs/elevator on the Wright Street side of the building)

September 17th: “The Future of Scholarly Communications”

Posted on by

The Scholarly Commons and IPRH are co-sponsoring a panel on “The Future of Scholarly Communication” with Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Director of Scholarly Communication, Modern Language Association), Seth Denbo (Director of Scholarly Communication and Digital Initiatives, American Historical Association), and Maria Bonn (Graduate School of Library and Information Science, UIUC).

DATE: Wednesday, September 17, 2014

TIME: 4:30 p.m.

LOCATION: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum (600 S. Gregory Street, Urbana)

See http://illinois.edu/calendar/detail/4639?eventId=31764314/ for full details!

June 3: IPRH Digital Humanities Reading Group

Posted on by

Come out to the first meeting of the IPRH Digital Humanities Reading Group on Tuesday, June 3 at 6:30 p.m. at Quality Bar in downtown Champaign. Here is some more information about the group:

We are interested in developing critically grounded perspectives on what it means to do digital humanities work in various institutional contexts. As a starting point, we will examine some prominent pieces that discuss themes related to defining, critiquing, practicing, and teaching “digital” humanities. We hope to supplement these readings with additional perspectives informed by the interests, scholarship, and work of those who do digital humanities on campus.

This first meeting will be focused on getting to know everyone’s interests, but to get the conversation started, here are three short pieces that reflect a recent debate about what “digital humanities” is and its role in humanities scholarship more broadly.

Adam Kirsch, Technology Is Taking Over English Departments: The false promise of the digital humanities
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117428/limits-digital-humanities-adam-kirsch

Ryan Cordell, On Ignoring Encoding
http://ryan.cordells.us/blog/2014/05/08/on-ignoring-encoding/

Chad Wellman, The Humanities in Full: Polemics Against the Two-Culture Fallacy
http://iasc-culture.org/THR/channels/Infernal_Machine/2014/05/the-humanities-in-full-polemics-against-the-two-culture-fallacy/

If you have any questions at all, contact Brandon Locke at blocke2[at][illinois.edu or Sveta Stoytcheva at stytchv2[at]illinois.edu.